Boone: A Biography (10 page)

1756–1759

After the debacle of the Battle of the Monongahela, Boone walked across Pennsylvania to visit relatives in Exeter. He had witnessed one of the bloodiest defeats the British ever experienced in the colonial period. But he got away unwounded, as the French and Indians turned back to scalp the dead and take the wounded prisoners to be tortured and burned at the stake.

In the mountains of Pennsylvania, as he was crossing a bridge over the Juniata River, he confronted an Indian who drew a knife on him. Bragging that he had killed many a Long Knife—what the Indians of the Ohio Valley called the Virginians, because of their hunting knives and sabers—the brave said he would take one more scalp. Many years later Boone told the sons of Henry Miller that he had killed only three Indians in a long life in the wilderness. The first was on the Juniata. Facing the drunken Indian, who flourished the knife over his head, Boone decided he would not back away. Waiting for his chance, he lowered his head and drove his shoulder into the Indian’s gut, knocking him off his feet and off the bridge.
The Indian fell on the rocks below
. But Boone must not have been certain the Indian was killed, for he later told his son Nathan that
the only Indian he was sure he ever killed
was at the Battle of the Blue Licks. The confrontation on
the bridge was the kind of incident Boone was almost always able to evade.

On the disastrous Braddock expedition, Boone had heard about the gap called the Cumberland, which led to the hunting ground of Kentucky. And by the campfire on the way to Fort Duquesne Boone had heard John Findley tell of the new Eden of cane and clover, buffalo and beaver, the island in the wilderness, where only a few Indians hunted and fewer seemed to live. Findley described a world that contained beaver so numerous a man could take all the pelts he could carry. Best of all was the news that so few Indians lived in this ideal hunting ground. Shawnees, Mingoes, and Delawares hunted there. But there seemed to be only the villages of Lower Shawnee Town, and perhaps Eskippakithiki, south of the Ohio, north of the Cumberland. Some scholars have thought the Indians considered Kentucky taboo for permanent settlements, a sacred hunting ground where none should settle. More think the powerful Iroquois had maintained the mead-owland as their buffalo hunting grounds, driving away all other tribes. The bounty was there for the taking, for anyone with the courage and enterprise to go there.

Since the time of the Vikings, perhaps since the days of the Romans, westering had been in the blood of Europeans. The Romans pushed as far toward the sunset as Britain and Ireland, and Irish monks and Erik the Red had sailed all the way to Iceland. Leif Eriksson had reached Greenland and the New World. Columbus and his successors had discovered lands and peoples that changed European ways of thinking about the globe and the future. Driven by greed or piety, lust for power or curiosity, romance, or some combination of all five, Europeans were relentless in exploration, going farther and farther with the sun, the stars, and the moon, always to the west.

For the colonists in North America the West meant free land and independence from feudal rule and quitrents, from debt and debtor’s prison, from censures of the church and the class system, from
servitude and poverty. The West was the place to rise, to become better, larger. For someone like Boone, the West was a place of mystery and shadow also, a stage on which to act a larger, more dramatic role, to play parts written on a different scale, in meadows and forests, along rivers and canebrakes, with buffalo far as the eye could reach, with flocks of passenger pigeons that filled the sky for days. From the time he returned from Braddock’s campaign, Boone began to think more and more about the land beyond the mountains, and he began to reach farther westward with each hunt, into the hills and mountains near the head of the Yadkin.

A
FTER HE
returned to the Yadkin, Boone initiated another important change in his life. Two years before, he had met fifteen-year-old Rebecca Bryan at a family wedding. Rebecca was the daughter of Joseph and Aylee Bryan, immigrants to Pennsylvania, and then Virginia, where Rebecca was born January 9, 1739, and then the Yadkin. “
Morgan Bryan came to Pa about 1700
. . . he there married Mary Strode, whose parents came from France . . . then moved to the Shenandoah Valley near the present site of Winchester.” The Bryan family had lived in Ireland, and then in Denmark, before coming to North America. The Bryans had settled a few miles north of the Boones in North Carolina. Like the Boones, the Bryans were a large family that moved and settled close together, presided over by Rebecca’s grandfather, Morgan Bryan. In the court records of Rowan County, Morgan Bryan’s name appears often as jury member or magistrate. Daniel had hunted and associated with three of Rebecca’s brothers.

