Rebecca Boone
| Rebecca Ann Bryan Boone | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 9, 1739 Winchester, Virginia |
| Died | March 18, 1813 (aged 74) St. Charles County, Missouri |
| Spouse(s) | Daniel Boone |
| Children | James Boone, Israel Boone, Susannah Boone, Jemimah Boone, Levina Boone, Rebecca Boone, Daniel Morgan Boone, Jesse Bryan Boone, William Bryan Boone, Nathan Boone |
| Parent(s) | Joseph Bryan, Sr. and Aylee (Alice, Alee, Alyle) Linville |
Rebecca Ann (Bryan) Boone (January 9, 1739 – March 18, 1813) was an American pioneer and the wife of famed frontiersman Daniel Boone. No contemporary portrait of her exists, but people who knew her said that when she met her future husband she was nearly as tall as he and very attractive with black hair and dark eyes.
She was born near Winchester, Virginia. Her father was Joseph Bryan, Sr. but there is no clear documentation as to her birth mother. Some say her mother, Hester Hampton, died in childbirth, and that Alice (or Aylee) Linville, Bryan's second wife, raised her.
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:
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.
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