General Amherst recommended that blankets known to have been used by smallpox victims be distributed to Indians so that they would fall ill as well. His plan may not have been successful, but his willingness to try speaks loudly. Epidemics continued in waves through the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, with consistently inadequate government response and disproportionate impact on Indigenous communities. There are, after all, many ways for people to disappear.
