Persistence and propagation of academic myths

I just came across a reference in a news account to the use by American colonists of germ warfare against Native Americans.  The last time I looked at this claim was some 10-15 years ago and the evidence seemed thin even then.  In the account I just read, the assertion was made with such great confidence it either suggested new evidence had emerged to support the assertion or simply that it was an argument by emotional conviction.

Since I keep seeing this argument that colonists were inhuman germ warfare warriors, I thought it worth checking.

No - no new evidence.  Merely a conviction which has been made improbable by actual research for a number of years.

There is no doubt that armies and individuals, without any knowledge of germ theory, have tried for centuries to kill one another by placing the enemy in close proximity to a person already ill or in close proximity to goods adorning a sick person (clothes, blankets, eating utensils, etc.)  I am aware of tales of this sort at least since medieval times.  

From Biological Warfare in Wikipedia

Rudimentary forms of biological warfare have been practiced since antiquity. The earliest documented incident of the intention to use biological weapons is recorded in Hittite texts of 1500–1200 BCE, in which victims of tularemia were driven into enemy lands, causing an epidemic. Although the Assyrians knew of ergot, a parasitic fungus of rye which produces ergotism when ingested, there is no evidence that they poisoned enemy wells with the fungus, as has been claimed. Scythian archers dipped their arrows and Roman soldiers their swords into excrements and cadavers – victims were commonly infected by tetanus as result. In 1346, the bodies of Mongol warriors of the Golden Horde who had died of plague were thrown over the walls of the besieged Crimean city of Kaffa. Specialists disagree about whether this operation was responsible for the spread of the Black Death into Europe, Near East and North Africa, resulting in the deaths of approximately 25 million Europeans.

In doing this fresh check, I come across an interesting anthropological paper indicating an even greater heritage.  From The Nessus Shirt in the New World: Smallpox Blankets in History and Legend by Adrienne Mayor.  She alludes to the ancient tale of Heracles and Nessus Shirt.  In these versions, however, the clothing was used for the transference of poison rather than disease per se.  

Mayor ties the American legend of an attempt at biological warfare at Fort Pitt in 1763 (by British officers) as an example of the continuance of the ancient legend into modern urban legends.

I am not after a poison story though.  The myth is of American soldiers conducting biological warfare with malice aforethought.  

Again, from Wikipedia:

The British Army attempted use of smallpox against Native Americans during the Siege of Fort Pitt in June 1763. A reported outbreak that began the spring before left as many as one hundred Native Americans dead in Ohio Country from 1763 to 1764. It is not clear, however, whether the smallpox was a result of the Fort Pitt incident or the virus was already present among the Delaware people as outbreaks happened on their own every dozen or so years and the delegates were met again later and seemingly had not contracted smallpox.

A popular article, Did Colonists Give Infected Blankets to Native Americans as Biological Warfare? by Patrick J. Kiger is similarly ambivalent based on the evidence.  

North American colonists’ warfare against Native Americans often was horrifyingly brutal. But one method they appear to have used—perhaps just once—shocks even more than all the bloody slaughter: The gifting of blankets and linens contaminated with smallpox. The virus causes a disease that can inflict disfiguring scars, blindness and death. The tactic constitutes a crude form of biological warfare—but accounts of the colonists using it are actually scant.

[snip]

For all the outrage the account has stirred over the years, there’s only one clearly documented instance of a colonial attempt to spread smallpox during the war, and oddly, Amherst probably didn’t have anything to do with it. There’s also no clear historical verdict on whether the biological attack even worked.

In fact, there is quite a bit of evidence that though there was an attempt, the attempt failed.  A more scholarly explication is in Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst by Elizabeth A. Fenn and in The British, the Indians, and Smallpox: What Actually Happened at Fort Pitt in 1763? by Philip Ranlet.

From Ranlet:

An entrenched part of the multicultural canon can be summed up by quoting from a book intended for undergraduate college students: "In the 1760s the British at Fort Pitt gave blankets from the smallpox hospital to Delaware Indians as a form of germ warfare."1 The story has been repeated time and again and has now become dogma, or so it seems. This essay will reexamine this familiar tale and what historians have alleged about it to determine what is credible about the incident at Fort Pitt.

[snip]

Still more pertinent is the skepticism expressed by Alfred W. Crosby, whose book, The Columbian Exchange, made disease a subject all historians of early America had to take very seriously. In his Ecological Imperialism Crosby devoted an appendix to smallpox and, in a note, discussed what he called "the old legend of intentional European bacteriological warfare." Asserting that the

 

colonists certainly would have liked to wage such a war and did talk about giving infected blankets and such to the indigenes, and they may even have done so a few times, but by and large the legend is just that, a legend. Before the development of modern bacteriology at the end of the 19th century, diseases did not come in ampoules, and there were no refrigerators in which to store the ampoules. ... As for infected blankets, they might or might not work. Furthermore, and most important, the intentionally transmitted disease might swing back on the white population. . . . These people were dedicated to quarantining smallpox, not to spreading it.  

[snip]

. . . Deliberately trying to spread disease is despicable in whatever century it might take place, but the smallpox incident has been blown out of all proportion, given that it was likely a total failure. Jennings suggestion that smallpox was also planted during the French and Indian War is unwarranted. Smallpox, widespread in that war, attacked everyone?Indians, colonists, and members of the British army?and this major outbreak of the 1750s and 1760s probably originated in French Canada in 1755. The time is long overdue for what happened at Fort Pitt in 1763 to be discussed rationally and on the basis pf evidence rather than unsupported and repetitious assumptions. 

Ranlet is worth reading at length as he explores in detail both the historical evidence as well as the medical probabilities of the effort being effective.

My conclusion is that this is once again a failed academia induced story, motivated by ideology rather than evidence.  Or perhaps it is driven by the atavistic urge, described by Mayor, for myths.  Regardless, it is a failed story which continues in circulation despite repeated debunking.  It is reasonable to ask why academia is so persistent in misrepresenting histroy.