Rebecca Boone - North Carolina

North Carolina

When she was ten, Rebecca moved with her Quaker grandparents, Morgan and Martha (Strode) Bryan, to the Yadkin River valley in the backwoods of North Carolina. Meanwhile the young Daniel Boone’s family settled near the Bryans in North Carolina. Rebecca and Daniel began their courtship in 1753 and married three years later.

Rebecca married Daniel Boone in a triple wedding on August 14, 1756, in Yadkin River, North Carolina at the age of 17. She took in her new husband's two young orphan nephews, Jesse and Jonathan who lived with them in North Carolina until the family left for Kentucky in 1773.

Like her mother and mother-in-law before her, Rebecca had many children born two or three years apart. Over twenty-five years time, she delivered six sons and four daughters of her own:

• 3 May 1757 - James (died 10 October 1773, Clinch Mountains, VA)
• 25 January 1759 - Israel (died 19 August 1782, Blue Licks, KY)
• 2 November 1760 - Susannah (died 19 October 1800)
• 4 October 1762 - Jemima (died 30 August 1829, Montgomery County, MO)
• 23 March 1766 - Levina (died 6 April 1802, Clark County, KY)
• 26 May 1768 - Rebecca (died 14 July 1805, Clark County, KY)
• 23 December 1769 - Daniel Morgan (died 13 July 1839, Jackson County, MO)
• 23 May 1773 - Jesse Bryan (died 22 December 1820)
• 20 June 1775 - William Bryan (died 1775)
• 3 February 1781 - Nathaniel or Nathan (died 16 October 1856, Greene County, MO)

Because her children married young and also had many children, she often took care of grandchildren along with her own babies. When in her early forties, considered an old woman at the time, she adopted the six children of her widowed brother. Without formal education, Rebecca was reputed to be an experienced community midwife, the family doctor, leather tanner, sharpshooter and linen-maker – resourceful and independent in the isolated areas she and her large, combined family often found themselves.

In 1852 George Caleb Bingham painted an epic portrait of Boone escorting settlers through the Cumberland Gap. Using Biblical and classical imagery to justify and heroicize westward expansion, Bingham portrayed Rebecca Boone in the pose of a Madonna, a popular domestic ideal of the time, and she is completed in interpretive ways with a faithful hunting dog and her husband leading a noble charger. She represented all pioneer women who by the mid-nineteenth century were idealized and celebrated. Rebecca's life was difficult as a frontierwoman. She moved many times during her lifetime. Before the birth of her first child, the Boones had moved to a small farm and built a one-story log house on a stream called Sugartree near the extensive Bryan family, near current day Farmington, North Carolina. They stayed in this home for nearly ten years, which was the longest they ever stayed in one place. She created homes in North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, and finally Missouri where she spent the last fourteen years of her life.

She often ran her household on her own while her husband was on long hunts and surveying trips. The Cherokee War separated Rebecca and Daniel for nearly two years, and family lore holds that her daughter Jemima was conceived during Daniel's absence.