Captivity Narrative: Hannah Dustin

Violence on the frontier went both ways, with both sides committing what would now be termed atrocities, but were at the time justified as self defense.  The case of Hannah Dustin of Haverhill, Massachusetts is one such event.

Hannah Emmerson (1657-c 1737) was the oldest of 15 children.  Her family had already appeared in the local records when one of her sisters was convicted of infanticide and hanged.  At the age of 20, Hannah married Thomas Dustin, a farmer who supplemented their income by making bricks.  Nine children followed and nothing else seemed remarkable about their life together.  However, during King William's War (1688-1697), Abenaki warriors working for the French staged a raid on Haverhill, Massachusetts.  Thomas was able to gather the oldest 8 children and flee with them into the woods.  Hannah, her six-day-old baby girl Martha, and her nursemaid Mary Neff were captured and forced to march into the wilderness.  As was common practice during these marches, the warriors seized little Martha out of Hannah's arms and smashed the infant's head against a tree. 

The two women were assigned to a Native American family which included another captive, a teenager named Samuel Lennardson.  They continued their journey to what is now Penacook, New Hampshire.  There, while their host family lay asleep, Hannah found a small hatchet (not necessarily a tomahawk).  She killed one of the men of the family while Lennardson found a weapon and slew the other.  They and Mary Neff also killed eight other members of the family.  Only an old woman and an older child, both severely wounded, escaped to tell the tale.  Then, the three Settlers took scalps to prove the incident, found a canoe and headed back to Haverhill, traveling by water and only at night so as not to be detected.  The Massachusetts General Court awarded Hannah 25 pounds in scalp bounty.  Lennardson and Neff divided another 25 between themselves.  In those days, this was not an insignificant sum of money.

Hannah and Thomas reunited their family and there the matter rested.  Hannah later told her story to Cotton Mather, who included it in one of his many books about the history of New England.  But it wasn't until the 19th century, when writers like Nathaneal Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry David Thoreau came along that the story was embellished and dramatized.  Several memorials were erected to Hannah around Massachusetts but her story remains controversial today.  Was her action self-defense, or murder in vengeance for her infant daughter?  By retelling her story, would that be considered glorifying violence toward Native Americans?  By making her a heroine, was that not racism?  I'll leave that for the reader to decide, I'm just reporting the facts.