Hannah Duston was taken captive by Abenaki people from Quebec during King William's War in the 1697 raid on Haverhill, Massachusetts, along with her first newborn daughter. The raid resulted in the deaths of 27 colonists, including 15 children. According to Duston's account given to Cotton Mather, the Abenakis killed her newborn baby and several other captives soon after the raid.
While detained on an island in the Merrimack River in present-day Boscawen, New Hampshire, Duston killed and scalped ten of the Abenaki family members holding her and the other captives hostage, with the assistance of two other captives. This act of resistance became the central narrative of her captivity story.
Duston's captivity narrative became famous more than 100 years after her death. During the 19th century, she was referred to as an American folk hero and the "mother of the American tradition of scalp-hunting." Some scholars assert that Duston's story became a legend in the 19th century only because her narrative was used to justify violence against Native American tribes as innocent, defensive, and virtuous.
European colonization of North America accelerated after 1600, with England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands establishing competing settlements along the Atlantic coast, the St. Lawrence River, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mississippi Valley. The first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia (1607) struggled with starvation and conflict; the Plymouth colony (1620) and the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630) followed. By the mid-1700s, thirteen English colonies stretched along the Atlantic seaboard, governed through a mix of royal charters, proprietary grants, and elected assemblies. The colonial economy depended on tobacco in Virginia and Maryland, rice and indigo in the Carolinas, and maritime trade in New England — all increasingly reliant on enslaved African labor after 1619. Conflict with Indigenous peoples over land was continuous, punctuated by major wars including King Philip's War (1675–1676) in New England and the Yamasee War (1715–1717) in the South. The French and Indian War (1754–1763), part of the global Seven Years' War, ended French power in North America and left Britain deeply in debt — triggering the taxation disputes that would lead to revolution.
27 colonists killed in the raid on Haverhill, including 15 children; 10 Abenaki family members killed by Duston and her fellow captives
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