As this force retreated, it spread smallpox to other American colonial troops, so that Dr. Jonathan Potts reported from Ft. George New York that:  “the distressing situation of the sick here is not to be described, without clothing, without bedding, or shelter sufficient to keep them from the weather... We have at present upwards of a thousand sick, and crowded into sheds, and laboring under the various and cruel disorders of dysentery’s, bilious putrid fevers, and the effects of confluent smallpox."