Henry Bouquet

Henry Bouquet was a Swiss professional soldier in British service who won the battle that broke Pontiac's War, and whose name is attached to one of the earliest documented proposals for biological warfare. He was born in Rolle on Lake Geneva and served the Dutch and Sardinians before joining the Royal American Regiment, a unit raised to recruit German speakers in Pennsylvania. He fought through the French and Indian War, including the expedition that took Fort Duquesne in 1758. When Pontiac's rising swept the western forts in 1763, Bouquet marched to relieve Fort Pitt. At Bushy Run in August he was ambushed, formed a defensive circle overnight, and the next day feigned a retreat that drew his attackers into the open where his reserves took them in the flank. It was one of very few clear British victories over native forces in that war. The correspondence for which he is now best known dates from the same weeks. His commander Jeffery Amherst wrote asking whether smallpox might be sent among the disaffected tribes, and Bouquet replied that he would try to distribute infected blankets. Officers at Fort Pitt had already done so independently, at a parley in June. Whether the blankets caused the epidemic that followed is not established; the intent is on paper in both men's handwriting. Bouquet died of fever at Pensacola in 1765. In 1764 he led an expedition into the Ohio country that forced the surrender of more than two hundred captives taken from frontier settlements, some of whom had to be removed by force because they did not wish to leave the families they had joined. He was promoted brigadier general shortly before his death, having never taken British citizenship.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history