by Ann Wilson
Six weeks later, Hannah was still being held hostage on an island in the Merrimack River. One night while her captors slept, she loosened the rope used to tie her wrists, grabbed a tomahawk, and killed one of the men who was watching guard over her. Seeing Hannah’s actions, another hostage killed the other guard. Hannah then used her bloody hatchet to kill two Indian women and six of their children.
Hannah and the hostages climbed into canoes and began to head down the river, away from the carnage. But before they went far, Hannah had second thoughts—there was more venom in her. She went back to the island to scalp her victims. Holding the gory scalps, she climbed back into the canoe and escaped. It took her several days to reach Haverhill and her family.
Here’s where the tale always really amazed me as a child: Once Hannah was back in civilization, she turned the scalps in for a reward. The Massachusetts General Court awarded her the princely sum of twenty-five pounds for the scalps. They paid her for her bloody act of murderous revenge.
I am not making this up.
Cotton Mather, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others wrote about Hannah’s story. In 1879, a bronze statute of Hannah was erected in Haverhill showing her holding a tomahawk and scalps. It is thought to be the first statue honoring a woman in the United States. In 1997, my sister Lynn and our mother traveled back to Haverhill to see Hannah’s statue. Our mother was a voracious reader of history, and she really enjoyed this trip.
In 2008, I traveled there, too. I had my picture taken holding a guitar in the same pose as the statue of Hannah Dustin holding the axe. I went inside Hannah’s house, which is now a museum. Some of the pictures of Hannah showed black cats in the corner. Because Hannah’s acts were so outrageous, and so unusual for a woman, there has always been intrigue around her, and there have been suggestions that she was a witch. Some of the same things have been said about Ann and me!
Hannah had incredible pluck. There was a fire in Hannah’s belly that we share. She went outside the norm of what people expected a woman to do. Ann was born with the same pluck, and I’ve got a bit of it, as well. Ann and I have also gone out on adventures into the unknown, but we’ve used guitars not tomahawks. We’ve tried to make ours a message of love, but sometimes there has been anger, and people have been wasted along the way. There are even chapters when revenge is part of the story.
At the museum in Haverhill, I bought a Hannah Dustin bobble head in the gift shop. I mentioned to the woman behind the counter that I was a descendant of Hannah. She leaned over, and whispered in my ear, “What do you think really happened?”
“It’s all true,” I said. “Every word is true.”
ANN WILSON
Hannah Dustin was not the only warrior in our background. On the Wilson side, we come from a long line of Marine officers. Their service, honor, and valor are also part of our legacy. If Lynn, Nancy, or I had been male, the family would have expected us to join the Marine Corps, and we would have probably ended up in Vietnam.
Our grandfather, John Bushrod Wilson Sr., was a decorated brigadier general. His unit of Marines was the first U.S. force in Europe during World War II. In July 1941, they were sent to Iceland to prevent Hitler from establishing a U-boat base. He brought back heavy arctic sleeping bags that our mom made into quilts. We slept under those quilts growing up. General Wilson was later in the Pacific, where he fought in key battles in Guam, Bougainville, and Iwo Jima. He earned two Bronze Stars, and a Legion of Merit.
The general was married to Beatrice Lamoureaux. Nancy’s French middle name comes from that side of the family (we are also part Scottish, Celt, Irish, German, and Italian). Beatrice’s first child was James Phillip, who would eventually go into the Marines and become an officer.
Our father, John Bushrod Wilson Jr., was born at the naval shipyard hospital in Bremerton, Washington, on April 8, 1922. During my dad’s youth, the family traveled from post to post, and spent many years in Taiwan and the Philippines. Our dad was a peaceful soul and a gentle man. He grew to be six-foot-three and dashingly good-looking, and girls adored him. He was funny and smart, and he hoped to become a teacher. He never told me this, but my guess is that although he knew Marine service was expected of him, he probably hoped a war wouldn’t be going on during his time in the “family business.”
