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Mother of Scalps
When Heroes Fought #4
© 2014 James LaFond
JUN/23/14
In the story of Liver-Eating Johnson one is saturated by a world obsessed with taking scalps as trophies. It was also a world where three heroic women took part in this bloody American tradition. I was preparing to write one of their stories from the mid 19th Century, when, purely by accident, I stumbled across the legend of Hannah Dustan, a Puritan mother who supposedly slew and scalped ten warriors. The illustrations include one where she defends her home with an axe against a party of warriors, cleaving off heads in a dress and heels! It is a fact that Hannah was a Puritan, and therefore probably a bitch, which is one of the perennial prerequisites for becoming an old battle axe. She is also the first female American folk hero to be honored with a statue.
The story of Hannah Dunstan, which comes down to us as an heroic exaggeration of a brutal act, offers more than a rumination on the practice of scalping on the American frontier. The shaping of Hannah's story in the hands of folklorists serves as an example of how the tales of later day heroes and heroines of the American West may have distorted with time.
The Scalping Question
Hannah’s story is more about scalping than fighting, and on multiple levels. There are two current interpretations of scalping.
Liberal revisionists mark scalping as a European practice calculated to dehumanize Natives and monetize their death, despite the fact that no evidence of scalping is found among the European populations that settled North America prior to their settling there. The same feminist leftist scholars that credit Natives with teaching whites how to farm and hunt, refuse to believe that they could have taught whites anything about war.
The traditional propagandistic view of scalping is that whites only began doing it in response to unprovoked Native attacks and trophy-taking mutilations.
The truth is of course somewhere in between. As usual scholars cannot be trusted to abandon their mythological camps to look for the truth. Scalping was an indigenous Native American tradition that was particularly prevalent among Eastern Woodland populations, as indicated by their more elaborate scalp-locks. Native warriors were generally so belligerent that they cultivated distinctively marked and decorated scalp-locks as a way of saying, ‘come and get it if you can’.
Most hostilities were initiated by European encroachment [which included conscious attacks on the ecology] and outright attacks. The Europeans generally fared poorly when fighting alone against Natives, so employed Native allies, who they learned from. By the time that Cotton Mather penned his propagandistic account of Hannah, depicting her as the justice-seeking mother of scalp-hunters, the most prolific scalp hunters out there were Anglo-American Indian fighters who had become better at the Red Man’s way of war than the Red Man himself—kind of like Navy SEALs and LRRPs in the later stages of Vietnam. Mather’s distortion of the account inserted a scene [and such scenes did transpire] in which a Native warrior dashed a white child’s brains out against a tree. In Hannah’s time this rarely happened as the East Coast Indians like the Abenaki were much harder hit by introduced diseases than their cousins a generation later, and generally sought to adopt white children to maintain their population. Mather seems to have spiced the account with some of the more unsavory practices of tribes more warlike than the Abenaki with whom Hannah tangled.
The Act of Scalping
Ideally one killed a man who had his head plucked or shaved bare except for the scalp-lock, which was a decorated topknot. One then grabbed the lock, pulled it taut with the left hand, and cut a deep pressure cut around the base of the lock –I suppose male-pattern baldness could really ruin a scalp-hunter’s day—and then ‘pop’ the scalp-lock free. Numerous whites lived through the process and described the distinctive sound. Most scalp hunters were not good at it, and could make a mess, particularly of a rude white scalp, or the scalp of a woman or child, that was not properly prepared for the ritual. Only a handful of warriors gathered so many scalps that they became expert at it.
The scalp would later be stretched and oiled on a hoop, and kept as a charm or trophy, brought down occasionally to be oiled or combed. In many tribes a feather in a warrior’s own scalp-lock indicated that he had taken that number of scalps, with these—particularly if they were many—being kept at home for ritual purposes. The European term ‘a feather in the cap’ was coined before the European experience in North America and symbolized that a soldier in Austrian service had slain a Turkish warrior or soldier. Ironically, John Smith, played by Colin Farrell in the 2005 movie The New World, about the founding of Jamestown, was said to have earned 3 feathers for his cap as a mercenary in Austrian service.
American Indian warrior traditions and those of the frontiersmen who adapted to these same wilderness conditions, emphasized portability, that would include portability of trophies. Where a Greek warrior would raised a trophy out of battle armor, or an African, South American or Pacific Islander would collect heads, a Roman soldier would capture the enemy chief, or the barbarian chief victorious over a Roman unit would take its Eagle, and colonial period armies captured flags, and do to this day, the Native American warrior who might have to run from Tennessee to New Hampshire, would prefer a few ounces of hair and skin. For my money the most disgusting trophies taken in North America were taken by U.S. Army forces, with one unit displaying the vulva and pubic hair patch of Native women on poles. That kind of trophy taking indicates that the conflict is genocidal, where hair, head, flag, and equipment trophies indicate political, honor, or vendetta—based warfare.
Hannah Dustan’s Tomahawk
The Massachusetts town of Haverhill was founded in 1640, as part of a very quick white population expansion. Hannah was born in 1657.
In 1697, as a mother of nine, she, her wet-nurse, and her newborn daughter who did not survive, were taken captive after her husband and older children ran away from a French-backed Abenaki raid on Haverhill. Overall 27 colonists were killed by the Abenaki Indians who were raiding the area on behalf of the French during this phase of King William’s War.
As French POWs the two women were assigned to a family unit of 13 Abenaki, which included only 2 men. They were either to be adopted into the tribe or traded by the French in prisoner exchanges with the English. A 14-year-old boy by the name of Samuel Lennardson of Worcester was also being held by this group. One night, as the Abenaki slept on an island at the confluence of the Merrimack and Contookook Rivers, Hannah conspired with Samuel to slay their captors. After butchering the two men in their sleep with tomahawks, Hannah and Samuel systematically murdered 2 of the women and 6 children. One severely wounded woman and a young boy managed to escape. These women and children were actually there to provide the captives with food and shelter, and possibly serve as adopted family members. Having slain the guards, this was gratuitous in a dastardly way. This would be analogous to killing the guards at a military prison and then murdering the clerical and cafeteria staff for the fun of it. Without the men and their canoes the women and children had no effective means of communicating Hannah’s escape. This was murder. The nurse, Hannah, and Samuel split the scalping duties and travelled downriver for three nights by canoe, and cashed in for their reward, netting between 50 and 100 pounds for proof that they had cleansed the land of some Indians.
Scalping by warriors—white, red, and others—was a symbolic act that ranged from establishing boasting rights to increasing social status, and even spiritual connectivity to the enemy. Scalping was made into a policy by colonial, and later, U.S. governments to encourage and reward contributions to the deliberate extermination of the Natives. Scalping later became a curio business fueled by British morbidity, as scalps taken by American mountain men would be displayed in British homes in the 1800s.
Hannah Dustan was a cold-hearted ruthless Puritan, who grew up in a brutalized society where her younger sister was hanged for killing her own baby. Although I was loath to include her story in this series, she does fit the ancient definition of heroic. She did something amazing for a woman of her time, and gained a form of immortality thereby. Hananh is not the only woman to earn the title ‘battle axe’. But she is the only one I know of that lived to be an ‘old battle axe’ finally passing, at the age of 96, in 1736 under peaceful circumstances.
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