The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  Here the war party began to split up. The two iglizmôniskwak, as the English women were known, were taken by an extended Abenaki family—two men, three women, and seven children, who also held a fourteen-year-old English boy named Samuel Lennardson (or Leonardson), captured a year and a half earlier in a raid on Worcester. The plan, as the captives understood it, was that their party would rest for a time with their captors’ relatives, then rejoin the rest of the raiders at a large Abenaki village in Maine.

  When they got there, the three colonists were told, they’d be stripped and forced to run the gauntlet—the typical test of bravery and strength for male captives, racing through a rain of blows, jeers, and abuse. To the horrified women and teenage boy, however, it was simply torture. And while such treatment was rarely, if ever, extended to women, they may not have known this. Duston, in fact, was no doubt aware of hair-raising accounts such as those of Mercy Short, who saw a five-year-old boy killed with a tomahawk and dismembered and a teenage girl beheaded and scalped as an explicit warning to the other captives to behave. A pregnant woman taken captive with Mary Rowlandson, who begged constantly to be sent home, was likewise killed out of hand as an example to the others. And as Duston had already seen, weak or sick captives, regardless of age or sex, were often executed on the march.

  European captives knew that death was always possible, but interestingly, sexual assault seems to have been all but nonexistent on the eastern frontier, perhaps because of deeply ingrained cultural taboos against it among many Woodland Indian cultures. Rowlandson could have spoken for the vast majority of female captives when she noted, “Not one of them ever offered the least abuse or unchastity to me in word or action.” Such constraints were decidedly absent on the other side, however, and the rape of Indian women by Europeans was depressingly common.

  Like Rowlandson, Duston and Mary Neff could expect rough treatment for a time as slaves, with the likelihood of eventual ransoming and a return to their homes. Full adoption into Abenaki society was possible, but this was less likely than among tribes such as the Mohawk, who made a regular habit of accepting white captives into society. More likely, they would be transferred to French control in New France, where a surprising number of English girls found an agreeable new life. Some, like Eunice Williams, embraced Indian culture, but far more assimilated into New France society, converting to Catholicism and in some cases becoming influential nuns.

  That so many women captives welcomed this change, while very few men did, may reflect the relative freedom and authority that the women enjoyed in both Indian culture and New France, compared with the strictures facing them in New England. In at least one case, captivity may have brought a strange kind of relief. Abigail Willey was captured with her two daughters in 1689 at Oyster River, New Hampshire. She was thirty-two and married, but six years earlier she’d unsuccessfully sought legal protection from her abusive husband, having suffered “sore and heavy blows . . . too much for any weak woman to bear.” Willey never returned to New England, although her children did.

  To Duston and Neff, the immediate prospects were frightening. No one knows whether their captors were simply tormenting them with the prospect of the gauntlet, whether the iglizmôniskwak misunderstood the Abenaki plans, or whether they leapt to conclusions based on stories they’d heard from other captives. They tried to pray but had to be surreptitious, for the Abenaki would stop them—though not from a lack of Christian faith themselves. The Indians had been baptized Catholic by the French missionaries; they prayed three times a day and wouldn’t let their children eat without saying grace. Instead, it was the English style of prayer that bothered them, just as their Catholicism was anathema to Protestants such as Duston. One of the Abenaki men had lived for a time with Mary Rowlandson’s family in Lancaster, and he told Duston that he had “pray’d the English way [and] thought that was good: but now he found the French way better.” He also told the women not to worry: “If your God shall have you delivered, you shall be so.”

  The same man also explained to Samuel—apparently at the boy’s request and possibly at Duston’s secret bidding—how he killed Englishmen with a tomahawk. “Strike ’em dere,” he supposedly said, pointing to his temple, then answered further questions by explaining how to take a scalp.

  What happened next has been the center of controversy for more than three hundred years. Some see Duston as a plucky symbol of frontier self-reliance. Others, like Cotton Mather, who wrote the first account of her captivity, see her as the weapon of divine justice, like the biblical Jael killing the Canaanite king Sisera by driving a tent peg through his head. Still others, notably Abenaki descendants, dismiss her as a cold-blooded murderer.

