It was during the residence of the family on the banks of the Yadkin, that Boone formed the acquaintance of Rebecca Bryan, whom he married.[7] The marriage appears, by comparison of dates, to have taken place in the year 1755.  “One almost regrets,” says Mr. Peck, “to spoil so beautiful a romance, as that which has had such extensive circulation in the various ‘Lives of Boone,’ and which represents him as mistaking the bright eyes of this young lady, in the dark, for those of a deer; a mistake that nearly proved fatal from the unerring rifle of the young hunter.  Yet in truth, we are bound to say, that no such mistake ever happened.  Our backwoods swains never make such mistakes.”

The next five years after his marriage, Daniel Boone passed in the quiet pursuits of a farmer’s life, varied occasionally by hunting excursions in the woods.  The most quiet and careless of the citizens of North Carolina were not unobservant, however, of the political aspect of the times.  During this period the people, by their representatives in the Legislature, began that opposition to the Royal authority, which was in after years to signalize North Carolina as one of the leading Colonies in the Revolutionary struggle.

The newly-appointed Royal Governor, Arthur Dobbs, arrived at Newbern in the autumn of 1754.  “Governor Dobbs’s administration of ten years,” says the historian Wheeler, “was a continued contest between himself and the Legislature, on matters frivolous and unimportant.  A high-toned temper for Royal prerogatives on his part, and an indomitable resistance of the Colonists ...  The people were much oppressed by Lord Grenville’s agents.  They seized Corbin, his agent, who lived below Edenton, and brought him to Enfield, where he was compelled to give bond and security to produce his books and disgorge his illegal fees.”

This matter of illegal fees was part of a system of oppression, kindred to the famous Stamp Act—­a system which was destined to grow more and more intolerable under Governor Tryon’s administration, and to lead to the formation of the famous company of Regulators, whose resistance of taxation and tyranny was soon to convulse the whole State.

We are by no means to suppose that Daniel Boone was an unobservant spectator of what was passing even at the time we are speaking of, nor that the doings of the tax-gatherers had nothing to do with his subsequent movements.  He not only hated oppression, but he hated also strife and disturbance; and already began to long for a new migration into the distant woods and quiet intervals, where politics and the tax-gatherer should not intrude.

The population in his neighborhood was increasing, and new settlements were being formed along the Yadkin and its tributary streams, and explorations were made to the northwest on the banks of the Holston and Clinch Rivers.  The times were already beginning to exhibit symptoms of restlessness and stir among the people, which was soon to result in the formation of new States and the settlement of the far West.