Thinking of the Indigenous People this 4th of July

[RWalker]

"...diseases was even used as a weapons by whites who purposely passed out smallpox-infested blankets to the Indians...disease might be called another battleground for the Indians...As to land consessions, disease through depopulation played a large part in the ultimate displacement of tribes...

The words of Four Bears, a Mandan chief who at the time was dying from smallpox, help make the subject more human, rather than one of abstract demography and statistics:

"Four Bears never saw a white man hungry, but what he gave him to eat...and how they have repaid it! I do not fear death...but to die with my face rotten, that even the wolves will shrink...at seeing me, and say tp themselves, that is Four Bears, the friend of the whites."

Atlas of the North American Indian
by Carl Waldman
p167