HANNAH DUSTIN--THE MOST FAMOUS WOMAN IN AMERICA

Hannah's statue, Haverhill

Ever heard of Hannah Dustin? In her lifetime, folk figure Hannah Emerson Dustin became a role model for pioneer women as her exploits spread across Anglo America. She is the first woman in the U.S. to have a statue erected in her honor. In fact, she has two statues . . . but I’ve gotten ahead of the story.


The time is March 15, 1697 and toward the end of King William’s War. When she learned they were being attacked, Hannah urged her husband, Thomas, to take their other children, aged two to seventeen, and flee to the nearby garrison and safety. Reluctantly, he left her to save their children. Less than a week after the birth of her child named Martha (her ninth), forty-year-old Hannah and her aunt, Mary Neff, were captured by Abnaki at Haverhill, Massachusetts.

The Abnaki smashed baby Martha to death against an apple tree before marching the two women for fifteen days north into New Hampshire. Taken with at least ten other people from Haverhill, those who couldn’t keep up the Abnaki’s pace were killed and left for carrion. Hannah and Mary were parceled out as slaves to another Abnaki group consisting of half a dozen adults and several children, including an adolescent captive boy, Samuel Leonardson, who had been taken from Worcester eighteen months earlier.

Hannah's statue in Boscawen

The band set up camp at the conjunction of the Merrimack and Contoocook Rivers (now known as Dustin Island) near what is currently Boscawen, New Hampshire and near Concord. One of the Abnaki men told Samuel that they would soon be moving to Canada where the captives would be stripped and forced to “run the gauntlet.” One of the Abnaki men had been teaching Samuel to fight and had showed him how to kill with a tomahawk. As the story goes, Hannah led a captive rebellion. She, Mary, and Samuel tomahawked ten Abnaki men, women, and children to death as they slept. They left alive only one elderly woman and a small boy. Hannah had the foresight to take scalps before leaving the enemy camp. There is speculation as to whether this was pay back for killing her baby and friends or necessary for escape. My guess would be both.

Hannah, Mary, and Samuel scuttled the enemy canoes except for one, which they used to travel down river at night. They reached Haverhill in three days. After some weeks of recovery, the now famous trio traveled to Boston where they requested bounty money for the scalps. The Massachusetts Bay Courts had enacted a bounty on scalps in 1694, but it had been repealed. However, the Massachusetts General Court made an exception for Hannah and her two companions. Accounts vary, but the most widely mentioned is that Hannah received twenty-five pounds and Mary and Samuel each received half that amount. In 1697, that was a considerable amount of money.

Hannah's grave, she died in 1736

Hannah became famous for her escape and exploits. A statue of her stands in Haverhill, Massachusetts showing her with a tomahawk in one hand and scalps in the other. Another statue is located in Boscawen, New Hampshire, site of the escape. Her story is retold in “The History of Haverhill," in “Notable American Women,” in Henry David Thoreau’s “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Laurel Ulrich’s “Goodwives,” and other tomes too numerous to mention. In some accounts, Dustin is recorded as Dustan, Durstan, or Duston. A remarkable woman, Hannah Dustin, the most famous woman in America in her time.

Thanks for stopping by Seduced by History,
Caroline Clemmons

Who Do You Think You Are?

Advertisement for this new TV show caught my eye. The show helps the celebrity guest trace their ancestry. I found it interesting for two reasons. One is that I grew up knowing who I was, and two that there are so many people who really weren’t as lucky as I was to know not only all the extended family but to hear the stories of who we were and where we came from.

This is why my bio says “Bio: Terry Irene Blain was lucky enough to grow in a large Midwestern family with a rich oral tradition. As a child she heard stories of ancestor’s adventures with Indians, wild life and weather so naturally she gravitated to the study of history. She holds a BA and MA in History as well as a BA in European Studies and taught Western Civilization and US History at the college level.”

I caught the first episode where the helped Sarah Jessica Parker, who found out that one of her ancestors left Ohio for the gold rush, perhaps not knowing his wife was pregnant, and then died of disease in California. Another of her ancestors was accused as a witch in the Salem witch trial, but this ancestor was lucky she was acquitted and lived on.

So I thought I’d tell you about some of my ancestors. As I said, I’m lucky as my family history was always in front of me when I was a child. Not only did I know all my grandparents, but lots of aunts and uncles and cousins. One of my dad’s cousin’s wife did genealogy and she gathered up all the birth/marriage/death certificates, and I’ve built on that.

