America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback by Kenneth C. Davis
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
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America’s Hidden Hi Ç ory a negotiated hostage exchange between the two contentious European nations as they battled for control of North America. In the big picture, this Abenaki raid on Haverhill was but a single, brief moment in a larger conflict, known in New England as the Second Indian War and later called King William’s War, after England’s reigning monarch. This running battle was a mere instant in a much longer drama of fighting between England and France that raged across North America for three-quarters of a century.
After several days’ march, the women were taken to an island near the convergence of the Contoocook and Merrimack rivers (now known as Dustin Island, near Concord, New Hampshire) and handed over to a native family. Here they joined another captive, Samuel Lennardson, a young English boy who had been taken from his father’s farm near Worcester, Massachusetts, a year and a half earlier. Like young Samuel, the two women were given as servants to this family of twelve Indians—two men, three women, and seven children. More distress-ing, as Puritan cleric Cotton Mather underscored in his account of the captives’ plight, these Indians said their prayers three times a day and made their children pray before eating or sleeping, as the French priests had taught them. In other words, they were not merely what Mather termed “Salvages;” they were Roman Catholics to boot—“idol-aters like their whiter Brethren Persecutors,” by which Mather meant the French. One of Boston’s most famous and influential preachers, Mather pointedly observed in recounting Hannah Dustin’s story that some Puritan families might profit from the Indians’ example of such rigorous devotion.
If the image of Indians faithfully reciting Catholic prayers seems at odds with the traditional view of Native American families in wigwams, consider the report of a French priest, Father Pierre Thury. Two | 46 \
Hannah’s Escape
years after the Haverhill raid, he described the scene as an Abenaki war party prepared to assault an English fort at Pemaquid, Maine: “Almost all our warriors, who numbered about one hundred, took confession before they left, as if they were going to die on this expedition. . . .
The women and children also followed their example and took confession, after which the women recited an endless rosary in the chapel, taking turns one after another from the first light of dawn until night, asking God through the intervention of the Sainted Virgin, to take pity on them and protect them during this war.”3
Shortly after Hannah Dustin and Mary Neff arrived at the island camp, one of the Abenaki men told young Samuel that the entire party would ultimately head toward Canada. There, at an Indian rendezvous, the three English captives would be stripped and forced to “run the gauntlet.” As Cotton Mather described it, with what sounds like a mix of breathless horror and a slight frisson of wishfulness, “When they came to this Town, they must be Stript, and Scourg’d and Run the Gantlet, through the whole Army of Indians. They said this was the Fashion when the Captives first came to a town; and they derided some of the Faint-hearted English, which they said, fainted and swoon’d away under the Torments of this Discipline.”4
While the practice of running the gauntlet has provided Hollywood with some vivid moments, its true intent may not have been cruel torture for the tribe’s entertainment. “Running the gauntlet was an initiation rite common among certain Indian tribes,” notes historian Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola. “Many terrified captives described as torture what was apparently intended to test the survival of the fittest and to serve as an introduction—even a welcome—upon arrival at an Indian village.”5 This interpretation fits in neatly with another of colonial America’s most famous captivity stories: after the | 47 \
America’s Hidden Hi Ç ory founding of
America’s Hidden Hi Ç ory a negotiated hostage exchange between the two contentious European nations as they battled for control of North America. In the big picture, this Abenaki raid on Haverhill was but a single, brief moment in a larger conflict, known in New England as the Second Indian War and later called King William’s War, after England’s reigning monarch. This running battle was a mere instant in a much longer drama of fighting between England and France that raged across North America for three-quarters of a century.
After several days’ march, the women were taken to an island near the convergence of the Contoocook and Merrimack rivers (now known as Dustin Island, near Concord, New Hampshire) and handed over to a native family. Here they joined another captive, Samuel Lennardson, a young English boy who had been taken from his father’s farm near Worcester, Massachusetts, a year and a half earlier. Like young Samuel, the two women were given as servants to this family of twelve Indians—two men, three women, and seven children. More distress-ing, as Puritan cleric Cotton Mather underscored in his account of the captives’ plight, these Indians said their prayers three times a day and made their children pray before eating or sleeping, as the French priests had taught them. In other words, they were not merely what Mather termed “Salvages;” they were Roman Catholics to boot—“idol-aters like their whiter Brethren Persecutors,” by which Mather meant the French. One of Boston’s most famous and influential preachers, Mather pointedly observed in recounting Hannah Dustin’s story that some Puritan families might profit from the Indians’ example of such rigorous devotion.
If the image of Indians faithfully reciting Catholic prayers seems at odds with the traditional view of Native American families in wigwams, consider the report of a French priest, Father Pierre Thury. Two | 46 \
Hannah’s Escape
years after the Haverhill raid, he described the scene as an Abenaki war party prepared to assault an English fort at Pemaquid, Maine: “Almost all our warriors, who numbered about one hundred, took confession before they left, as if they were going to die on this expedition. . . .
The women and children also followed their example and took confession, after which the women recited an endless rosary in the chapel, taking turns one after another from the first light of dawn until night, asking God through the intervention of the Sainted Virgin, to take pity on them and protect them during this war.”3
Shortly after Hannah Dustin and Mary Neff arrived at the island camp, one of the Abenaki men told young Samuel that the entire party would ultimately head toward Canada. There, at an Indian rendezvous, the three English captives would be stripped and forced to “run the gauntlet.” As Cotton Mather described it, with what sounds like a mix of breathless horror and a slight frisson of wishfulness, “When they came to this Town, they must be Stript, and Scourg’d and Run the Gantlet, through the whole Army of Indians. They said this was the Fashion when the Captives first came to a town; and they derided some of the Faint-hearted English, which they said, fainted and swoon’d away under the Torments of this Discipline.”4
While the practice of running the gauntlet has provided Hollywood with some vivid moments, its true intent may not have been cruel torture for the tribe’s entertainment. “Running the gauntlet was an initiation rite common among certain Indian tribes,” notes historian Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola. “Many terrified captives described as torture what was apparently intended to test the survival of the fittest and to serve as an introduction—even a welcome—upon arrival at an Indian village.”5 This interpretation fits in neatly with another of colonial America’s most famous captivity stories: after the | 47 \
America’s Hidden Hi Ç ory founding of
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