99% Invisible - 113- Monumental Dilemma

Episode Date: May 6, 2014

About ten miles north of Concord, New Hampshire, off of interstate 93 there’s a little island with a great, big monument on it. The monument depicts a woman, who is holding a hatchet in her right hand and bunch of … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. So I'm down at the bottom of the hill away from the highway and I'm about to cross a really old railroad bridge, not an active railroad anymore. That's Jack Roteliko wandering around the New Hampshire woods. It's a pretty view. He's about 10 miles north of the state capital of the interstate 93. In a pretty out-of-the-way place, there are no signs or markers on the road indicating something special is there, but he's found something. So if you get out to this little island and the railroad tracks go straight across, but what you really notice is this epic looking granite monument in the middle of the island?

It looks a lot like a monument you'd see in a city park, except it's on a forested island in the middle of a river. It is enormous. It's 30 feet tall. Wow. It's all granite and on top of a tall pedestal there's a woman. She's wearing this gown that's falling off her shoulders. In her right hand she has a tomhawk and in her left hand she has a fistful of scouts. And on the back of this thing, I'm going to run around to the back here. Is the inscription. Now let's pause for just a second here.

If you are a regular listener to the show, you know how I feel about plaques and always reading them. The reason being that plaques tell stories, sometimes they tell really amazing stories, if you can decipher them. March 15th, 30th, 1697. The Warhoop, Tomahawk, Faggot, and Infanticides were at Haverill. The ashes of wigwam campfires at night and of ten of the tribe are here. I got nothing from that.

Yeah, not a lot of detail there. Honestly, the whole island was strange to me. Kind of creepy, actually. Not very well kept up, this enormous imposing statue with the eerie plaque, the scalps? What's crazy is this statue was erected in 1874, making it the oldest monument dedicated to a woman in the US. So you think someone would come out here and at least mow the grass, you know? Well, what I learned is that plaque does tell a story, though not an obvious one, and I learned there's a good reason why the grounds

are neglected. In fact, what to do with this historic site has become a bit of a problem. And it all has to do with the woman in the monument and what she did. The story starts about 50 miles south of the monument in a town called Haverall, Massachusetts. I went down there and met up with a local historian named Tom Spitaleri in the parking lot of a Dunkin Donuts.

How you doing? Good. Jack. Tom, nice to meet you too. Tom is a die hard New Englander. I'll tell you he's wearing a Boston Red Sox jacket. On top of a Boston Celtics jersey, on top of a Boston Celtics jersey on top of a New England Patriots t-shirt. The guy's going to get a little noisy. It needs a lot of work. Sure. And everywhere we drive in Haverl, Tom sees signs of New England's past, particularly

from colonial times. And to the time of Hannah Dustin. During that time, we're embroiled in what some historians are now calling World War One. Most people would know it as the French Indian law, or King Phillips, King George's, and the Seven Years' War. In the 1600s, New England was a war zone between the French, the British, and the Native Americans. By the end of that century, disease and war would wipe out most Native Americans in the Northeast.

And Havrell was, The Wild West. I mean, it sounds funny, but putting it in today's contents is what it was. We were the outpost. There was nothing north of us. That was it. There was nothing but wilderness around, making it an easy target for attacks by Native Americans. Bands of Native Americans had shifting alliances with the British and the French. The French paid abanakis to abduct Brits and bring them to Quebec. Then the French would sell these captives back to the British. It was a slave trade.

So I mean, this area was constantly being rated. Constantly. In 1697, a woman named Hannah Dustin was recovering from delivering her eighth child when Abanaki's raided haverl. They killed and captured dozens of colonists and burned buildings. That's what the word of Faggot's on the monument refers to. A Faggot was a bundle of sticks used to fuel the fire. During the raid, Hannah Dustin's husband was outside with seven of their kids, defending

the homestead and his children, but Abanakis entered the house, and abducted Hannah, her newborn baby girl, and her nurse, Mary Nath. The captives were marched north through the wilderness, and shortly after leaving Haverl, when Hannah's baby wouldn't stop crying, one of the Abanakis smashed it against the tree. That's where you get the word, infanticide, from the Monuments plaque. They kept walking north. Most likely they were heading to the outpost of St. Francis. That's up in Quebec. At some point the war party handed Hannah Dustin and Mary

Neff to another group of Abonakis, a group made up of a couple families. She was sold to those Native Americans as a slave. So the group of Abonakis that ended up with Hannah was made up of two fathers, two mothers, a grandmother, and a bunch of children. And they already had a white boy with them, a kid named Samuel Leonardson, who had been abducted from Worcester the previous year. So that makes three white captives and twelve Abanakis. The whole crew crossed the Mary Mac River to the island, the one that now has the monument on it, and they set up camp for the night. Mac River to the island, the one that now has the monument on it, and they set up camp for the night.

