Hannah Duston

Hannah Duston by Junius Brutus Stearns

Hannah Duston (Dustin, Dustan, and Durstan) (born Hannah Emerson, December 23, 1657 - c. 1736) was a 40 year old colonial Massachusetts Puritan mother of eight during King William's War who was taken captive with her newborn daughter during the Raid on Haverhill (1697). On March 15, 1697. Hannah witnessed the brutal killing of her baby and several of her neighbors. Later in her captivity, while detained on an island in the Merrimack River in present-day Boscawen, New Hampshire, she acquired the assistance of two other English captives and killed ten of the Indian families they resided with.

Duston is the first woman honored in the United States with a statue. She has been referred to as "a folk hero" and the "mother of the American tradition of scalp hunting". At the same time, scholars assert Duston's story only became legend in the nineteenth century because America used her story to define its violence against native americans as innocent, defensive and virtuous.

Biography

Statue on the island in Boscawen, New Hampshire where Hannah killed the Indian family and escaped down river

During King William's War, Hannah, her husband Thomas Duston, and their nine children were residents of Haverhill, Massachusetts in March 1697 when the town was attacked by a group of Abenaki American Indians from Quebec. (In this attack, 27 colonists were killed and 13 were taken captive to be either adopted or held as hostages for the French.) When their farm was attacked, Thomas fled with eight children, but Hannah, her newborn daughter Martha, and her nurse Mary Neff were captured and forced to march into the wilderness. Along the way, the Indians killed the six-day-old Martha by smashing her against a tree.

Hannah and Mary were assigned to an Indian family group of 13 persons and taken north. The group included Samuel Lennardson, a 14-year-old captured in Worcester the year before.

Six weeks later, at an island in the Merrimack River at the mouth of the Contoocook River near what is now Penacook, New Hampshire, Hannah led Mary and Samuel in a revolt. She used a tomahawk to attack the sleeping Indians, killing one of the two grown men (Lennardson killed the second), two adult women, and six children. One severely wounded Indian woman and a young boy managed to escape the attack.

The former captives immediately left in a canoe, but not before taking scalps from the dead as proof of the incident and to collect a bounty. They traveled down the river only during the night and after several days reached Haverhill. The Massachusetts General Court later gave them a reward for killing Indians; Hannah Duston received 25 pounds, and Neff and Lennardson split another 25 pounds (various accounts say 50 or 25 pounds, and some accounts mention only Duston's receiving an award).

Hannah lived for nearly 40 more years.

Legacy

Hannah Dustin historical marker in Boscawen, New Hampshire

The event became well known, due in part to the account of Cotton Mather in his Magnalia Christi Americana. Duston became more famous in the 19th century as her story was retold by Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry David Thoreau.

There are six Memorials to Hannah Dustin. First Memorial was by William Andrews, a marble worker from Lowell, erectected in 1874 on the island in Boscawen, New Hampshire where she killed her captors. Huge crowds overwhelmed the island on the day of it's dedication, with speeches presented all day long. It was the first publicly-funded statue in New Hampshire.

In 1879, a bronze statue of Hannah Duston grasping a tomahawk was placed in Haverhill town square (now GAR Park), where it still stands. The monument stands on the site of the Second Church, of which Hannah Duston became a member in 1724. The original small axe or hatchet held by Hannah Duston can be found today in the Haverhill Historical Society. The Duston hatchet is not a tomahawk. It is usually called a biscayan or biscayenne, a common trade item of the late seventeenth-century New England frontier.

The third Memorial was created in 1908 when there was an inscription put on a boulder in Memorial to both Hannah and Martha. The boulder was placed on the site of Hannah's son Jonathan's home, where Hannah lived her final years. Hannah Duston died at this location in 1736.

Fourth Memorial: A mill stone placed on the shores of the Merrimack River where Hannah, Mary and Samuel beached their canoe upon their return to Haverhill.

Fifth Memorial: The Site of James Lovewell's Home, where Hannah, Mary and Samuel rested on their way home from captivity.

Other commemorations include: Hannah Dustin Health Care Center, a Hannah Dustin Rest Home, and a Hannah Dustin Elementary School,

The 1861 Haverhill, Massachusetts monument at its current location in Barre, Massachusetts. The campaign to build the first monument in Haverhill, Massachusetts, began in 1852, at a time when building public monuments was still a somewhat rare occurrence. The monument they chose was a simple marble column that would cost about $1,350 and by 1861 they had the necessary funds. It was erected in June 1861, at the site of Duston’s capture, but it was never fully paid for. After successfully suing the association, the builders removed the monument in August 1865, erased the inscription, engraved a new one, and resold it to the town of Barre, Massachusetts, where it stands to this day as a memorial to that town’s Civil War soldiers. The Dustin House, in which she lived, is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

Controversy

Today, Hannah Duston's actions in freeing herself, Mary and a child from captivity are controversial, with some calling her a hero, but others calling her a villain, and some Abenaki leaders saying her legend is racist and glorifies violence.

Scholars, such as Barbara Cutter, have questioned why the legend of Duston was ignored for most of the eightieth century, while being heralded throughout the ninetieth century. She concludes that America was invested in connecting the archetype of women's virtue and innocence with the violence the nation was conducting against Native Americans in the ninetieth century. She identifies that one of the only commentators to object to the honouring of Duston was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who believed the violence of America against its native populations was neither virtuous or innocent.

See also

• Dustin House

Bibliography

• Caverly, Robert B. Heroism of Hannah Duston: Together With the Indian Wars of New England (orig. pub. 1875). Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books, 1990. ISBN 1-55613-301-4
• Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana (orig. pub. 1702). New York: Russell & Russell (Atheneum House), 1967. ASIN B0007DLZGI
• Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier. University of North Carolina Press, 1993. ISBN 0-8078-4408-X
• Sayre, Gordon M., ed. American Captivity Narratives. Houghton Mifflin, 2000. ISBN 0-395-98073-9
• Barbara Cutter. The Female Indian Killer Memorialized: Hannah Duston and the Nineteenth–Century Feminization of American Violence. Journal of Women’s History, 2008. Vol. 20 No. 2, 10–33.
• Ann-Marie Weis, “The Murderous Mother and Solicitous Father: Violence, Jacksonian Family Values, and Hannah Duston’s Captivity” American Studies International 26, no. 1 (February 1998), pp. 46-65.
• Sara Humphreys, “The Mass Marketing of the Colonial Captive Hannah Duston” Canadian Review of American Studies 41, no. 2 (2011): 149-179.

External links

• HannahDustin.com
• HannahDuston.com
• HawthorneInSalem gives Nathaniel Hawthorne's version
• Hannah Duston at Find a Grave