I think our family is fairly typical, my dad was in the Navy in WWII, and helped build the airstrip on Guam, his father was a farmer, and reserve occupation during the war (just as my husband’s father was a farmer during the war). I have pictures of the star in the window of their house that indicates they had a son in the service.

When the movie League of Their Own came out, my mom and I went to see it together as she taught me to play ball -- because she had played semi-pro ball. She still has her old uniform in her cedar chest.

Most of my immediate ancestors grew up in the Illinois, but when you trace back I can see my great grandmother came from Kentucky with her husband – the family stories tell of her carrying her new born son in her arms on the journey. If I go back far enough, I can find a great-great-great-great (one more great I think) ancestor who used to go hunting with Daniel Boone in Kentucky. And his ancestor had to leave Virginia after the Revolution, as his land grant had been a crown grant and he lost the title to his land.

My nephew just got a copy of the civil war records for a school project, confirming the stories. All my ancestors fought for the Union, one at Shiloh and Vicksburg and another at Chancellorsville.

When our son was applying for college, he asked if any of his ancestor fought in the Civil War. The answer was yes, on both sides. My husband’s family is from Oklahoma, and I did some tracing on his family. Unfortunately since the South lost the war a lot of the records are no longer available. My father-in-law told me an great uncle who fought in the Civil War and when he came home to Oklahoma, the homestead was deserted and the great uncle spent the rest of his life trying to find the remains of his family and eventually tracked a sister to Florida. My mother-in-law hear her grandmother tell how when she (grandmother) was a little girl she remembers her mother hitting a carpet bagger on the head with a ladle when he tried to steal a bag of corn meal.

My best story is when I was teaching and had to go down to the administration office and the secretary there had her name tag on the desk and the following conversation took place:
Me: Wow, that’s my maiden name. We must be related.
She: (with an unbelieving look) Why?
Me: Does your husband’s family come from Illinois?
She: Yes (hesitantly).
Me: Tell me your husband’s name.
She: David.
Me: I don’t know him, what’s your father-in-law’s name
She: Franklin.
Me: Ah, you father-in-law Franklin’s father was Austin, and Austin was a preacher and the older brother of my grandfather Harold. Austin actually preformed the marriage of my grandfather and grandmother.
She: Wow.

And then to top it off, the family had always said that Franklin had been in intelligence in WWII and it caused him to have a nervous breakdowns later in life. However, last year I got more information from cousins, and it turned out that Franklin had, indeed, had to ‘go away’ for several months at time in the 1950s. It turns out he was one of the guys working on the U2 spy plane project, and the nervous breakdowns were a cover.

My degrees in history and my teaching experience make me a natural to write historical romance. It gives me the opportunity to pass on stories of who we are and where we come from while exploring the relationship between men and women. I like to think I’m writing about a hero and heroine who lived just down the road from my ancestors. What could be more fun than that?

Do you have any favorite ancestor stories? Related to anyone famous?

Hollywood's View of History

For the most part, writers of historical romance strive for accuracy in capturing historical events and characters. Can the same be said of Hollywood?

I’d suspect that ninety-nine percent of book editors would run screaming from a plot that featured a beautiful, tempting Pocahontas and a very studly Captain John Smith…after all, history tells us that Pocahontas was about seven when Smith and his crew landed in Jamestown in 1607. The New World, starring Colin Farrell as Captain John Smith (who obviously was not cast due to a striking resemblance to the legendary colonist) highlighted the romantic attraction between Smith and a teenaged Pocahontas, portrayed by a striking young actress, Q’orianka Kilcher.

Before its release, the studio was said to have deleted several love scenes deemed too steamy between the nearly thirty-year old actor and the fourteen year-old actress. Besides the “ick” factor here, this romance is completely inaccurate. Many other scenes in the movie are historically wrong as well, but the romance is the most glaring example of Hollywood mauling the truth in this film.

Disney’s Pocahontas isn’t quite as bad, but as a teacher who works with children who have to learn the facts about the Jamestown expedition and its key players, it’s difficult to overcome the portrayals of Pocahontas as someone who looks like Barbie’s Native American cousin and Captain John Smith as Jamestown Expedition Ken. At least, that’s a fantasy, complete with the requisite Disney talking animals, and that offers a teaching point about fiction versus non-fiction.

