Rebecca Boone

Rebecca Bryan Boone was an American pioneer and the wife of famed frontiersman Daniel Boone. She began her life in the Colony of Virginia (1606–1776), and at the age of ten moved with her grandparents and extended family to the wilderness of the Province of North Carolina. It was there that she met her future husband, Daniel Boone. 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, Boone generally raised and protected their eighteen children by herself. Living in the frontier, and needing to be self-reliant, she was a healer, midwife, sharpshooter, gardener, tanner, and weaver. The family was subject to attacks by Native Americans as their land was encroached upon by white settlers and by bands of white men, called highwaymen, who attacked settlers. Several times she and her family left their home for shelter and protection in nearby forts and in one case lived several years in Culpeper County, Colony of Virginia, during the Anglo-Cherokee War.