Description

Hannah Duston was a colonial Massachusetts Puritan woman who was taken captive by Abenaki people from Quebec during King William's War, with her first newborn daughter, during the 1697 raid on Haverhill, in which 27 colonists, 15 of them children, were killed. In her account she stated that the Abenakis killed her newborn baby soon after they were captured. While detained on an island in the Merrimack River in present-day Boscawen, New Hampshire, she killed and scalped ten of the Abenaki family members holding them hostage, with the assistance of two other captives.