History of smallpox In the late 1770s, during the American Revolutionary War, smallpox returned once more and killed thousands. Peter Kalm in his "Travels in North America", described how in that period, the dying Indian villages became overrun with wolves feasting on the corpses and weakened survivors. Smallpox was also used as a weapon by the British. In 1799, the physician Valentine Seaman administered the first smallpox vaccine in the United States. He gave his children a smallpox vaccination using a serum acquired from Edward Jenner, the British physician who invented the vaccine from fluid taken from cowpox lesions. Though vaccines were misunderstood
1837 Great Plains smallpox epidemic experienced a major smallpox epidemic in 1780-81 which severely reduced their numbers down to less than a few thousand. Many other bands along the Missouri river suffered smallpox epidemics during 1801-02 and 1831. Sporadic efforts were made to promote vaccination among the Indigenous peoples since the turn of the nineteenth century. Later, the Indian Removal Act the U.S. Congress took its first step in 1832 to generate public support for vaccination of the Native Americans. But shortly after passage of this congressional act to extend vaccinations to Indians, Secretary Cass stated that no effort would be made "under any circumstances"