John Lovewell

[2] Although the outcome was a draw, Lovewell's Fight in May 1725 marked the end of hostilities between the English and the Abenakis of Maine.

In his youth, a number of people in Dunstable were killed in raids on the settlement, including four family members in the space of a month.

[4] In early September 1724, Indians captured three men near Dunstable, Massachusetts, in the area now known as Nashua, New Hampshire.

Favored by a grant from the Assembly, Lovewell, whose maternal grandparents had been killed and scalped by Indians, raised a company of 30 men and was commissioned a captain.

The remainder made a wide loop up towards the White Mountains, followed the Bearcamp River into the Ossipee area, then headed back in an easterly direction along the Maine and New Hampshire border.

On the banks of a pond at the head of the Salmon Falls River in the present town of Wakefield they came upon more wigwams with smoke rising from them.

The Indians were said to have had numerous extra blankets, snowshoes, moccasins, a few furs and new French muskets which would seem to indicate that they were on their way to attack frontier settlements.

On May 9, as the militiamen were being led in prayer by chaplain Jonathan Frye, a lone Abenaki warrior was spotted.

The battle continued for more than 11 hours until Ensign Wyman killed the Indian war chief Paugus.

Later that month Colonel Ebeneazer Tyng arrived with a large force of militia to bury the dead and take revenge on the Abenaki who had already fled.

More than one hundred years after his death Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (poem, "The Battle of Lovells Pond"), Nathaniel Hawthorne (story, "Roger Malvin's Burial") and Henry David Thoreau (passage in the book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers) all wrote about Lovewell's Fight.

"Roger Malvin's Burial", an 1832 story, concerns two colonial survivors returning home after what Hawthorne calls "Lovell's Fight."