Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 59, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 March 1917 — Being a Wife In Puritan Days. [ARTICLE]

Being a Wife In Puritan Days.

In the town of Haverhill. Massachusetts. there stands a monument girt by an iron railing, and surmounted by a statue of an angry-looking woman, wielding what appears to ba an ax. The casual stranger takes it to be Carrie Nation on her way to smash a few saloons, —which shows that the casual Stranger is lamentably ignorant of local history. For this isHannah Thtatin, who, in the spring of Xg9-7. was snatched from her home by Indians. Her husband saved his seven children from the savages; but his wife, weak from chiidbirth, and a nurse or midwife who attended her, were carried a nine days’ flight into the forest. On the tenth night Hannah arose, and with such aid as the nurse and a young boy dared give her she killed ten Indianr sleeping by their fires. She then —to prove her deed and win the promised bounty—scalped the corpses, scalped them with awful deliberation in the firelight, tucked the hideous trophies into her belt, scuttled all the canoes but one, and the three captives returned triumphantly to Haverhill. The General Court of Massachusetts voted the sum of fifty pounds to this dauntless heroine, and Governor Nicholson of Maryland sent her a pewter tankard, as a token of his respectful admiration, —which was all very well for a gentleman who lived at a comfortable distance. But how, one wonders, did Mr. Dustin feel when he woke at night and saw his spouse sleeping at his side, or tucked the hand which had dealt out death tto men! Compared with such a woman, the suffragists who broke London windows or slashed unresisting pictures seem like children demolishing Alia Dr, Cotton Mather, who tells us the story with unwonted eloauence in his Magnalia Christi AnJericana heads it appropriately "Dux Femina Fact!/' A woman never forgot she was a woman in those days. Whatever her leadership, whateverher prowess, she remained, after her fashion, profoundly femine. Christine Zellers, who was to Pennsylvania, what Hanna Dustin was to Massachusetts, slew three Indians who strove one summer afternoon to enter her house through a window; —"after which” says the unperturbed chronicler, "she returned to her domestic duties”— ’Lika a weU-conductod person. Went on cutting bread and butter. * —Harper's Msgaslne. ■ —-MRS, I ■ 4. v