This event happened a few decades before April 19th, but I think it is appropriate none the less.
From Seeds of Discontent by J. Revell Carr;
Small raids continued to plague the frontier region; however, in the spring of 1697 an unlikely heroine emerged from the brutality of King William's war. Hannah Dustin, a woman of about forty and the mother of eight, was at her home near Haverhill, Massachusetts, with her week-old infant and her nurse, Mary Neff, when a group of Abenaki natives attacked the farm. Dustin's husband, who had the other children with him in the fields, was able to hold off the attackers while he got his children to safety. However, he could do nothing to prevent the capture of his wife, the newborn and Neff. Cotton Mather recorded the events, the terrible beginning of the captives' march, and the fate of Hannah's newborn, "but ere they had gone many steps, they dash'd out the brains of the infant against a tree; and several of the other captives, as they began to tire in the sad journey..." With their captives, the Indians retreated to the north, rendezvoused with other tribe members, and then split up to continue the march in small groups.
Six weeks into their trek, Dustin's party was camped on an island in the Merrimack River. On the night of March 30, when the five adult Indians and seven children were asleep, Hannah Dustin, Neff, and another captive, seventeen-year-old Samuel Leonardson, who had been captured at Worchester the previous year, took bold action, "a little before break of day, when the whole crew was in a dead sleep, one of these women took up a resolution to...take away the life of the murderers by whom her child had been butchered. She heartened the nurse and the youth to assist her in this enterprise; and all furnishing themselves with hatchets for the purpose, they struck home such blows upon the heads of their sleeping oppressors." Dustin, Neff and Leonardson then set about the grim task of scalping their victims. Dustin's primary motivation for her attack was escape and retribution for the loss of her child, but there was also a "scalp bounty" of £50, which the government offered to encourage the colonists and militia to actively engage in the war against the natives.
Awesome story, RL. Thanks for sharing.
ShadowMan