The Wilsons were originally from Corvallis, Oregon, where their ancestors helped establish Oregon State University. And that was where our father began college, majoring in education and English. He was already in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps because it was destined for him to be a Marine. But he also took choir, and it was in choir he met our mother.
Lois Mary Dustin was from Oregon City, Oregon, a small town outside of Portland. Lou, as everyone called her, was only five-foot-two, but she was a blonde firebrand. She was an intellectual, but she enrolled in college to study home economics. That was just what girls did back then. One of her high school journals shows the mindset of many growing up in that time. “When Cupid shoots his bow,” one classmate wrote, “I hope he ‘Mrs.’ you!” Another read: “When you get married and have twins, come over to my house for safety pins.”
When John met Lou on that campus that day, Cupid shot his bow, and thus began a love story that would continue over many decades. But amid a backdrop of war, theirs would be a love constantly on the move. What started was an itinerant, almost-gypsy lifestyle that Nancy and I have always believed was passed on to us.
After Pearl Harbor, John Jr. finished his final credits at college and joined the Marines. Our dad was sent several places for training, but stayed in touch with mom through letters. They had already talked marriage, but John felt that would only be proper once he’d become an officer. He was nothing but proper. To assure her of his intentions, our dad wrote to mom in March 1942 on United States Marine Corps stationery. To our mother, this letter was her single dearest possession, other than her children. It read:
Subject: Request and orders.
1. It is requested by this command that you comply in all respects with the wishes of said command concerning matters of close attachment and eventual marriage.
2. It is further requested that you enter in a state of relaxation concerning the matter of this command’s deep feeling for you.
3. This command loves your command.
4. You are hereby ordered (Paragraph 908, Section 17, Article 3b, Landing Force Manual) to remain on active duty with your present organization and commandant. This command will absolutely not tolerate any evidence of lack of “esprit de corps.”
5. The foregoing are hereby directed and ordered for immediate carrying out, barring the exigencies of the service within reason, at your discretion.
By order of,
J. B. Wilson, Jr. Pfc., USMCR., Commanding
Our mother, always a romantic, just melted. But the letter also said much about what their relationship would be in the years to come: They would share a sense of humor, an appreciation of sarcasm, but also a deep, underlying commitment. Yet, as the letter also suggests, it would be a marriage that would fall under traditional gender confines. He was “commanding,” even when he did it as sweetly as his letter suggested.
Two years later, in October 1944, he wrote her again to announce he had completed the Officer’s Training School in Quantico, Virginia. He was now a junior lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. He requested she travel across the country to join him. He told her they could be married in nearby Fredericksburg, Virginia, upon her arrival. He couldn’t come to her because he might be shipped out at any moment. She knew in accepting his proposal it would almost certainly mean she’d be alone waiting for him to return from the war, perhaps for years. In those days, there was also every possibility this marriage could mean a quick widowhood. It was a dark time. But she packed her things and took a train across the country. She told everyone about her upcoming nuptials, and there were several stories in the local paper in Oregon City. I can only imagine how mom swooned to see the headline
: “Miss Lois Dustin to Wed Lieutenant in October Services.”
That train ride back east was the most single romanticized story our mother ever told. She took a train three thousand miles to this little Civil War town to get married. “John was like a knight,” our mom would tell us. “I was going to a fairy tale town to get married to a knight.” She was leaving her blue-collar Oregon world for a Civil War wedding to a Marine officer. She had grown up a huge fan of Gone with the Wind, and the wedding must have seemed like she was having her Scarlett O’Hara moment. Always concerned with fashion, she wore a tailored peplum outfit, hose, and black shoes. In her luggage, she carefully packed a blue wedding suit, and a “second-day” suit for the day after the honeymoon.
You cannot overestimate the effect this tale had on us growing up. We heard of a romance deeply caught up in journey, in travel, as if movement itself was a powerful expression of desire. It probably informed my lyrics more than any other single influence. In a way, it was how I first learned about love.
