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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
When I was growing up in Southern Connecticut, my mother referred occasionally to an ancestor of ours who had killed some Indians. In 1970, I went away to college and Mom came up to Massachusetts for Parents' Weekend. Just across the river from my campus in Bradford stood a statue in the center of Haverhill's town green. My mother pointed it out to me (my sister had gone to the same school, so Mom knew her way around the area). I'd been passing this tribute to our ancestor – supposedly the first statue of a woman ever erected in this country – every time I went to town to pick up subs or hang out with the townies. Not sure whether to be proud or ashamed, my mother and I stood and looked up at the bronze woman streaked with bird droppings. Her hatchet was raised, her hefty thigh slightly raised beneath her heavy skirts; we imagined we saw a family resemblance – the square jaw and round cheeks that are distinctive in our family. At the base of the statue, bas relief plaques narrated Hannah Emerson Dustin's story: taken by Abenaki Indians from her Haverhill home along with her week-old infant and her midwife, Mary Neff, Dustin watched as her infant was killed by the Indians. She was then marched up along the Merrimack River, through swamps and woods, to a small island where the Merrimack meets the Contoocook River, in present-day New Hampshire. Shortly after her arrival at the island, Dustin – with the aid of Mary Neff and perhaps that of an English boy, Samuel Lenardson, then living with the Indians – hatcheted to death the sleeping people, scalped them, then made her way back down the Merrimack in a canoe. As I looked at the statue, I wondered many things about Dustin.
1. The novel is currently seeking a publisher.
2. One thing I never did confirm in all the research I did was whether, in fact, I am related to Dustin. This was not important to me, and, I became convinced, half of Anglo New England wants to claim her as an ancestor. No thanks. There are as many versions of the Dustin story, it seems, as there are descendants.
3. Here, the trial transcript is somewhat illegible. Some have read “several” as seven; I believe it makes more sense that Elizabeth replied “several.”
4. Suffolk County Court Records, Early Files, 2636.
5. Internet web page: scils.rutgers.edu/cthc/hyperedition.html (Variations in the spelling of names is common in older files as spelling was not yet standardized.)
6. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. I am enormously indebted to Ulrich for leading me to Elizabeth. Her superb history images what life might have been like for both Elizabeth and Hannah as girls and her questions were of critical importance to me, for they were similar to ones I was asking myself.
7. Ibid., 198.
8. Essex County Court Papers, Quarterly Court Papers, 46: 131–1.
9. Court of Session – miscellaneous papers, 47–104–1. It's understandable that such records could be overlooked, unless one were researching at great length for a particular person, as I was. A variety of courts reviewed Elizabeth's cases, the courts were held at different locations, and as a result the cases were recorded in different courts' records. The Swan testimony came from Ipswich Quarterly Court Records, others from Essex County Court Papers, and still others from miscellaneous records.
10. Koehler, Lyle, A Search for Power: The “Weaker Sex in Seventeenth-Century New England” (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 199.Google Scholar
11. Chase, George Wingate, The History of Haverhill, Massachusetts ([Lowell, Mass., 1861] Haverhill, Mass.: New England History Press in collaboration with the Haverhill Historical Society, 1983), 31–32Google Scholar. Introduction to 1983 edition by Gregory H. Laing.
12. Mather, Cotton, Souldiers Counselled and Comforted (Boston, 1689), 28Google Scholar, quoted in Axtell, James, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 147.Google Scholar
13. Kathryn Whitford traces numerous versions that have appeared in print over the centuries in her careful study, “Hannah Dustin: The Judgment of History,” in Essex Institute Historical Collections 108, no. 4 (1972): 304–25.Google Scholar
14. No, this is not a typographical error, but an obsolete form of savage.
15. Mather, Cotton, Magnalia Christi Americana.Google Scholar
16. Schwarz, Frederic D., “The Time Machine: Hannah Dustin's War,” American Heritage 04 1997: 95–96.Google Scholar
17. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, “The Duston Family,” American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge 2 (05 1836): 397.Google Scholar