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Yes, those small pox germ laden blankets the British Colonists provided the tribes were simply bad luck.From what I've read small pox was already there among the Indians, and nothing shows the blankets transmitted.
https://www.history.com/articles/colonists-native-...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....
...Historian Philip Ranlet of Hunter College and author of a 2000 article on the smallpox blanket incident in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, also casts doubt.
“There is no evidence that the scheme worked,” Ranlet says. “The infection on the blankets was apparently old, so no one could catch smallpox from the blankets. Besides, the Indians just had smallpox—the smallpox that reached Fort Pitt had come from Indians—and anyone susceptible to smallpox had already had it.”
The most important indication that the scheme was a bust, Ranlet says, “is that Trent would have bragged in his journal if the scheme had worked. He is silent as to what happened.”
