Captured by The Mohawks

The Tale of Hannah Duston

by Tom Seymour

Deerfield, MA 1913. Re-enactors of the 1704 “French & Indian” raid. Interest in these Native American raids of the early 1700s began in 1890s. Courtesy of Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield, MA

Haverhill, Massachusetts was a frontier town during the waning years of King William’s War (1689-1697). And life on the frontier was always fraught with danger. A slight injury could, without proper medical attention, prove fatal. Confrontations with wild animals were always a possibility. Crop failure and resulting famine was an ever-present danger. But the threat of Indian attack was the most terrifying of all.

Relations between colonists and native Americans were at a low ebb. King Philip’s War (1675-1676) had taken a toll on the tribes of southern New England. Military actions, along with the introduction of diseases such as small pox, brought from Europe beginning with the earliest contact and from which the native Americans had no immunity, served to deplete native populations.

Northern native American nations, though, had not fared as badly and the remnants of the near-depleted southern nations teamed with the Abenaki Indians in a last desperate attempt at self-preservation. It was well for them that they did. The Abenakis, along with the Mohawks, were politically allies of the French in Canada, thus giving them far more power than they would have enjoyed had they remained separate and fragmented. This alliance and the four French and Indian Wars that resulted from it was a part of a larger alliance and war among western European dynasties in a geopolitical struggle which included colonial interests in North America. France, the most powerful, England, the Netherlands and Austria were the key players.

Native Americans had suffered tremendous losses during the previous Indian war, King Philip’s War (1675-1676). Both sides, colonists and Indians, attacked each other with unprecedented ferocity. Stories of colonists being taken by the Indians and their French allies abound. Attacks in southern Maine settlements include those at Gorham, Wells, York, Casco and Scarborough. One of the best known in New England, the Deerfield Raid, serves to illustrate the fate of Colonial captives.

Deerfield Raid

On February 28, 1704, a mixed group of Abenaki and Mohawk Indians, along with their French partners, swept down upon the sleeping town of Deerfield, Massachusetts. The town was burned, settlers brutally murdered and livestock destroyed. The French and Indians captured 112 colonists. Among them was seven-year-old Eunice Williams, who, along with six surviving family members, were led off to captivity in Canada. (The Unredeemed Captive,1995, by John Demos is a well researched and written book on this event and it’s relationships to other such raids in New England.)

In April of that same year, Eunice’s father, John Williams and his children Esther, Samuel and Warham, were conducted to Montreal, where they were handed to the French. In this and many other cases, captives were ransomed back to their families or hometowns and this was often a lengthy process. Eunice, on the other hand, was taken to a Catholic mission not far from Montreal, there to live with the Mohawks.

In 1706, five members of Eunice’s family were ransomed and returned home, but Eunice was given up to adoption by a Mohawk family. Smallpox had claimed this families’ daughter and Eunice became a surrogate for that deceased daughter.

During the ensuing years Eunice was given ample opportunities to leave and she did visit remaining family members off and on at various times. But she refused to abandon her Indian family, married a Mohawk and died in 1786 at 89 years of age.

Hannah Abducted

The Dustan Garrison House, Haverhill, MA. Undated glass plate photograph of the house Thomas Dustan built after his house was burned in a French & Indian raid in 1697. Some English settlements built a few fortified brick garrison houses. Originally they had heavy shutters for the windows and doors. Town residents could shelter in garrison houses during an attack. Photo courtesy Haverhill Public Library.

At about the time Eunice Williams was born, during King William’s War, another “Indian raid” occurred about 25 miles northwest of Salem, Massachusetts. On March 15, 1697, a group of Native Americans, which historians believe were Abenakis, attacked the Massachusetts town of Haverhill. Accounts of this raid abound, but one in particular stands out. Cotton Mather, the same minister Cotton Mather of the Salem Witch Trials, got details of the raid and abduction from one of the English captives, Hannah Duston, and included Hannah’s story in his treatise, Magnalia Christi Americana.

According to Cotton Mather, Hanna Duston was recuperating from childbirth with the assistance of her nurse, Mary Neff when the Indians attacked. Hannah’s husband Thomas, who had been working in the fields, rushed to the house and after directing seven of their children to run to the safety of a nearby garrison house, implored Hannah to come with him and affect an escape.

As the Indians drew closer, the time for making decisions had passed. Hannah realized that she would only slow her husband down, so she resolved to place herself in God’s hands, whatever may happen and directed her husband to run, quickly, which he did.

After leaving the house, the husband overtook his escaping children and though the Indians began firing upon the little group, the husband fired back and by this means was able to reach safety without losing one of his children.

Hannah, though, was not so fortunate. She, along with her infant baby Martha and Mary Neff and about 10 other English captives, were taken away by a group of, according to Cotton Mather, 19 or 20 Indians.

Despite her frail condition, Hanna kept pace with her captors. Had she not she would have undoubtedly been slain. As the group of captors and captives went along, Hanna’s infant daughter began crying and it irritated the Indians so much that one of them took the baby by the legs, swung it and dashed its brains out against a tree.

Other captives met similar fates because of their inability to keep up. Hannah and Mary Neff, though, managed to continue on without significant physical difficulties. Then at some point, Hannah and Mary were given to an Indian family made up of two men, three women and seven children, plus a captive English boy who was taken 18 months earlier, 14-year-old Samuel Leonardson. Samuel had managed to put up a good face and because of that had secured the Indian’s trust.

