Hannah Emerson Duston

When Hannah Emerson Duston was taken captive with her infant daughter and a nurse by Native Americans from the Abenaki tribe in Massachusetts in 1697, one might have thought it was over for her, but Duston was an in-your-face woman. In fact, six weeks later, at the mouth of the Contoocook River, Duston waited for her captors to go to sleep and then led the nurse and a fourteen-year-old boy who had also been captured, in killing or running off everyone in the party, including some children, taking scalps in order to collect a bounty.

Whatever we might think of this story today, Duston was certainly an in-your-face woman who went on to live forty more years during which, I would assume, nobody messed with her!