The meeting of Rebecca Bryan and Daniel Boone is the beginning of one of the great romantic tales of the frontier and eighteenth-century America. Celebrated in film and television, folklore and history, Rebecca 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. According to Annette Kolodny, in her landmark study of women on the frontier,
The Land Before Her
, Timothy Flint first portrayed Rebecca with “
the same heroic . . . nature
” he attributed to Boone but then toned down his portrait to suit Victorian tastes. Others would suggest that Rebecca loved the wilderness as much as Daniel did, and rumor would ascribe to her the training of her sons in marksmanship while Daniel was away. Kolodny adds, “
It is said by some that she was a fair shot
, by others that she rivaled her husband in marksmanship; and the rumor persisted that she, not her husband (. . . often away from home), had taught their sons the use of the gun.” Rebecca was rumored to have shot six deer in one day.

Daniel was already the champion hunter, trapper, marksman, and wrestler of the Yadkin region. A descendant later referred to Rebecca as “
one of the handsomest persons
she ever saw.” She was also described as mild, pleasant, and kind. Rebecca had fair skin and coal black hair and striking black eyes. She was a good bit taller than average, about Daniel’s height; she was called buxom and
larger than the average woman
of the time. Though no portrait of her has ever been found, we have a vivid sense of her beauty and vitality. She was a woman capable of the hard work and childbearing and dangers, and excitement, of the American frontier.

Rebecca’s nephew Daniel Bryan later remarked on
her pleasant manner and speech
. A granddaughter would recall that Rebecca “was
one of the neatest and best of house keepers
, proverbial for the tidiness and Quaker-like simplicity and propriety of all her domestic arrangements.” When Boone first saw Rebecca he was nineteen and she was only fifteen, and he always called her “
my little girl
.” The folklore of the Yadkin region spawned many tales of the meeting and courtship of Daniel and Rebecca. One of the most popular, first recorded by Timothy Flint, described Boone out fire hunting with a friend. Fire hunters carried a blazing torch into the woods at night, and startled deer would stand frozen, staring at the flame. The glow of the eyes
made a perfect target. According to Flint, young Rebecca Bryan is out looking for a stray cow and gets lost in the woods as night falls. She sees a light and walks toward it. Boone aims at the shining eyes but holds his fire, as if warned by instinct. Rebecca sees what is happening finally and runs away. Boone follows her to the Bryan cabin and falls in love. He knows also that he will give up fire hunting. One of Rebecca’s nieces later pointed out that the story could not be true, because human eyes do not reflect the way animal eyes do. Rebecca’s daughter-in-law Olive Van Bibber Boone quipped that the only shining was in the lovers’ eyes when they married. “
And if there was any ‘shining of the eyes’
it must have been there.”

There are stories in the folklore of many cultures about the hunter who falls in love with his prey. The fire-hunting story of Daniel and Rebecca may have been adapted from a similar Indian story.
The sexual resonance of the story
reaches across all cultures, and the renunciation of fire hunting at the end suggests a Victorian twist added by Flint. But Annette Kolodny sees the fire-hunting story as
an example of the way Rebecca was marginalized
in the accounts of Boone’s life, especially in the nineteenth century.

Another tale, which the Boone family never denied, describes Daniel and Rebecca meeting at a cherry picking in the summer of 1756. Just naming the occasion gives the story a nice erotic overtone. The couple sit in the grass of the cherry orchard, Rebecca wearing a fine cambric apron, showing at once her practicality and love of finery. Cambric was hard to get on the frontier. Daniel, perhaps nervous, takes out his hunting knife and begins to flourish it around. The knife rips the fine apron in three places. But Rebecca Bryan does not protest or reproach him and seems to ignore the damage. Boone later explained to his descendants that he had meant “
to try her temper
” to see if she would get angry. Because she ignored the damage, Boone said he knew she was the woman he must marry. The tale shows Boone’s love of a good story, and it also demonstrates how in old age he could turn what must have been embarrassing at the time into a
quip that made him look wise even in his youth. It is quite possible that
Rebecca saw what Daniel was about
and only pretended not to care that her fine apron was ruined.

