David Nagel has always passed the looming statue of Hannah Duston at the junction of the Contoocook and Merrimack Rivers whenever he went cycling in Boscawen. One day, he decided to read the sign in front of it — and couldn’t believe what he learned.

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Nagel, a Republican state representative from Gilmanton, recently filed a legislative request to remove the statue.

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Based on historic accounts, Duston, from Haverhill, Mass., was kidnapped in 1697 by indigenous Abenaki people during King William’s War, one battle in a series of conflicts between English colonists, the French in Canada and Native Americans. Duston was captured with her neighbor, Mary Neff, and Duston’s newborn, who was killed shortly afterward.

The group traveled north for two weeks before being handed off to a Native American family that consisted of two men, three women and seven children. With that family was another captive, 14-year-old Samuel Leonardson from Worcester, Mass., kidnapped a year and a half earlier.

When the family went to bed one night, Duston, Neff and Leonardson slayed most of the family with tomahawks, cutting off the scalps of 10 members, including six children.

Her story was memorialized by puritan minister Cotton Mather between 1697 and 1702, praising Duston for her heroism and demonizing the Native American people. {snip}

The tale gained prominence in the 1820s when colonists expanded to the west in pursuit of their perceived Manifest Destiny. Biographies, magazines, and children’s books were written and even a mountain was dedicated to her. In 1874, a 25-foot-tall monument of Hannah Duston was erected in Boscawen, one of the first and oldest statues of a woman in the United States. Another statue in her hometown Haverhill was put up in 1902.

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The representative, originally from New York and moved to New Hampshire 38 years ago, said he has worked closely with Native American people and historians around the state. His wife is a board member at the Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum in Warner.

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“I’m not native myself, obviously, but if I didn’t have that background of working with groups, exploring their sensitivities, things like that, I don’t know that I would have it would have hit me as hard,” he said. “I just found the monument incredibly insulting.”

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