The wedding took place in a Methodist church in Fredericksburg, just feet from a famous Civil War battlefield. Mom carried a small white Bible and a gardenia. Dad wore his Marine dress blues, with spit-shined black shoes that would have reflected the scene like mirrors.
But even that picturesque wedding had complications that I only grew to understand later. Our grandmother Wilson, whom we called Maudie, was present, and she never approved of our mom. Maudie was the wife of a general, and as such she had hung out with Cary Grant and met General George Patton. She never felt an Oregon City–bred gal was good enough for her son. Maudie’s attitude didn’t soften after the marriage, or ever. That disapproval toward our mother resonated through our entire childhood.
Just days after the wedding, John was sent to the Pacific. Getting shipped out after a wedding was a common enough occurrence back then that a popular cartoon of the era showed a soldier waving good-bye to his bride at the train station, “Have a nice honeymoon, dear.” Our mom clipped that cartoon out and pinned it in her wedding scrapbook.
With John gone, she packed up her three suits and took another train across the country to Oregon City. She moved back in with her parents. For a brief period of time, she took a job wiring Liberty ships for the war effort but later got a job in a department store. And there she stayed, awaiting news of her knight.
NANCY
In 1945, a telegram arrived for Lou saying that her husband had been seriously wounded and would not survive. He had been on Guam, and his jeep hit a landmine. A similar telegram went to Maudie. At that point, all three of the Wilson men were Marines fighting in the Pacific, and Maudie immediately tried to get John Sr. to find out more information on her son’s condition. It was slow in coming, even to a general. The first telegram our mom got from her father-in-law read, “No information in Washington other than that John is seriously wounded.” Another telegram indicated he was near death.
Our mom was devastated. She traveled to the Oregon Coast, where she stayed in a little cabin. She did shifts in one of the lookout towers where civilians scanned the sea with binoculars looking for Japanese submarines. At night, she walked the dunes and mourned her lost love. In my mind’s eye, when I heard the story, I imagined her in a long black veil, willing her love not to be dead.
And then the most amazing thing happened. She got a telegram two weeks later saying John would survive.
I was the youngest of the three daughters, so by the time these stories got to me, they had been mythologized and were wrapped in a deep layer of romanticism. But even at a young age I understood that in these stories with the perfect wife, the perfect husband, the perfect gentleman soldier, some of the pieces were missing. The perfect soldier was only flawless because he was off fighting a war. The man who was actually present was never going to be as romantic as an absent one. That was a vision of love I saw and learned from.
Our dad was sent to Pearl Harbor for medical treatment, and then flown to the Marine hospital at Cherry Point, North Carolina, for rehabilitation. Our mom traveled across the county once again to be with him. It was yet another transcontinental train ride to her man. John recovered, though he carried shrapnel in him for the rest of his life. But he was well enough that fall that Lou got pregnant.
World War II had ended by then, but John received orders to transfer to the submarine base Coco Solo in the Panama Canal Zone, and my mom went with him. It was there in August 1946 that my oldest sister, Lynn, was born. Lynn had the blue eyes and fair hair of my mother, the same traits that I inherited. Only Ann would get our father’s brunette gene.
Lynn, our tribal elder, can relate the story of Ann’s birth best:
LYNN WILSON
In 1948, we returned to the states and briefly lived with Maudie in La Jolla. While we were living there, our grandfather, General John Sr., died. He had survived two world wars and the storming of Iwo Jima’s beach with his Marines, but he died of a heart attack while hunting on Camp Pendleton.
After that we lived in Camp Pendleton base housing. Then John was transferred to Twenty-Nine Palms, and mom and I lived in a converted chicken coop near Barstow for six months, waiting for him.
