United States -- Social life and customs -- To 1775; Women -- United States
My Wife & family was posted at your Honʳˢ a considerable while,
it being thought to be ye most convenient place for ye feminine
Rendezvous. Mr James who Commands in Chiefe among them, upon ye
coast alarum given, faceth to ye Mill, gathers like a Snow ball as he
goes, makes a Generall Muster at yor Honʳˢ, and so posts away with
ye greatest speed, to take advantage of ye neighboring rocky hills,
craggy, inaccessible mountains; so that Wᵗᵉᵛᵉʳ els is lost Mr James
and yᵉ Women are safe.
All women did not run at the approach of the foe. A marked trait of
the settlers’ wives was their courage; and, indeed, opportunities
were plentiful for them to show their daring, their fortitude, and
their ready ingenuity. Hannah Bradley, of Haverhill, Mass., killed one
Indian by throwing boiling soap upon him. This same domestic weapon was
also used by some Swedish women near Philadelphia to telling, indeed
to killing advantage. A young girl in the Minot House in Dorchester,
Mass., shovelled live coals on an Indian invader, and drove him off. A
girl, almost a child, in Maine, shut a door, barred, and held it while
thirteen women and children escaped to a neighboring block-house before
the door and its brave defender were chopped down. Anthony Bracket and
his wife, captured by savages, escaped through the wife’s skill with
the needle. She literally sewed together a broken birch-bark canoe
which they found, and in which they got safely away. Most famous and
fierce of all women fighters was Hannah Dustin, who, in 1697, with
another woman and a boy, killed ten Indians at midnight, and started
for home; but, calling to mind a thought that no one at home, without
corroborative evidence, would believe this extraordinary tale, they
returned, scalped their victims, and brought home the bloody trophies
safely to Haverhill.
Some Englishwomen were forced to marry their captors, forced by torture
or dire distress. Some, when captured in childhood, learned to love
their savage husbands. Eunice Williams, daughter of the Deerfield
minister, a Puritan who hated the Indians and the church of Rome worse
than he hated Satan, came home to her Puritan kinsfolk wearing two
abhorred symbols, a blanket and crucifix, and after a short visit, not
liking a civilized life, returned to her Indian brave, her wigwam, and
her priest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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