Another episode in the legend of the courtship has Daniel killing a deer and bringing it to the Bryan house to show Rebecca what a good provider he is. Of course it is impossible not to get bloody, carrying a deer with its throat cut and a bullet hole in its head or heart. Daniel dresses the carcass outside the Bryan house, getting even bloodier, while Rebecca cooks dinner inside. When the suitor is called in to eat, his hunting shirt is filthy, and he hadn’t thought to bring a change of clothes. The Bryan girls, from a more prosperous family than the Boones, giggle and snicker at his condition. But Daniel will not be laughed at without retaliating. As he sits down he lifts a cup and looks into it. “
You, like my hunting shirt
, have missed many a good washing,” he says. The quip was repeated often and always got a laugh, showing Daniel had evened the score. One Boone relative said it showed how proud women needed to be brought down a notch or two.

Rebecca and Daniel were married, along with two other couples, August 14, 1756, with Squire Boone in his capacity as justice of the peace officiating. Though the romance and marriage of Rebecca and Daniel were the stuff of legend almost from the time they occurred, Rebecca has figured less in the Boone story than one might expect. Annette Kolodny blames biographers such as Timothy Flint for suppressing the image of Rebecca as courageous and even heroic, in her long life on the frontier, to make her seem the meek and patient wife of the Victorian ideal. “
Flint effectively annihilated any
possibility that she might achieve mythic status on her own.” But in recounting some of the incidents in Rebecca’s life, Flint gives at least a partial picture of the active role Rebecca and other women took in sustaining and defending family and community.

Many of the deeds Boone became famous for were done away from home, among Indians or other hunters and soldiers. But it is impossible to imagine Daniel Boone’s career without Rebecca. It is true that
he loved the wilderness, the solitude of the long hunts, the adventure of the unknown. But he was also a man of intense loyalties, a family man, who came from a big family and raised a big family. Without a woman as strong and resourceful as Rebecca, he could not have gone into the forest again and again for extended periods. Without a woman as steady and independent as Rebecca he could not have even considered the many moves to strange places. Without her his world would have collapsed under debt and uncertainty. The tall, buxom Rebecca inspired him and always drew him back from his great voyages of discovery and business. It is clear she also had what men most truly desired and needed in a wife: she could be relied on to keep the household together and raise the children, whether he was around or not. Later, when Boone was captured by the Shawnees and assumed dead, it was Rebecca who would lead her family back across the mountains to the safety of the Yadkin Valley.

Rebecca Bryan Boone is one of the best examples in American history of the adage “Behind every good man . . .” During the siege of Boonesborough women dressed as men and carrying rifles paraded along the walls of the fort to make the attackers think there were many men inside the stockade. Indeed, some of the women in Kentucky were crack shots and expert hunters. In 1777 Esther Whitley of St. Asaph’s Station, at a shooting match, would beat all the men, who kept firing at a target until it got dark, attempting to equal her marksmanship.

R
EBECCA AND
Daniel first lived in a cabin on Squire Boone’s property. After Daniel’s brother Israel died of consumption, they took in his sons Jesse and Jonathan and raised them as their own. Nine months after their wedding a son named James was born May 3, 1757, and another son named Israel was born January 25, 1759. Rebecca would have eight more children over the next quarter century, and she would later adopt six children of a widowed brother.

Soon after their marriage the young couple moved to a new place in the Bryan settlement, farther up the Yadkin on a creek called Sugar-tree, which ran into Dutchman’s Creek, near present-day Farmington,
North Carolina. The name of the creek suggests the presence of sugar maples. Maples were tapped on the frontier for syrup and sugar, at a time when other sweetening was hard to come by. Bees were not common among the settlements then, and sorghum cane had not yet been introduced to the region. The Boones must have begun their habit of annually collecting and boiling maple sap there, a custom they continued in all the places they lived until the end of Rebecca’s life. Boiling maple syrup together seemed to be something that Daniel and Rebecca particularly enjoyed, in the periods he was at home and not roving. When he was away Rebecca made syrup with their children. In the worst of times, later, when he had lost most of his land and was deeply in debt, they fell back on this forest occupation, making hundreds of gallons of syrup. On Hinkston Creek in Kentucky in 1797, while Boone was being sued for debts and land surveys, they would boil down enough sap to make more than five hundred pounds of maple sugar to sell and use.