15. Hannah Duston’s fame gradually faded in the colonies
Following the final work on the subject by Cotton Mather, 1702’s Magnalia Christi Americana (The Glorious Works of Christ in America), which contained a recounting of the tale entitled Dux Faemina Facti (A Woman-Led the Accomplishment), the story of Hannah Duston and her heroic slaughter of ten barbaric sons and daughters of Satan began to fade from view. One reason was that so many tales of slaughter and heroism emerged along the New England frontier as the series of wars between French, English, and their Indian allies continued. At the same time, the fire and brimstone influence of the Mather’s and other Protestant ministers eased somewhat, though the messages from the pulpit still often contained plenty of promises of eternal damnation and the need to either convert or exterminate Indians which failed to accept their Savior.
By the time of the American Revolutionary War, less than a century after the events, Hannah Duston was a local legend, her feats embellished by retelling. She became a subject for inclusion in works by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. It appeared in school textbooks. By the 1850s the story was fully sanitized, Hannah had risen up to slay only her captors, who were also the murderers of her child. The six dead Pennacook children (if they were indeed Pennacooks) were no longer part of the story. Eventually, the war party which seized her, and which she killed before escaping, consisted of ten or so warriors, of differing tribes. As the tale took on the editing of time, the capturing Indians found names, and in some cases fearsome reputations, warriors of renown in what was already New England’s distant past.