Door from the original Williams house in Deerfield which was burned in the 1704 raid. Hatchet marks can be seen around the opening chopped in the door, which is now at the Memorial History Museum in Deerfield. The museum now acknowledges in exhibit information the 6,000 year residency of Native American Pocumtucs in the valley that surrounds Deerfield prior to Europeans forcing them out. Fishermen’s Voice photo.

The Indian family was on the move and escape seemed improbable if not impossible. However, Hannah had a plan. She convinced the English boy to ask the Indians to instruct him in how to kill someone by using a tomahawk. The Indians may have welcomed this request as a sign that the boy had in fact fully taken up their ways and so they taught him the art of killing by tomahawk.

As it happened, the Indian family was headed to a rendezvous with a larger group of Indians in an Indian town many miles away. The Indians advised the captives that when they reached the town, they would, according to Cotton Mather’s account, be stripped, scourged and compelled to run the gantlet through a street lined on both sides by Indians who would strike them as they ran. The Indians ridiculed earlier English captives, who they described as faint-hearted because they fainted during their trials.

This greatly frightened Hannah and the two other captives. Hanna, the Indians knew, had appealed to her God for deliverance and the head warrior told her not to concern herself with such matters, since if her God meant to help her, he certainly would.

Thoughts of deliverance, along with visions of running the gauntlet proved sufficient inducement for Hanna to put her escape plan into action. Camped on an island on the Merrimack River in New Hampshire, during the wee morning hours of April 30, Hanna enlisted Mary Neff and Samuel Leonardson in her action plan. Hannah and the two others silently crept about camp, where they each secured a tomahawk and at Hannah’s signal, began killing their sleeping captors, killing 10 Indians, including six Indian children. Also, the group wounded an adult woman, who, with a young boy, managed to escape.

Hannah and her group appropriated one of the Indian’s canoes, along with whatever provisions they could find, and took off down the Merrimac River and finally, to safety in Massachusetts. But as they paddled, it occurred to Hannah that she needed proof of what had occurred. In colonial times, women who left home, for whatever reason, including being taken by Indians, were held under a certain suspicion. Hannah knew she must clear herself and her good name.

According to a written account published by the Duston family, the group soon turned back to the island where the dead Indians lay and Hanna, using her tomahawk, scalped the dead bodies and took the scalps with her in the canoe as proof of her trials and tribulations. Upon arrival to safety, the Massachusetts General Assembly awarded Hannah 50 pounds for the Indian scalps.

Heroine Hannah

Hannah and her friends achieved instant fame and friends and public figures awarded them with presents. One Colonel Nicholson, governor of Maryland, having heard the harrowing tale of capture and escape, sent the three a generous cash award.

While the killing and scalping part of Hannah’s ordeal was accepted at the time as virtuous (imagine Hannah thinking of the murder of her baby as she swung her tomahawk), later commentators wondered if her acts were justified.

Years after Hannah’s successful escape from captivity and possible death, stories of her trial abounded and not all agreed upon every detail. Some accounts mentioned that Hannah had on only one shoe as she was led off into captivity. This seems doubtful, given that she proved more durable than many of the other captives and did not lag behind. Had she only one shoe, it seems unlikely that she could have done what she did.

Other commentators dispute Hannah’s return to the Indian camp for the purposes of scalping the dead Indians. Various accounts have Hannah scalping the Indians immediately upon killing them. The account of her having second thoughts that prompted her return in order to fetch the scalps is still maintained by her descendents, as alluded to above.

Lithograph from 1883 depicting Thomas Dustan moving his children into an outbuilding during the 1697 Haverhill raid when his house was burned and his wife Hannah and infant child were taken captive. Photo courtesy Haverhill Public Library.

Hannah’s story gained in popularity. During the 19th century Hannah became a folk hero and was credited, according to Wikipedia, with the dubious title of “mother of the American tradition of scalp hunting.” Latter-day scholars maintain that Hannah’s folk hero status was contrived by the United States in order to justify the government’s treatment of Indians. Some today consider Hanna a racist, whose action only glorified violence. Others, though, continue to honor her as a true heroine.

Nonetheless, in 1879, a huge number of people visited an island in Boscawen, New Hampshire, the same island where Hanna killed her captors. This was because a statue of Hannah was dedicated on that day. It was a day-long affair, with speeches through the event. This was also, again, according to Wikipedia, the first publicly-funded statue in New Hampshire. It is also credited as being the first statue erected to a woman, although most accounts only say something like, “this statue was thought to be the first statue erected to a woman.”

A second statue, erected in 1879 in the Haverhill, Massachusetts, town square, depicted Hanna holding her tomahawk. In 1908 a third memorial was inscribed on a boulder at Hannah’s son Jonathan’s home, where Hannah spent her final years and where she died in 1736 or 1737.

Later, on an unknown date, a millstone was set along the Merrimack River at the site believed to be where Hannah beached their canoe upon their safe arrival in Haverhill.

A fifth memorial was set up on the site of the home of James Lovewell in Nashua, New Hampshire, where Hannah, Mary and Samuel recuperated from their ordeal.

Finally, a mountain, Mount Dustan, in Wentworth’s Location, New Hampshire was named for Hannah Duston, using an alternate spelling of her name.

Hannah’s tomahawk, which is properly termed a biscayenne, a type of hatchet, resides in the archives of the Haverhill Historical Society.