It wasn t just the settlers but also the army that just wanted to erase the American Indian tribes .. they tried to starve them by exterminating their main source of food the bison .. they nearly exterminated the bison too.

An example of the hatred for Indians then...

Smallpox had spread at Fort Pitt.
Early American historian Elizabeth Fenn of the University of Colorado Boulder lays out her theory on what happened in her 2000 article in the Journal of American History. In the late spring of 1763, Delaware, Shawnee and Mingo warriors, inspired by Ottawa war leader Pontiac, laid siege to Fort Pitt, an outpost at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers in present-day downtown Pittsburgh.

The fort s commander, Capt. Simeon Ecuyer, reported in a June 16 message to his superior, Philadelphia-based Col. Henry Bouquet, that the situation was dire, with local traders and colonists taking refuge inside the fort s walls. Ecuyer wasn t just afraid of his Native American adversaries. The fort s hospital had patients with smallpox, and Ecuyer feared the disease might overwhelm the population inside the fort s cramped confines.
Bouquet, in turn, passed along the news about the smallpox inside Fort Pitt to his own superior, Amherst, in a June 23 letter. In Amherst s July 7 response, he cold-bloodedly saw an opportunity in the disease outbreak.

Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.

On July 13, Bouquet, who at that point was traveling across Pennsylvania with British reinforcements for Fort Pitt, responded to Amherst, promising that he would try to spread the disease to the Native Americans via contaminated blankets, taking care however not to get the disease myself.

That tactic seemed to please Amherst, who wrote back in approval on July 16, urging him to spread smallpox as well as try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execreble [sic] Race.

What Amherst and Bouquet didn t know was that somebody at Fort Pitt had already thought of trying to infect the Native Americans with smallpox and had attempted to do it.

William Trent, a trader, land speculator and militia captain, wrote in his diary that on June 23, two Delaware emissaries had visited the fort, and asked to hold talks the next day. At that meeting, after the Native American diplomats had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the British to abandon Fort Pitt, they asked for provisions and liquor for their return. The British complied, and also gave them gifts : two blankets and a handkerchief which had come from the smallpox ward. I hope it will have the desired effect, Trent wrote.

Though it s not completely clear who perpetrated the biological warfare attack, documentary evidence points to Trent as the probable culprit.

As detailed in Fenn s 2000 article, the trader later submitted an invoice to the British military for purchasing two blankets and a silk handkerchief to Replace in kind those which were taken from people in the Hospital to Convey the Smallpox to the Indians. Ecuyer certified that the items were used to spread smallpox, which indicates that he may have been in on the attempt as well. British Gen. Thomas Gage, who succeeded Amherst that year as colonial commander, eventually approved the payment.

That s the one documented case that we have, says Paul Kelton, a historian at Stony Brook University, and author of two books on the role of epidemics in the European takeover of the Americas. It s not known whether Bouquet actually followed up on Amherst s letter and made additional attempts on his own to spread smallpox to the Native Americans, he says.

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