It is always tempting to view history through a contemporary lens. Your article on Hannah Dustin, who survived a bloody Abenaki Indian attack on Haverhill, Mass., in 1697, contained comments that confirm how easy it is to yield to that temptation ("Boscawen scalping inspires town,"Monitor, Aug. 19).

The setting was King Philip's War, a savage episode in the long-running French and Indian wars, which pitted the French and Native American allies against the English in North America. The colonial version of Dustin's story, so-called by Associated Press reporter Jay Lindsay, was documented in contemporary interviews with Hannah Dustin conducted by no less a Massachusetts Colony luminary than the Rev. Cotton Mather.

In his 1702 history of New England, Mather recounted how Dustin, who was 39, and Mary Neff, her 50-year-old midwife, were captured in a raid on the outskirts of Haverhill in which 39 English settlers were killed or taken up the Merrimack Valley. Dustin's husband and seven of their children narrowly escaped the raid, but her week-old infant daughter, Martha, was smashed against a tree before her eyes. The other English captives were tomahawked by the Abenakis.

Soon, the only survivors were Dustin Neff, and 14-year-old Samuel Leonardson of Worcester, who had been enslaved by the Indians for 18 months and spoke a little of their language.

The Merrimack Valley in 1697 was largely unpopulated by English people north of present-day Nashua, and the women were told by their captors that they were being taken to an Abenaki rendezvous somewhere beyond what is now Boscawen. There they would be stripped, forced to run the gantlet and enslaved.

With that fate in sight, these two frightened women and a boy boldly seized an opportunity to slay their sleeping captors where the Merrimack meets the Contoocook. Then they paddled down the Merrimack from Boscawen to the first English cabin they saw - in Dunstable, now Nashua, before stopping the next night.

For some, the fact that Dustin, Neff and Leonardson killed all but one of their captors (who included women and children) at close range with tomahawks, the weapons available, seems to call their morality into question in an era in which Americans prefer their killing executed more impersonally by laser-guided bombs and automatic weapons.

And the fact that these two English women actually scalped their victims today appears barbaric instead of prudent in light of the practice of paying a bounty for Native American scalps (originally set at 50 pounds) in a colony engaged in a vicious and bloody fight for existence.

Was there an element of revenge in Dustin's actions? More than likely. It is a comprehensible motivation for any mother who has just watched her captors slaughter her baby and nearly 40 neighbors on the way from Haverhill.

But it is absurd to suggest, as does the Abenaki representative quoted in your article, that the escapees in this unprecedented historical event were therefore not heroic. Two English women and a teenager were victimized by horrific Native American attacks. Alone in a hostile environment, they were forced to make wrenching life-or-death decisions to survive an experience inconceivable to those of us who live here tranquilly 309 years later and regard the Merrimack and Contoocook Rivers merely as picturesque recreational opportunities as we whiz by in our SUVs.

(David A. Dustin lives in Contoocook.)

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By DAVID A. DUSTIN

For the Monitor