The Welcome back, everyone to one thousand one heroes, legends, histories, and mysteries

podcast. This is your host, John Hagadorn, and it's great to be with you today and digging into history once again.

Today's story takes us back to colonial America and the Indian Wars of the 17th century,

as France and England both turned the New England landscape of bloody red in their efforts to seize a foothold in the new world.

France had gained a foothold in Canada and was using all their powers to buy Indian

alliances, paying warriors handsome bounties for scalps of colonial settlers in America and for

captives. England had established a foothold in Virginia and Massachusetts and was busily

populating New England, Virginia, the Carolinas, and the frontiers in New York and Pennsylvania

with colonists who were seeking land and a better life.

England also sought out Indian alliances and paid for scalps,

and these Indians weren't choosy about where the scalps were coming from.

It was tribe against tribe, French against English, with innocent settlers caught in the middle.

The threat of attacking Indians was a way of life to American colonists for centuries.

We just don't see much of it in our history books, and when Indians attacked, their ways were barbarous. Warfare and killing had been their means of survival against each other, and had

been since the beginning of time.

There are hundreds of stories out there of Indian captivity and raids in the 17th and 18th century,

if you dig deep enough. Much easier to find are stories of whites massacring Indians,

such as what happened at Wounded Knee. What you won't hear in those stories is that they were planned as revenge

against past Indian atrocities. Many of the men involved had seen the grisly evidence of

Indian attacks on their families and neighbors. Their hearts had long since turned cold.

The heroine of this story, Hannah Dustin, was a farmwife and mother, who was the victim of an Indian attack.

She survived by taking justice into her own hands. For her actions and courage, she was lauded

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