[4] John and James remained, and lived and died in Oley.
It was many years before Daniel Boone realized his dream of reaching Kentucky. Such an expedition into the far-off wilderness could not be lightly undertaken; its hardships and dangers were innumerable; and the way thither from the forks of the Yadkin was not as easily found, through this perplexing tangle of valleys and mountains, as Finley had supposed. His own route had doubtless been over the Ohio Company's pass from the upper waters of the Potomac to a tributary of the Monongahela.
Another reason caused Daniel long to linger near his home. A half-dozen years before the Boones reached the Yadkin country there had located here a group of several related families, the Bryans, originally from Ireland. Pennsylvanians at first, they had, as neighbors crowded them, drifted southwestward into the Valley of Virginia; and finally, keeping well ahead of other settlers, established themselves at the forks of the Yadkin. They took kindly to the Boones, the two groups intermarried, and both were in due course pioneers of Kentucky. Rebecca, the daughter of Joseph Bryan, was fifteen years of age when Daniel first read his fate in her shining black eyes. In the spring following his return from Braddock's slaughter-pen he led her to the altar, the ceremony being performed by old Squire Boone--farmer, weaver, blacksmith, and now justice of the peace for Rowan County.
An historian of the border, who had studied well the family traditions, thus describes Daniel and Rebecca at the time when they set forth together upon the journey of life: "Behold that young man, exhibiting such unusual firmness and energy of character, five feet eight inches in height, with broad chest and shoulders, his form gradually tapering downward to his extremities; his hair moderately black; blue eyes arched with yellowish eyebrows; his lips thin, with a mouth peculiarly wide; a countenance fair and ruddy, with a nose a little bordering on the Roman order. Such was Daniel Boone, now past twenty-one, presenting altogether a noble, manly, prepossessing appearance.... Rebecca Bryan, whose brow had now been fanned by the breezes of seventeen summers, was, like Rebecca of old, 'very fair to look upon,' with jet-black hair and eyes, complexion rather dark, and something over the common size of her sex; her whole demeanor expressive of her childlike artlessness, pleasing in her address, and unaffectedly kind in all her deportment. Never was there a more gentle, affectionate, forbearing creature than this same fair youthful bride of the Yadkin." In the annals of the frontier, as elsewhere, all brides are fair and grooms are manly; but, allowing for the natural enthusiasm of hero-worshipers, we may, from the abundance of testimony to that effect, at least conclude that Daniel and Rebecca Boone were a well-favored couple, fit to rear a family of sturdy borderers.