13. Haverhill continued to be the target of Indian attacks
Hannah Duston returned to Haverhill and local legend, boosted by the sermons of Cotton Mather and the publications in which he presented the story. Haverhill, being one of the outlying towns of the English settlements, continued to be the target of French and Indian attacks. Neighbors were raided, their homes burned, their crops destroyed. Women continued to be the target of raiders, carried back to the Abenaki settlements, which were dominated by French missionaries. The French priests served as the liaison with government officials in Quebec, negotiating the ransoms of the prisoners captured by the Abenaki. Children continued to be killed by raiders on both sides, often seen as little more than an inconvenience when considering the distances prisoners were forced to travel.
A neighbor of Hannah’s, captured during the same raid in which Hannah had been, returned to Haverhill in 1699, ransomed by the English, with a different tale of Hannah’s activities while in the hands of the Indians. Though Haverhill was the objective of many more raids, including during Queen Anne’s War (so-called in North America; in Europe known as the War of the Spanish Succession), Hannah and her somewhat isolated farm were spared further attacks. She had one more child, a daughter named Lydia, born in the autumn of 1698. She lived another thirty years or so after her captivity, her death occurring in either 1736 or 1738; the confusion over the date is limited to the year of her demise, with scholars and local histories agreeing that she died on March 6.