  That night, as the camp slept, Duston “heartened the nurse and the youth to assist her in this enterprize,” Mather wrote, “and all furnishing themselves with hatchets for the purpose, they struck home such blows upon the heads of the sleeping oppressors” as to kill ten of the twelve Abenakis. Samuel killed the man who had helpfully explained how to wield a tomahawk. One woman, left for dead, escaped despite seven deep hatchet wounds in her head, wandering in the woods for several days before finding other Abenakis. A boy of unknown age was spared or escaped, the only one of the seven Indian children to live through the attack.

  The three English captives grabbed a gun and the hatchets, gathered some supplies, and punched holes in all the canoes except one before heading downstream. But then Duston did something that makes her story even more of a moral quagmire. Having made their successful escape against immense odds, she turned her party around and returned to camp. There she straddled each body and, with a knife, peeled the scalps off the ten dead Abenakis—including the children—wrapping the bloody skins in a piece of fabric.

  One can imagine a kidnapped woman doing almost anything to escape, and it’s equally easy to imagine a mother who saw her newborn’s head smashed open, and who had every reason to believe the rest of her family dead, wanting to exact revenge. Two weeks of fear, grief, and exhaustion could unhinge almost anyone and make her capable of great violence. But the deliberate slaughter of sleeping children, compounded by the methodical scalping of all the bodies, has made Duston’s story a hard one to stomach.

  Should it matter? Casual, often incomprehensible cruelty was a hallmark of the frontier wars on both sides, driven by deep-seated hatred and the desire for revenge. In March 1690, the Abenaki sagamore Hope Hood, whose kidnapping had precipitated the war, was among those attacking Salmon Falls, across the river from Cochecho, where he kidnapped a five-year-old boy named James Key. For days, the lad cried for his parents. So first Hope Hood beat him bloody, and then when the boy complained about a sore eye, Hope Hood “[lay] Hold on the Head of the Child with his Left Hand, and with the Thumb of his Right he forced the Ball of [the boy’s] Eye quite out,” warning the boy that if “he heard him Cry again he would Serve t’other so too, and leave him never an Eye to Weep withal.”

  Certainly, no one in the English settlements was the least disturbed by what Duston and her comrades did—quite the contrary. With the fresh scalps wrapped in Duston’s apron, the trio traveled by night down the river, making their way safely back to Haverhill. Less than two weeks later, Thomas Duston took all three to Boston, where he petitioned for a payment. Even though the bounty for Indian scalps had been revoked the year before, the General Court granted Hannah fifty pounds (some accounts say twenty-five, with a similar amount later to reward Thomas). Mary and Samuel each received twelve pounds and ten shillings. With the money, Thomas Duston purchased an additional twenty acres of land five months after his wife’s escape.

  Hannah Duston was a celebrity. The governor of Maryland sent his compliments and an unspecified gift, perhaps the silver tankard that became a family heirloom (as did a silver earring Duston may have taken, along with a scalp, from one of the dead women). Cotton Mather, four years after making a stern sermonly example of her condemned sister Elizabeth, now ringed Hannah with praise. He later includ
ed her tale in his 1702 book Magnalia Christi Americana. Less publicly, her account was included in the diaries of several Puritan notables, such as Samuel Sewall, who spoke with her shortly after her escape.

  Over the next two centuries, Duston became a New England folk legend, the gruesome story abridged or embellished as necessary, used as a morality tale for schoolchildren, reenacted in public pageants, translated into heroic artwork, and referenced by serious writers like Hawthorne and Thoreau. A mountain in northern New Hampshire was named for her. Thomas Duston, having shielded his children from the approaching Indians, also was lionized in art and poetry, but not to nearly the same degree. The fact that a woman had committed such acts was what made Hannah Duston stand out through history.