Hollywood has always taken liberties with the truth...huge liberties, in some cases. Henry VIII is portrayed as a studly hunk in many films, not a gout-ridden, portly monarch. Of course, some would say that Henry was not always fat and was known to be rather athletic in his youth, but how on Earth did anyone decide to cast gorgeous, dark Eric Bana as the monarch in The Other Boleyn Girl ? The portrait of Henry VIII in his twenties shows a man who certainly would not have made a girl lose her head (yes, I know…such a bad pun) if he were not a monarch.

Of course, The Tudors casting of Jonathan Rhys Meyers isn’t any more visually accurate, although I think he captures the moods and manipulations of Henry far more convincingly than hulky Eric Bana (yes, another bad pun), who came across to me as a rather dull-witted monarch.

I could go on and on about Hollywood’s historical inaccuracies. Bonnie and Clyde portrayed the notorious bank robbers as lovers on the run, not the cold-blooded killers they were. Braveheart depicts a kilt-clad Mel Gibson even though kilts weren’t worn in Scotland until about three hundred years after William Wallace died. More remarkably, the film depicts Wallace as the father of Edward III, who was born seven years after Wallace’s death (and I thought nine months was a long time to be pregnant). Mel was at it again with The Patriot, in which he almost single-handedly wins a battle that history recorded as a win for the British…a minor detail, I suppose, in the minds of Hollywood. Gladiator’s villain, Emperor Commodus, was certainly not a nice guy, but it’s believed his father died of disease, not at Commodus’ hand. Commodus was murdered after ruling for more than a decade…in his bathtub, not fighting in a gladiator’s ring. I suppose a guy dying in his bathtub would not have created the heroic ending the folks behind Gladiator were looking for, and as I adore Russell Crowe, I’ll forgive this particular inaccuracy.

What about movies that got it right, or at least, close to right? Are there any? Tombstone and Wyatt Earp might have played loosely with the truth and selectively omitted some of Earp’s less than favorable qualities, but both films portray the era with a feel for the times. Plus, Tombstone has Michael Biehn as Johnny Ringo...I just love the actor in that character and root for the villain, much to my husband's chagrin. Cinderella Man is more of an essay about the hardships of the Depression than a boxing movie, and Russell Crowe depicts Jim Braddock with a feel for the desperation of a man during those times trying to keep his family afloat. The Untouchables, while depicting Eliot Ness and his men as almost saintly, does capture the flavor of the times while depicting the truth…all the gun power in Chicago couldn't bring Capone down, but crooked income tax returns did.

What do you think of Hollywood’s view of history? Could authors get away with the gross inaccuracies sometimes found in films? I’m curiously awaiting the new film, Public Enemies, which portrays John Dillinger and Melvin Purvis. Of course, the casting of Johnny Depp as Dillinger and Christian Bale as Purvis (an obvious choice, given that Purvis was about 5’ 4” and looked absolutely nothing like the hunky Bale) might influence my mad dash to the theaters this summer.

A Question for authors and readers

Here’s a question for you. How much history can a romance writer alter for the sake of a story without being accused of betraying his/her craft?

I’ve given this a lot of thought, because I’ve done just that, intentionally. With Heartsong, the medieval from the 13th century, I had my hero going into Wales for hostages. Taking hostages was a practice used during the medieval ages, but there is no record I could find of Edward I seeking hostages from Wales. I also changed his son’s birth a year to make the timeline fit my story.

When I first began to write, I had the scene of a US Civil War battle wrong. I caught the mistake, and it was my mistake, before the book saw the light of day. Now, even I would consider that poor research on the author's part. But, I still wonder if a historical romance author can alter the date of an event or a character's participation in an event, without an avalanche of objections being heaped on her/his head.

I agree, there are some events, some occasions as an author you cannot alter. An example might be the date of a war's beginning or ending, the corination of a king or queen, or their deaths. But, I know writers who have included a book character in a event or at a particular occasion and I suspect many will continue to be do so because, after all, it’s fiction. My concern is how much can an author alter?

The reason I'm asking is simple. In one of my books in process, I have my hero coming up with a plan to stop the great London fire. Can I do that, or is it stretching the truth a bit too far? After all, it certainly wasn't his idea because I made him up.

I'd love to hear your opinion.

Allison Knight
"Heartsong" Named
Best Novel of the Year
available from Champagne Books