In early 1950, we moved into a two-bedroom house in San Diego. It was the most domestic place we had for years, with a small lawn, a backyard swing set, and artichokes and olive trees in the yard. It was there that Ann was born on June 19, 1950. Ann would later make much hay about the fact that her birthday was a day after Paul McCartney’s (although eight years later).
Ann was a darling baby. Our mom fed Ann condensed milk with a touch of Karo syrup in it, and she grew chubby. It was a time when mothers were being told not to breast-feed their babies. Ann always wondered if that bad advice played a role in her body issues.
Ten days after Ann was born, our dad was sent to Korea. My mom heard nothing for weeks. Then, months later, with newborn Ann on her hip, and four-year-old me on her apron, my mother received news that our father had been killed in action. Once again, she got unreliable news about dad. Eventually word came that he was seriously wounded and might recover.
Our father rarely talked about his time in Korea and it was only years later, when a Heart fan who had been a Marine researched some of the history, that I learned the grisly details. Our dad landed in Korea with the First Division, Fifth Brigade. He served under Chesty Morgan, one of the biggest names in Marine history. Our father was a platoon commander. The book Colder than Hell includes our dad’s story, though his name has been changed.
The Marines took Seoul, but the Chinese snuck down and surrounded them. If you survived one battle, you’d most likely die in the next engagement. Of a starting force of two hundred fifty, only twenty-seven of my dad’s men survived the war uninjured.
In one fateful engagement, John was shot three times. A dead comrade fell on top of his wounded body. He couldn’t move, or fight, and he was bleeding to death. All night he lay there, hearing Chinese spoken as the enemy moved in and finished off all the wounded. He was spared only because he was hidden under a dead man.
Dad was found the next day by reinforcements and taken by air to Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego. He later received the Purple Heart for his actions. It is pictured inside the sleeve of Ann’s album Hope and Glory; the medal is shown held in Nancy’s hand.
Two years later, he was transferred to San Francisco where we lived in officers’ quarters. We were there on March 16, 1954, when Nancy was born. Four years separated her and Ann, just as it had Ann and me.
Our dad celebrated our growing family by buying a 1954 Plymouth station wagon. When Nancy was just a few months old, our dad was transferred to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. It was three thousand miles of driving, with Ann, me, and baby Nancy in the backseat. We arrived in North Carolina and moved into a house on the Outer Banks, while we waited for base housing. When it came through a week later, we moved yet again. One week after that, Hurricane Hazel completely destroyed the Outer Banks house. I guess we were just a lu
cky family.
2
The Big Five
Nancy is a curly-headed baby tied to the railing of
a World War II troop transport on a trip across the
Pacific Ocean. Ann dodges flour bombs while trying to
earn her Girl Scout badges. . . .
NANCY WILSON
Our dad always loved nonsensical names. When we went camping, and he saw a sign for anything historical, he’d say, “Look, another hysterical landmark.” Squirrels became “Skaveerls.” Our mom was “Feevee,” or “Mammass.” Ann was “Inz” or “Inzy-pinz.” Lynn was “Nice.” And I became “Nacey Pootoose.”
We often called our mother “Mama,” so we needed a nickname for our dad, too. We came up with “Dotes.” It made no sense, but then neither did any of the names he’d come up with. It stuck.
Dotes took it in stride, but also decided he needed a nickname for our entire clan. He started to call us “The Big Five.” It was the most normal name he ever came up with, and the best.
My mom also had a few of her own names for us, and mine was “curly-headed baby.” It came from a song she sang to me when I was in the cradle. “My Curly-Headed Baby” was a folk song first popularized in the thirties: “She’s my curly-headed baby, she’s more than all the world to me.” I had blonde curls, and I was to be her last baby. Just a few years after I was born, birth control pills became available, and our mom was one of the first women to take them. There would never be a “Big Six.”
Mama’s family loved large gatherings, and they always included music and sing-a-longs. Our maternal grandfather, Jules Verne Dustin, called them “hootenannies.” I loved that name when I was a kid, because he told me it came from when an owl married a goat.
