Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/185

 their bigotry adopt. Here all the implements of war and the means of sustenance were supplied; the expedition was planned; the price was bidden for scalps; the aid of European officers and soldiers was conjoined; the devastation and slaughter were sanctioned by the ministers of religion; and the blood-hounds, while their fangs were yet dropping blood, were caressed and cherished by men regarded by them as superior beings. The intervals between formal attacks were usually seasons of desultory mischief, plunder, and butchery; and always of suspense and dread. The solitary family was carried into captivity; the lonely house burnt to the ground; and the traveller waylaid and shot in the forest. It ought, however, to be observed, to the immortal honor of these people, distinguished as they are by so many traits of brutal ferocity, that history records no instance in which the purity of a female captive was violated by them, or even threatened." The veteran Colonel Church was engaged in retaliatory expeditions, in which indiscriminate slaughter was practised with as little compunction as by the French and Indians. In 1694, the settlement at Oyster River in New Hampshire—the present town of Durham—was attacked, and nearly a hundred persons killed or made captives of. Two years subsequently, in 1696, D'Iberville, a distinguished Canadian naval officer, arrived from France with two ships and some troops, and having been joined by the party under command of Villebon and the Baron St. Castin, in August, 1696, laid siege to and took the fort at Pemaquid. The loss of the fort caused the breaking up of all the old settlements in the neighborhood. D'lberville, in the spring of 1697, sailed for Hudson's Bay, recovered a fort from the English, and captured two English vessels. In March, 1697, the savages fell upon Haverhill, in Massachusetts, and killed or carried into captivity some forty persons. The heroism of Mrs. Dustin is honorably commemorated in our early history. Only a week before, she had become a mother. The nurse, trying to escape with the new-born infant, fell into the hands of the savages, who, rushing into the house, bade the mother arise instantly, while they plundered the house and afterwards set it on fire. They then hurried her away before them, together with a number of other captives, but ere they had gone many steps, dashed out the brains of the infant against a tree. The mother's heart would have sunk, but she thought of her surviving children, and summoned up strength to march before the savages towards the Canadian frontier. She saw her companions, as they sunk one by one with exhaustion, brained by the tomahawk of the savages, and their scalps taken as trophies to the Christian governor of Canada. After sojourning, in prayerfulness and anguish of spirit, with the Indian family to which she was allotted, she pursued with them her onward course towards an Indian rendezvous, where, as she was told, she would have to run the gauntlet through a row of savage tormentors. A desperate resolution took possession of her mind might she not lawfully slay the