The Family
Of This Indian Consisted Of Two Men, Three Women, And Seven
Children, Beside An English Boy, Whom She Found A Prisoner Among
Them.
Having determined to attempt her escape, she instructed
the boy to inquire of one of the men, how he should despatch an
enemy in the quickest manner, and take his scalp.
"Strike 'em
there," said he, placing his finger on his temple, and he also
showed him how to take off the scalp. On the morning of the 31st
she arose before daybreak, and awoke her nurse and the boy, and
taking the Indians' tomahawks, they killed them all in their
sleep, excepting one favorite boy, and one squaw who fled wounded
with him to the woods. The English boy struck the Indian who had
given him the information, on the temple, as he had been
directed. They then collected all the provision they could find,
and took their master's tomahawk and gun, and scuttling all the
canoes but one, commenced their flight to Haverhill, distant
about sixty miles by the river. But after having proceeded a
short distance, fearing that her story would not be believed if
she should escape to tell it, they returned to the silent wigwam,
and taking off the scalps of the dead, put them into a bag as
proofs of what they had done, and then retracing their steps to
the shore in the twilight, recommenced their voyage.
Early this morning this deed was performed, and now, perchance,
these tired women and this boy, their clothes stained with blood,
and their minds racked with alternate resolution and fear, are
making a hasty meal of parched corn and moose-meat, while their
canoe glides under these pine roots whose stumps are still
standing on the bank. They are thinking of the dead whom they
have left behind on that solitary isle far up the stream, and of
the relentless living warriors who are in pursuit. Every
withered leaf which the winter has left seems to know their
story, and in its rustling to repeat it and betray them. An
Indian lurks behind every rock and pine, and their nerves cannot
bear the tapping of a woodpecker. Or they forget their own
dangers and their deeds in conjecturing the fate of their
kindred, and whether, if they escape the Indians, they shall find
the former still alive. They do not stop to cook their meals
upon the bank, nor land, except to carry their canoe about the
falls. The stolen birch forgets its master and does them good
service, and the swollen current bears them swiftly along with
little need of the paddle, except to steer and keep them warm by
exercise. For ice is floating in the river; the spring is
opening; the muskrat and the beaver are driven out of their holes
by the flood; deer gaze at them from the bank; a few
faint-singing forest birds, perchance, fly across the river to
the northernmost shore; the fish-hawk sails and screams overhead,
and geese fly over with a startling clangor; but they do not
observe these things, or they speedily forget them. They do not
smile or chat all day. Sometimes they pass an Indian grave
surrounded by its paling on the bank, or the frame of a wigwam,
with a few coals left behind, or the withered stalks still
rustling in the Indian's solitary cornfield on the interval. The
birch stripped of its bark, or the charred stump where a tree has
been burned down to be made into a canoe, these are the only
traces of man, - a fabulous wild man to us. On either side, the
primeval forest stretches away uninterrupted to Canada, or to the
"South Sea"; to the white man a drear and howling wilderness, but
to the Indian a home, adapted to his nature, and cheerful as the
smile of the Great Spirit.
While we loiter here this autumn evening, looking for a spot
retired enough, where we shall quietly rest to-night, they thus,
in that chilly March evening, one hundred and forty-two years
before us, with wind and current favoring, have already glided
out of sight, not to camp, as we shall, at night, but while two
sleep one will manage the canoe, and the swift stream bear them
onward to the settlements, it may be, even to old John Lovewell's
house on Salmon Brook to-night.
According to the historian, they escaped as by a miracle all
roving bands of Indians, and reached their homes in safety, with
their trophies, for which the General Court paid them fifty
pounds. The family of Hannah Dustan all assembled alive once
more, except the infant whose brains were dashed out against the
apple-tree, and there have been many who in later times have
lived to say that they had eaten of the fruit of that apple-tree.
This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton
wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great
for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the
English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman
by the Greek. "We must look a long way back," says Raleigh, "to
find the Romans giving laws to nations, and their consuls bringing
kings and princes bound in chains to Rome in triumph; to see men
go to Greece for wisdom, or Ophir for gold; when now nothing
remains but a poor paper remembrance of their former condition."
And yet, in one sense, not so far back as to find the Penacooks
and Pawtuckets using bows and arrows and hatchets of stone, on
the banks of the Merrimack. From this September afternoon, and
from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more
remote than the dark ages. On beholding an old picture of
Concord, as it appeared but seventy-five years ago, with a fair
open prospect and a light on trees and river, as if it were broad
noon, I find that I had not thought the sun shone in those days,
or that men lived in broad daylight then.
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