When Hannah Duston escaped captivity, taking ten scalps as proof of her deed, she could not have known that two centuries later she would become the first American woman honored with a monument. What do we know about her?
Ordinary Life on a Dangerous Frontier
Hannah Emerson was born on December 23, 1657, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, the eldest of fifteen children. At the age of twenty, she married Thomas Duston, a farmer and brickmaker. The couple had nine children and led a peaceful life on the colonial frontier.
However, the Emerson family already had its dark history. Hannah’s younger sister, Elizabeth, was hanged for infanticide in 1693, and her cousin Martha, along with Martha’s father, stood trial during the infamous Salem witch trials.
Haverhill was situated in dangerous territory. King William’s War was ongoing, during which the French, led by Count Frontenac, regularly incited Native Americans to raid English settlements. Residents knew they could be attacked at any time—a reality that followed them as they worked the fields and fed their children.
The Day That Changed Everything
On March 15, 1697, Hannah was forty years old and had given birth to her daughter Martha just a week earlier. That morning, a group of about thirty Abenaki warriors from Quebec attacked Haverhill. The raid was bloody and merciless. Twenty-seven colonists were killed, half of them children. Thirteen people were taken captive, to be either adopted into the tribe or held as hostages for the French.
Thomas Duston was working about eight hundred meters away from their home, building a new brick house. Seeing the attack, he escaped with their eight older children but couldn’t return for his wife. Hannah was captured with her midwife, Mary Neff, and her newborn. The attackers set the house ablaze and forced the women to march into the wilderness.
According to the account Hannah later gave to famed Puritan preacher Cotton Mather, the captors brutally murdered six-day-old Martha, smashing the infant’s head against a tree while her mother was forced to watch. This event would shape everything that followed.
The Night of Revenge
The captives had to march approximately one hundred miles north. For a woman who had just given birth and lost her child, it was a nightmare journey. Eventually, they reached an island at the confluence of the Merrimack and Contoocook Rivers, in what is now New Hampshire. There, Hannah and Mary met Samuel Lennardson, an English boy who had been held captive for over a year.
The Native Americans told their captives that a short journey to another village awaited them, where they would be stripped and flogged—a common initiation ritual for new slaves. For Hannah, this news may have been the final push to act. She faced a choice: wait passively for further humiliation or attempt a desperate escape.
On the night of April 29–30, Hannah made her historic decision. Together with Mary Neff and the young Samuel, they seized tomahawks. When their guards fell asleep, they launched their attack. Hannah personally killed one of the two adult men, two women, and six children. Samuel killed the other man. According to Mather’s account, they left one Native child alive, intending to take him with them, but the boy woke up and ran away; a seriously wounded woman also survived.
After the massacre, the former captives kept their composure. Hannah insisted they return to scalp all ten bodies. She needed proof of their deed but also knew colonial authorities paid bounties for Indian scalps. Afterwards, they stole a canoe and paddled downriver, traveling only by night. After several days, they reached Haverhill.
Heroine or Murderess?
On April 21, 1697, Hannah Duston appeared before the General Court in Boston and told her story. Colonial authorities had no doubt how to judge her actions. Hannah received a twenty-five pound reward, and her two companions split half that amount each. In Puritan New England, she was a heroine—a woman who defended herself from wild pagan attackers.
After her husband died in 1732, Hannah moved to Ipswich, where she lived out her remaining years, dying sometime in 1736, 1737, or 1738, in peace and obscurity. But her story did not die with her.
It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that Hannah Duston’s tale became a true legend. Writers and historians portrayed her as an American folk hero—some even called her the mother of the American tradition of scalping. She became the first American woman commemorated with a monument.
Yet modern scholars take a different view of her story. Some argue that Hannah’s legend flourished in the nineteenth century largely because it helped justify violence against Native Americans by portraying her actions as innocent, defensive, and virtuous.
Margot Cleverly
Margot's journey into women's history began with a box of forgotten letters in a Cambridge archive – suffragettes whose voices had been silenced for over a century. Since then, she's been on a mission to uncover the stories history overlooked.
What she writes about: Queens who ruled from the shadows. Scientists whose male colleagues took credit. Revolutionaries who risked everything. But also ordinary women – those who survived wars, raised families through upheaval, and shaped their communities in ways no one bothered to record.
Margot turns historical figures into real people. She writes with warmth and detail, making centuries-old stories feel surprisingly relevant. Rigorous research meets accessible storytelling – no dusty academic jargon, just compelling narratives backed by solid facts.
When she's not writing, you'll find her in regional archives, collecting oral histories, or visiting sites connected to the women she writes about.