America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback by Kenneth C. Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

Indians. In York, Maine, the people had been less fortunate. In what was called the Candlemas Massacre, more than fifty settlers had died and another hundred had been taken captive in the early winter of 1692. That the settlers believed that the Indi-
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    America’s Hidden Hi Ç ory ans were actually in league with the devil only served to heighten the climate of fear. The connection between witches, magic, and Native Americans was not coincidental. Contemporary scholars have much more closely connected the outbreak of New England’s witchcraft hys-teria in the 1690s with the growing threat from local tribes who were widely viewed by Puritans as demonic agents.
    For Haverhill’s residents, these dangers—both the spiritual and the worldly—simply confirmed the constant admonishments of their Puritan preachers: they were hopeless sinners with little chance of redemption, in this life or the next. As the Reverend George Burroughs, a minister from Wells, Maine, wrote after the devastating surprise attack on York, “God is still manifesting his displeasure against this Land.”1
    On this cold March morning, Thomas Dustin, Hannah’s forty-five-year-old husband, suddenly burst into the house in a panic. Haverhill was under attack. Half a dozen nearby houses were already burning. An Abenaki raiding party was heading for the Dustin home.
    Hannah implored her husband to collect their other children and get them to safety. She and Mary Neff would fend for themselves and the baby.
    After what must have been a torturous moment in which he had to choose between trying to save his wife and newborn and saving the rest of his family, Thomas Dustin did as his wife asked. Rushing from the house, he gathered his seven other children, ranging in age from two to seventeen, and managed to shepherd all of them to safety. Desperately holding off the Abenaki warriors who followed his family as they fled, Thomas Dustin kept the Indians at bay without actually firing his musket, which might have spelled his doom. Had he gotten off a shot, the Indians would have certainly overwhelmed him before | 44 \
    Hannah’s Escape
    he could reload. The little group reached the town’s designated garrison, the fortified house of veteran Indian fighter and Salem witch trial judge Nathaniel Saltonstall, about a mile away.
    Barely moments after Thomas rushed off, some twenty Abenaki raiders, armed with war axes and muskets, came crashing into the farmhouse where Hannah cowered by the hearth. Hannah and the nurse, clutching newborn Martha, expected death. Instead, they were pulled from the house, which was then set ablaze. One of the raiders grabbed newborn Martha from Mary Neff’s arms and brained the six-day-old baby against a nearby apple tree.
    In this inconceivable moment of terror, shock, and grief, the two women were spared. Taken captive along with at least ten other prisoners from Haverhill, they began a wilderness trek. According to the most famous contemporary account of this ordeal, “several of the other captives, as they began to Tire in their sad Journey, were soon sent unto their Long Home; the Salvages [ sic ] would presently bury their Hatchets in their Brains, and leave their Carcasses on the Ground for Birds and Beasts to Feed upon.”2
    As the raiders pushed over the rugged, snow-covered backwoods with their prizes, Hannah Dustin and Mary Neff’s fate remained uncertain. Like the other captives, they might be killed in an instant simply because they could not keep up with the war party as it wound its way north in the late New England winter. They might be forced to become servants of an Indian family, or even adopted by one to replace family members lost in fighting.
    Or, in what was perhaps their best hope, they might be turned over to the Abenaki’s European allies, the French, who might pay the Indians a bounty for the English prisoners. The women would then possibly be ransomed back to the English or used as bargaining chips in