In the middle of the night, Hannah Dustin made a decision. She rallied Mary and Samuel and led them around the sleeping abanakis. One at a time, they brought a hatchet down on the abanakis heads. They killed ten in total, two men, two women, six children, and then before making their getaway, they scalped each victim. Two abineckis made it out alive. The old woman who was injured and a little boy. Hannah, Mary, and Samuel left the island in a canoe. It was a dangerous time of year to be on the river. It would have been choked with ice and full of rapids. They traveled at night to avoid being seen." In 15 days after vanishing, Hannah Dustin and her companions landed in Haveral,

to the total shock of her husband or seven children and everyone who ever lost a family member to a raid. Hannah Dustin is the woman memorialized in the monument. The scalps she is holding in the statue belong to the 10 people, including six children, that she and her companions killed on the island. And that statue isn't the only Hannah Dustin Landmark in New England, not by a long shot. There are others, particularly in Haverl, where she lived. Tom Spitaleri took me on a tour. Let me just pull off here real quick. Just a hand of dust in the rest area.

Name deft. Is this the street? Yeah, I always forget. This is it here. Here's hand of dust in street. The hand of dust in nursing home. Obviously, name deft. Now we're at the hand of dust in rock. Monument street got its name from the monument that's there for hand of dust.

Bosco and Avenue. Bosco is the town in New Hampshire, where the island is. Tom even took me to an old garrison house, a fort essentially, where Hannah Duster lived after her captivity. We do private toys in here. In a glass case is a piece of Hannah Duster and memorabilia I've seen on eBay.

In the 1970s, the state of New Hampshire commissioned Jim Beam to make a Hanodustin whiskey decanter. It's an exact replica of the statue in New Hampshire down to the little bloody scalps in her hand. It's made of porcelain. Porcelain. Yeah, that hits the floor goodbye goodnight. It's kind of sexy and provocative, right?

I mean, she's got cleavage popping out. Yeah, that would never have happened back in 1697. But you remember, this was in 1976, they did this. 1976, it was about selling. You're selling booze with a sexy woman with scalps and an axon her hand. Right, and we don't even know what you really looked like because there is no photographs of her. That whiskey decanter is from 1976,

but the New Hampshire Historical Society still sells a Hannah Dustin bobble head in its museum shop. On the base of that bobble head, it says, quote, the mother's revenge. You can probably see how these kitschy collector's items might feel offensive. In fact, all the hand-adustant stuff and hand-adustant landmarks are a problem for some people who know the whole story.

But the whole story, that's a tricky thing to pin down. You get to understand something with the hand-adustant story. There's a lot of interpretation out there, and there's a lot of new and folk law. interpretation out there and there's a lot of knowingly folklore. Hannah Dessons kidnapping and escape happened more than 300 years ago and the story has been told and re-told a lot and actually the reason we know anything about it today has to do with the fact that she scalped her victims. After Hannah came home, her husband took her and all those abanaki scalps down to Boston to sell them.

Now, if you're like me, when you heard she had scalped her victims, you may have thought she had some kind of bloodlust. I thought scalping with something tribes did to white people, not the other way around. Turns out I was very, very wrong. Colonial governments paid cash for Native American scalouts, heads, and even hands. They would pay most for a man, less for a woman, and least for a child. They would even pay Native Americans for the body parts of other Native Americans, depending on who was worrying with whom at the time.

