35 Facts About Rebecca Boone

Rebecca Bryan Boone was an American pioneer and the wife of famed frontiersman Daniel Boone.

Rebecca Boone began her life in the Colony of Virginia, and at the age of ten moved with her grandparents and extended family to the wilderness of the Province of North Carolina.

Rebecca Boone raised ten of her own children and eight nephews and nieces that she and Daniel had adopted.

Since Daniel was away for extended hunting and exploration trips, sometimes for several years at a time, Rebecca Boone generally raised and protected their eighteen children by herself.

Daniel was captured and Rebecca Boone, believing her husband was dead, returned to North Carolina with her children.

Rebecca Boone moved to numerous locations where she raised her family, ran a tavern kitchen, operated stores, hunted for game, and made and sold maple sugar.

Rebecca Boone has been portrayed as the ideal wife, patient, resourceful, a great beauty, a crack shot with a rifle, moving again and again with Daniel and their family from North Carolina to Virginia, back to North Carolina, to Tennessee, to Kentucky, to Virginia again, and back to Kentucky, then finally to Missouri.

Rebecca Boone was born into the Quaker family of Joseph and Hester Bryan.

Rebecca Boone learned to spin wool, weave, sew, cook, and make candles.

Rebecca Boone learned how to dry food for the winter, tan deer hide, ride a horse, and shoot a musket.

Rebecca Boone received domestic training from her grandmother and learned outdoor skills, like shooting, from the male members of the Bryan family.

One is that on a night that Rebecca Boone was herding stray cows, Daniel tracked her during a "fire hunt", a Native American night-time method for stalking and shooting deer that became frozen or catatonic by the light.

Rebecca Boone was said to have been a tall, attractive woman with black hair and dark eyes.

Daniel's father Squire Rebecca Boone officiated the wedding in what is Davie County, North Carolina.

Rebecca Boone raised the children on her own during the falls and winters that Daniel spent hunting and trapping furs and on his extended exploration trips into the wilderness.

Rebecca Boone grew up learning how to raise, feed, and clothe a family in the wilderness.

Rebecca Boone was reputed to be a midwife, healer, leather tanner, sharpshooter, and linen-maker.

Rebecca Boone entertained Native Americans who came to visit her husband.

Rebecca Boone adopted her widowed brother's six children when she was in her early forties.

Rebecca Boone was visited by Moravian missionary George Soelle in 1771.

Rebecca Boone told me of her trouble, and the frequent distress and fear in her heart.

Rebecca Boone was intent on leaving North Carolina for several reasons, he owed money to people there, the settlements were becoming crowded, and he sought better hunting grounds.

Rebecca Boone worked with other prospective settlers to raise $50,000 to purchase land held by Cherokees in Kentucky, which was then called the Transylvania Colony or Transylvania Purchase.

Rebecca Boone was the first white woman to have settled in Kentucky.

Rebecca Boone, who had brought seeds with her to Kentucky, planted a garden with her daughters.

Rebecca Boone later lived with her family in a double cabin on Marble Creek.

Rebecca Boone welcomed six children of her widowed uncle James Bryan.

Rebecca Boone's husband, serving as lieutenant colonel, and two of her sons fought together at the Battle of Blue Licks of the Revolutionary War.

Rebecca Boone moved three more times by 1798, including a move back to Kentucky near some of his children and grandchildren.

Rebecca Boone accompanied her husband on hunting trips, living in hunting camps, when his rheumetism made it difficult for him to aim and shoot his firearm.

Daughters Susannah, Levina, and Rebecca Boone died between 1800 and 1805.

Rebecca Bryan Boone died on March 18,1813, at her daughter Jemima Boone Callaway's home near the village of Charette.

Rebecca Boone was buried at the Old Bryan Farm Cemetery, overlooking the Missouri River, in the Marthasville area.

In 1862, four marble panels, which depicted scenes from Daniel and Rebecca Boone's lives, were added to the monument.

The World War II Liberty ship SS Rebecca Boone was named in her honor.