  In 1874, a statue of Duston—said to be the first monument to a woman erected anywhere in the United States—was placed on a small island at the confluence of the Contoocook and Merrimack rivers near Boscawen, New Hampshire, roughly where she, Mary Neff, and Samuel Lennardson killed the Abenaki family. It depicts her gripping a hatchet in one hand and scalps in the other. In 1879, Haverhill raised a statue to Duston, requisite ax again at the ready.

  Unlike Mary Rowlandson and many other captives, Duston never committed her own story to paper. We have only secondhand accounts of what happened in the cold predawn hours along the Contoocook. It is the uncertainty about her state of mind and motives that leaves us with two central questions: why kill the children, and why return for the scalps? And it’s the latter act of apparent premeditation that turns Duston from a merely vengeful captive into something darker and far more disturbing.

  Americans of all backgrounds have been trying to make moral sense of Duston’s story for a long time. Starting in the early 1800s, local historians suggested that she needed the scalps as proof that two English women and a boy could overpower an entire band of Indians. Certainly, that is the most sympathetic rationale. Strikingly, however, neither Mather nor Sewall—the only two writers who heard the story from Duston herself—give any hint of that justification. If anything, Mather’s comment about how the trio “[cut] off the scalps of the ten wretches, they came off, and received fifty pounds from the General Assembly . . . as a recompense of their action” suggests that the intent was for a bounty of some sort.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne found her an impossibly conflicted figure, calling her—all within a single 1836 essay—a good wife, a “raging tigress,” and “a bloody old hag” who would have been better drowned or lost forever in the forest, “nothing ever seen of her again, save her skeleton, with the ten scalps twisted around it for a girdle!”

  Henry David Thoreau, floating down the Merrimack River in 1839, imagined the scene 142 years earlier: “These tired women and this boy, their clothes stained with blood, and their minds racked with alternate resolution and fear, are making a hasty meal of parched corn and moose meat, while their canoe glides under these pines . . . They are thinking of the dead whom they have left behind on that solitary isle far up the stream, and of the relentless living warriors who are in pursuit.” Perhaps his more empathetic turn came from thinking about the apple tree against which the infant Martha was killed; in Thoreau’s day, many an old-timer claimed to have eaten fruit from that tree.

  Not surprisingly, the Indians had a starkly different view of what transpired. Apparently, both the escaping boy and the badly wounded Abenaki woman made it to safety with their story, and in the generations since, Duston has been a symbol of treachery and murder. Abenaki historian Margaret Bruchac has suggested that in the Native view, Duston “shifted into a dangerous non-human form” in order to commit the acts she did—although in the same breath, Bruchac dismisses the murder of six-day-old Martha Duston by the Abenaki raiders, saying the infant and other captives were “mercy-killed,” in keeping with tradition, to spare them the rigors of a winter trek.

  Historians caution that it is unfair to judge anyone in the past except by his or her own standards and the standards of the time. In this sense, what any modern bystander would view as atrocities—smashing a baby’s head against a tree or tomahawking a sleeping child and ripping off its scalp—were acceptable reactions to frontier war. What is self-evidently wrong to us was not so to them, and although we can take comfort from humanity’s albeit slow progress away from the acceptance of offhand savagery, we need to be careful to view actions on both sides through the prism of the times.

  Except Hannah Duston and the others bound up in her story won’t remain quietly part of the past. Each generation of New Englanders, white and Native, has had to wrestle with her. Whereas nineteenth-century writers seemed unsure what to make of this episode of violence by a woman, some twentieth-century feminists contended that Duston’s actions were those of an oppressed woman substituting Indian victimizers and victims for the white patriarchy.

  Not all the attention has been academic. In the 1970s, a rather busty version of Duston was turned into a commemorative whiskey decanter by the Jim Beam distillery, complete with her fistful of scalps. Nor, hard as it may be to believe, was that the nadir of Duston’s commercialization; that dubious honor goes to a recent Hannah Duston bobblehead doll.