So Dustin had financial incentive for scalping her victims. But here's the reason we still know the story. When Hannah was in Boston selling her scouts, she sat down with Cotton Mathur, and he wrote her story down. His name might ring a bell. Cotton Mathur was head of the Protestant church in New England. He had ties to the Salem witch trials, and he was a fire and brimstone minister

who traveled around giving sermons. These little frontier towns at Cotton Mathur visited. They were filled with these shell-shot colonists who had missing family members from Native American raids. Mother told Dustin's story again and again to rap churchgoers building Dustin's status as a heroine. Well, I think the Hannah Dustin story has endured for so long because it's not just a story about a woman who killed people.

It actually has become a story about the American nation at different points in time. This is Barbara Cutter, historian and professor at the University of Northern Iowa. It was a story about the colonial battle against Native Americans in the 17th century. It was a story justifying the westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century. And in more recent years, it has been used as a story domestically about culture wars, really. Cutter has researched how and why the hand-adjusted monuments were built. And she says it really hit home just how far the story had traveled when... I happened across a Salt Lake City Mormon woman's newspaper in the 1890s that started off

by saying, who has not heard of Hanodustin? I mean, Hanodustin was from Massachusetts. After her captivity, Hanodust Dustin lived in colonial obscurity. She actually had seven more kids and died at age 84. No one talked about her through the 1700s. She was forgotten. Until... In the 18 teens and the 1820s, the United States was a new nation and a lot of intellectuals at that point in time were trying to create a

distinctly American culture. And so they started telling American stories and trying to uncover American heroes and heroines. So the country's literary elite dug around for some good old American stories and they found Hannah Dustin. Cutter says if you were an American in, say, 1865, Well, the first place you might likely come across her would be when you opened your American history textbook in the school.

You would also come across her story if you read famous American writers like Hawthorne. Or John Greenleaf Whittier or Henry David Thoreau, popular magazines, newspapers, essay collections, children's books, paintings. In the 1800s, Hannah Dustin was a household name. Johnny Appleseed, Davey Crockett, Hannah Dustin. But with each retelling of the story, something happened. People changed the narrative to suit their purposes. It becomes a moral problem for Americans that had a dust-and-killed children, especially

since they weren't just children, they were sleeping children. Writer's omitted details embellished others and sometimes just made things up. They completely left out the children she killed, replacing them with warriors, that abanaki child that escaped, the writers said Dustin spared him intentionally, which there's no evidence of. Most writers depicted Hannah Dustin as a sympathetic heroine, this outraged mother seeking a justifiable revenge. This was the era of manifest destiny, as in it is America's destiny to inherit the land, to seize it from people dubbed Heathens and savages. That's when I think New Englanders really started focusing on hand-and-dust and more and

more as the kind of heroin they should commemorate. In the mid-1800s, as headlines screamed about the wars in the West, monuments sprung up in the Northeast. When the monument on the island was built in 1874, there were a thousand people present. Again, it was the first monument ever built to a woman in the U.S. but when the Indian wars died down around 1900, Hannah Dustin dropped out of the National Spotlight again. But a subset of New Englanders held on to her story. In 1905, Hannah Dustin's descendants created the Dustin Family Association.

They sort of littered the landscape of Haverl with memorial boulders and millstones in her honor at sites where she landed her canoe across from where she was buried. Apparently, they put one up at one place where she turned around and looked back thinking that Indians might be following her on her way home. Then all the way into the mid-1900s, there was a whole other layer of things named after those rocks and statues, a nursing home, a school, streets. Over time the namings peed her out, but the names themselves stuck and so did the Dustin family. Well, my name is Cedric H. Dustin, Jr. I'm the 10th generation from Hannah.

So, would that make her my eighth grade grandmother? I'm not sure. I just haven't counted. Something like that, yeah. Cedric is the vice president and formally the president of the Dustin Family Association. He's 88 and he's known about Hannah Dustin since he was a boy. To Cedric, Hannah was a heroine. She was concerned about her own life and those of us companions. And as such, I thought she was quite a lady to hatch the planet she did and do the thing she did.

