Hannah Duston and Two Massacres

Hannah Duston's Capture and Escape from the Indians

The Hannah Duston statue is in
Haverhill, Massachusetts.

I did not make a special post for Women’s History Month last March. But I should have written about Hannah Duston (or sometimes it’s spelled Dustin). When I told my wife about Duston - the first woman in the United States to have a statue erected in her honor - she said, “This woman sounds like a badass.” I’d have to agree with that, based simply on her story. But the memory of Hannah Duston is also an example of how we interpret our history through the years.

I really enjoy it when I catch myself in some preconceived notion. When you think of Puritan settlers in 1600s Massachusetts, do you think of a bunch of devoutly religious, passive people, kind of like the pilgrim mythology? Me too! Then while I was on the west coast, I read the story of Hannah Duston in the book “Massacre on the Merrimack: Hannah Duston's Captivity and Revenge in Colonial America” by Jay Atkinson. That book dissuaded me from my preconceptions and when we were recently passing through Massachusetts, I just had to take a look at the area where this story took place.

On the base of the statue you'll 
find a panel that shows Thomas
Duston defending his children.

First, here's the story in a nutshell:
Haverhill, Massachusetts, is on the north side of the Merrimack River, just 14 miles west of the Atlantic, or thirty-five miles north of Boston as the crow flies. Puritan settlers first arrived as early as 1640. Almost fifty years later, when our story takes place, it was still the edge of civilization, assuming the perspective of the English settlers. One of those settler families was the Dustons: Thomas and Hannah and their nine children.

During King William’s War (1688 – 1697), the governor of New France encouraged Native American tribes to raid English settlements. On March 15, 1697, Abenaki Indians from Quebec, made a raid on Haverhill. A “garrison house,” that was more heavily fortified (think brick, stone, or heavy logs) than your average farmhouse was on a hill above the Duston farm, but some distance away. As they had been instructed, eight of the Duston children headed that way when they heard the raid begin. Hannah, age 40 at the time, had given birth to her ninth child a couple of weeks earlier. She had a difficult birth and was still recovering. Present that morning was a neighbor/nurse, Mary Neff. Husband Thomas was working on building a brick garrison house of his own about half a mile away. When he heard the gunfire and whoops of Indians, he mounted his horse and headed for his house.

Another panel shows the killing
of the Indians.

When Thomas got to his house, he saw Indians heading across his fields. He knew that they would be able to catch his other children heading for the garrison house, so he grabbed his rifle and went to get between the Indians and his kids. Hannah, Mary, and the newborn were to sneak out a back door and make a run for it on their own. Thomas was successful in blocking the Indians who were after his kids. They withdrew when Thomas and the children made it to within rifle range of the three militiamen who were in the garrison house. Thomas borrowed a fresh horse and headed back with one of the militiamen to find his wife, but it was too late.

The Abenaki killed 27 colonists and took 14 captives, two of those were Hannah and Mary. The Indians took them on a speed march away from any potential pursuers. If any of the captives slowed them down, they were killed. Hannah’s newborn was stripped from her arms and killed in front of her. On the trail she and Mary received help in their survival from a fourteen-year-old boy named Samuel Lennardson who had been taken from Worcester, Massachusetts up to a year prior and had some modicum of trust from their captors.

The Duston Garrison House.

After weeks on the trail, other captives had all been killed or traded away. Hannah, Mary, and Samuel were left with a family group of two warriors, three adult women, and seven children. Along the trail Hannah had, along with the horrors she had witnessed, been told that her husband and children had all been killed and that when they arrived at their destination she would be tortured and either killed or sold into slavery. While camping on an island in the Merrimack River near present-day Boscawen, New Hampshire, the Indians let their guard down and all went to sleep. One version says that the warriors shared a bottle and passed out. Regardless, Hannah enlisted Mary and Samuel to participate. After the Indians went to sleep, they were able to get ahold of hatchets. Hannah and Samuel each killed one of the men while they slept. The three then proceeded to attack the women and children. Hannah left one of the children alive, a boy who had been kind to her on the trail. He subsequently fled. One of the women was severely wounded but also escaped. Hannah scalped the bodies in order to collect a bounty offered by the colony and to prove her story. The three captives made their escape in one of the Indian canoes, heading down the river to an English settlement.

The Aftermath
Hannah never wrote down her story, nor did Mary or Samuel. Hannah died in Haverhill sometime between 1736 and 1738. However, several people have written the story, claiming that they interviewed Hannah for the details. The most prominent of these was Cotton Mather. We know that she really did take the Indian’s scalps because her husband petitioned the government of the Massachusetts Colony to collect the bounty.

About a hundred years after Hannah’s death, her story was resurrected and she became a heroine. Some historians believe the story resonated with the public because of the Indian removal efforts that began in the 1820s. The first statue in her honor was erected in 1874 in Boscawen, New Hampshire (the site of her escape). The 35-foot statue depicts her with a hatchet in one hand and scalps in the other. In 1879 a statue of Hannah was placed in the GAR park in Haverhill. This one has Hannah holding a hatchet, but she’s pointing with the other hand as if to say, “You were bad.” On the sides of the base are depictions of the four events in her story: her capture, her husband’s defense of the children, killing her captors, and returning in a canoe. Today, some question why Hannah Duston was elevated to hero status, particularly considering that she killed six children along with the adults, like the tone of this article from Smithsonian. I’m afraid I don’t agree. You just can’t judge someone in those circumstances through the lens of our modern morality. And although it’s not right to say “they did it too” as an excuse, one source said that many of the settlers killed in the Abenaki raid were children. And what about Hannah's newborn?

By the way, the garrison house that Thomas was working on got finished. You can visit it, just outside of Haverhill. Like visiting a Civil War battlefield, when you’re stopping off at Dunkin’s and fighting the going to work traffic, it’s hard to visualize what it was like there in the 1600s. The Hannah Dustin statue and the Duston Garrison House help us remember.