  Duston again became a lightning rod in 2006, when the Haverhill Rocks music festival used a doctored image of her statue showing her holding a red electric guitar instead of her trademark hatchet. Some people were bothered by the choice. “What, was Lizzie Borden busy?” one resident quipped to a reporter. Others defended it. A consultant helping Haverhill’s revitalization efforts called Duston part of the town’s unique identity and suggested that her statue should be no more controversial than one on Boston Common honoring William Tecumseh Sherman, a man seen as both a hero and “a psychotic murderer and arsonist,” depending on one’s background. Hollywood, sensing a good story, began talking about a film version of Duston’s capture and escape, and soon Haverhill was discussing an annual Hannah Duston Day to breathe life back into the aging town.

  As one would expect, Indians in general and Abenakis in particular weren’t happy with the renewed attention given a woman they feel has already garnered more fame than she deserves. “More than being an Indian, being a mother I find it absolutely appalling that a community would promote violence and a violent act in a racist manner to young people today,” said Chief Nancy Lyons of the Koasek Traditional Band of the Koas Abenaki Nation, descendants of Duston’s captors and victims.

  More than three hundred years after Hannah Duston canoed back to Haverhill, scalps wrapped in her apron, tensions of the war years on the First Frontier still simmer, and Duston’s bloody legacy continues. As Margaret Bruchac has asked, “Must we be haunted by Hannah for eternity?”

  Chapter 7

  “Oppressions, Grievances & Provocacons”

  SHORTLY AFTER SUNRISE on a January morning in 1704, an army of about sixty Englishmen and Indians converged on the center of La Concepción de Ayubale, one of the largest of the dozens of mission towns strung across the neck of Spanish Florida. These towns were connected by deeply worn trails that stretched from the cypress swamps and pine woods of the Apalachicola River near the Gulf of Mexico east to the huge presidio at San Agustín de la Florida (St. Augustine), whose cannons guarded the Atlantic Ocean.

  Normally, hundreds of Apalachee Indians tilled the fields of maize and squash that surrounded Ayubale, and they attended Mass in the large mud-walled mission church where the Franciscan priest, Fray (Friar) Angel de Miranda, presided. Traders brought tanned deerskins to the village to be painted and decorated, for the artisans of Ayubale were famed for this craft. This morning, however, the town seemed deserted, except for the crowing of roosters, the scuffling of a few pigs, and the worried barking of dogs. The dry, wheat-colored palmetto fronds, with which all the mission buildings were thatched, rustled softly in the breeze.

  As the invaders reached the edge of the town proper—the church and convent, the storehouses and other buildings, all shielded by a palisade—arrows began to flash through the air, striking
the packed dirt streets and sinking into the unwary attackers’ flesh. The advancing men scurried for cover behind a large wattle-and-daub house while their commander, Colonel James Moore, considered his next step.

  Moore—born in Barbados, the former governor of English Carolina, and the leader of a faction of wealthy, staunchly Anglican plantation owners from Charles Town (later Charleston) known as the Goose Creek Men—was officially on a diplomatic mission to “Apalatchia.” It must have seemed a strange kind of diplomacy to the defenders of Ayubale. His small band of soldiers was accompanied by almost a thousand Creek warriors, nearly all of whom were, at this moment, attacking the surrounding villages and farmsteads—a frequent occurrence for the local Apalachee, who were the victims of regular Creek slaving raids.

  Talk of diplomacy was political window-dressing. Moore’s mission was widely understood to strike a powerful blow against Spain, whose missions and military had dominated the colonial Southeast for more than a century and a half. But Moore, who had offered to finance the months-long expedition out of his own pocket, also knew it was a golden opportunity to reap a windfall in plunder and slaves.

  Swinging axes, Moore’s men raced to the church door and hacked at the wood, while the Christian Apalachees inside, trapped with Fray Miranda, rained arrows down on them, killing several of the Carolinians. The battle seesawed through the morning and into the early afternoon, until the Apalachees ran out of arrows and the attackers finally set fire to the church roof. When Miranda emerged to beg for mercy, more than two dozen Apalachees lay dead behind him, and the eighty survivors faced a grim future in which slavery was probably their most hopeful fate.