But basically, I think this for self-preservation. Just to make something clear, the Dustin Family Association isn't lobbying for statues anymore. They mostly spend time tracing their lineage and they get together for a barbecue every summer. And Cedric Dustin says he understands why some aren't such a big fan of his grandmother, eight generations removed. But he has disappointed the statue and the island are in disrepair. Hannah's nose was shot off of the rifle. There's graffiti and the grass hasn't been mowed in years. When I was a young man I could have gone up there and cut the whole thing, but right now age won't let me do that. But I think the stain onshire should make good use of the fact that they have in their

confines the first statue ever erected to a woman in this country. Perhaps a new science should be put at that location indicating that as opposed to the sign that they are now indicating the deeds that happened on that island. So this is the island, huh? This is the island. I went back to the island with the 30-foot tall Hanodustin monument. With someone who says he's avoided going out there for years. She doesn't look very heroic. She looks more like an opportunist, angry opportunist that went

back and then bragged about it, and then history has become history. This is Paul. I'm Paul Puglio, I'm the Saga Mall, which is roughly translated the principal speaker of the Grand Council of the Kosok being of the Pentecostal Kinnabnaki people. Paul doesn't buy cotton mathers version of the Kosok being of the Pentecostal Abnaki people. Paul doesn't buy cotton mathers version of the story. The one with the Abnaki smashed Dustin's newborn baby against the tree. He says it doesn't mesh with other captivity stories of the era. We have many, many accounts of captives saying that

being taken by the Abnaki was not a death sentence. Many went to Canada, someone who were treated back. Paul thinks Hannah's captives were probably treating her well. Well, presumably as well as one can be treated in captivity. And he says Abnaqi's revered children, so the idea of a warrior bashing a baby against a tree as cotton math or story portrays sounds unlikely to him. It's impossible to know how the baby was killed

or how Hannah Dustin was treated by her captors. And I hesitate to judge from my 21st century vantage point what she should or shouldn't have done in order to make her escape. But it's clear that the Hannah Dustin story is complicated. Paul thinks the monument to her should just be forgotten. I mean, I really don't think this monument should be preserved in any way. Just let it, it's gonna last here for millennia, so it's unfortunate here.

It's not going away. And that's the problem now. The Hanodustin monuments, the one on the island and all the others, are mostly fading relics and out-of-the-way places. But every few years, some politician or history buff or Native American points to one and says, tear this thing down or clean this thing up. And every time, people argue, is she a heroine? Or is she a villain? The same thing over and over and over. Just in the last couple months, there's been renewed talk about the monument.

People are suggesting putting up additional plaques that show the Appanaki history, or changing the name from the Hannah Dustin Memorial State Historic Site to the Kuntukuk Island State Historic Site. But even something as small as cleaning up graffiti on the monument, or mowing the grounds, could be seen as taking a stance about whether Hannah Dustin deserved a monument in the first place, about whether she was actually a hero or villain. Before we left the island, Paul Puglio said there was something he wanted to do off the record.

Sure, no recording? Okay. He pulled out a drum and some tobacco. He paced around the monument twice. One time he scattered a little tobacco on four sides of the statue. The other time he beat the drum and sang. He didn't want me to record the ceremony,

but he talked about it afterwards. We don't want to forget our ancestors of the past. So we did a little honoring song and we made an offering of tobacco to kind of purify the grounds where we were walking around there. And does it provide you with any relief or satisfaction to do that? Well, it's what is appropriate, you know, just asking Earth Movative, you know, oning her if Movato, taking back and understanding with this kind of closure of the end now.

Spiritual closure, if nothing else, in lieu of any public decision on how to include Paul's ancestors in this history, this private ceremony will have to be enough. For now, the statue, with her shot off nose and big, haunting plaque, remains neglected and crumbling, which actually is probably the most accurate symbol of how we feel about Hannah Dust in today, ambivalent about who she was, but not quite ready to let her go. March 15th, 30th, 1697, the Warhoop Tomahawk, a faggot and infanticides were at 99% Invisible What's Produced This Week by Jack Roteliko with Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan, Avery Troubleman, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 Local Public Radio KALW in San Francisco and produced the offices

of Arxite just steps away from the 12th and Broadway bar stop in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can explore more and more about this show and interact with those of us who make it and fans just like you on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. But if you want to see the statue of Hannah Dustin with her no-shot off, that is at 99pi.org. The music you're listening to right now is by 99PI favorite Ok Akumi. He has a fantastic new album out right now. When it plays in the background, Ok Akumi's music makes our show so much better and that same magic can work in your everyday life.

Trust me, it works. Go to Ok Akumi.com or follow the links on our website, 99pi.org. Radio tapio. From PRX.