It’s March 31st. . . Hannah Dustin Day!
Okay. So it’s not marked on your calendar. But this is a red-letter day in the life of one of the most famous American women you’ve never heard of. Hannah Dustin – now largely overlooked – was the first of her sex to have a permanent statue erected in her honor in America. It depicted her holding a hatchet in one hand and some Indian scalps in the other.
And therein lies the tale –actually one of those “Untold Tales” from American History that your schoolbooks left out.
On the night of March 31, 1697, Hannah Dustin was a captive, held by a family of twelve Indians. She and midwife Mary Neff had been taken prisoner a few weeks earlier during a raid on her home in Haverhill, Massachusetts and marched into what is now New Hampshire. Hannah Dustin’s newborn daughter, her eighth child, had been killed in the raid –her head smashed against an apple tree.
After midnight, the story goes, Dustin roused two of her fellow captives, and with hatchets they had hidden away, the trio killed ten of the sleeping Indians –six of them children. As they began their flight back to Massachusetts, Hannah Dustin remembered that the Bay Colony once paid bounties for Indian scalps. She returned to the bloody scene and took the ten scalps, then made her way home, to be hailed as a model of Puritan piety and virtue.
“Famous symbol of frontier heroism” the historical marker by her statue in Haverhill still reads. The original hatchet and scalps have disappeared from the statue –victims of vandals or political correctness. But from the time of her midnight massacre, through much of the 19th century, Hannah Dustin stood as a symbol of the virtuous English American colonist, a model of Puritan piety, and heroic pioneer mother. She was rewarded and feted in her time, praised by poets and writers, and became an American icon. Not everyone felt so charitable. Nathaniel Hawthorne called her a “hag.”
I recount the story of Hannah Dustin in America’s Hidden History, published in paperback today. Dustin is one of the “Fighting Women” who time and textbooks have ignored. But Hannah Dustin’s tale speaks volumes about the harsh life of a woman on the New England frontier, the rigid constraints of the Puritan world, and the constant warfare between New England’s English colonists and the Native Americans –descendants of the people who sat down for that “first Thanksgiving” in 1621.
We like to paint a history that looks back with pride and patriotism. But our “hidden history” often tells another tale.
