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21 4 A Good Wife Back on the Yadkin, Boone once again made his living as a hunter. As an old man, Boone would say that a man needed only three things to be “perfectly happy: a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife.”1 Judging by his success in hunting and in the shooting competitions at Salisbury, by the time Boone turned twenty he had already acquired a good gun. Based on the full loads of deerskins he was bringing in from his hunts, he already had at least one good horse. What Boone lacked was a good wife. He must have seen the need for one. To be over twenty years old was to be a fully grown man by frontier standards. British colonists in America married young, often by the age of sixteen. Boone would long since have figured out how pleasurable women’s company could be. He certainly had plenty of opportunities— on his 1750 three-week “general jamboree or frolick” with his friend Henry Miller in Philadelphia, spending the proceeds of their long hunt; on his frequent trips to Salisbury when he cashed in the skins and furs from his hunts and visited the local taverns; and at the carryings-on that attended weddings in the backcountry. And there were weddings aplenty in the Yadkin Valley neighborhood, cementing relationships between families, starting up new families to work the land. Boone’s older brother Jonathan married a Carter, the daughter of a prosperous immigrant from Virginia who was on the county court with Squire Boone. In 1753 Boone’s younger sister Mary, who was then sixteen, married William Bryan, one of a large Welsh family of Quakers that had lived in western Pennsylvania and the Virginia valley before coming to the Yadkin Valley in 1749. William Bryan’s father, Morgan Bryan, the patriarch of the family in America, was the biggest landowner in the county, owning some five thousand acres, much of it about twenty miles north of where Frontiersman 22 Squire Boone had settled. Squire Boone’s nephew John Boone then married a daughter of Morgan Bryan.2 Soon Daniel Boone was the oldest of Squire Boone’s children living at home. If Boone’s parents were like most parents, Boone was getting strong and repeated suggestions that it was time to get married. At one of the many Boone-Bryan weddings—probably the one in 1753 between Mary Boone and William Bryan—Daniel Boone took notice of Rebecca Bryan, Morgan Bryan’s granddaughter, and she took notice of him.3 They were both striking-looking young people. Rebecca was barely fifteen years old. Her hair was jet black, her eyes dark.4 One descendant described her as “one of the handsomest persons she ever saw.”5 Rebecca was buxom and lively and very close to Boone’s height—tall for a woman of the times. She was tidy in housekeeping, strong, and strong-willed. Daniel was eighteen or nineteen when they met. He was not a tall man by present standards—about five foot eight, most say, though some say as tall as five foot ten—but that was average height for a man in Boone’s day, and he was compact and muscular. As his son Nathan put it, Daniel Boone “had broad shoulders and chest and tapered down.” Someone described him as “a sort of pony-built man”—not tall but built like a horse and similarly strong.6 Boone’s hunting friend Peter Houston said that at the end of a hand spike Boone “could lift more than any man I ever saw.”7 He weighed about 175 pounds when he met Rebecca. His eyes were blue, his skin fair and ruddy, his hair reddish sandy. He kept his hair plaited and clubbed—that is, the long hair was braided into a queue that was folded under itself and tied to keep it secured. His forehead was high, his brow heavy, his cheekbones prominent, his mouth tight and wide, his nose long and slender.8 Rebecca Bryan’s family was richer, and her clothes more civilized, than Boone’s. Boone looked like, and was, a backwoodsman. Like other hunters on the frontier, he wore deerskin moccasins reaching up his calves and a long hunting shirt of linsey or of deerskin reaching down to his knees. Often , instead of pants, he would wear a breechclout and deerskin leggings attached to a belt. His clothes looked a lot like an Indian...

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