Susannah (Boone) Hays (1760-1800)

Susannah (Boone) Hays was the third child of Daniel and Rebecca Boone. She was born on November 2nd, 1760 and died on October 19th, 1800.[1] She lived 39 years, 11 months, 17 days.

Susannah married William Hays when the Boone family was living on the Clinch River at Moore’s Fort in Virginia, in early March of 1775.[2] Susannah's younger brother, Nathan Boone, later described William Hays as “a brave man and always foremost, but he was bad-tempered and drank to excess,”[3] as well as one who “taught my father to write with an improved hand” and who “kept Father’s accounts for a while.”[4] Not only could he keep business accounts, but he was also a hunter, trapper, soldier, and weaver.[5] He was of Irish descent.

Within a month of their wedding, the young couple traveled to Kentucky with the party of about 30 men led by Daniel Boone that cleared the Wilderness Road and established the settlement at Fort Boonesborough.[6] She was the first white woman to stand on the banks of the Kentucky River (she and a slave woman were the two women on the trip), and her first child was said to be the first white child born in Kentucky.[7]

William and Susannah participated in the various adventures of the Kentucky frontier. When Daniel Boone was captured by Indians, William brought Susannah and her mother and most of her siblings to live in North Carolina and returned in time to participate in the defense of Fort Boonesborough. After that siege, Daniel brought them all back to Kentucky. William was received a bullet wound through the back of his neck during the relief of Bryan's Station in 1782 and survived.[8] They had ten children, all of whom came with them in 1799 to the Spanish territory of Upper Louisiana (present-day Missouri). They settled near where the Femme Osage Creek entered the Missouri River. Susannah died about a year after they arrived from a “bilious fever.”[9] From their ten children, they would eventually have over 75 grandchildren. 

Their marriage seems to have been somewhat troubled. Decades later there would be rumors of some degree of unchaste behavior on Susannah’s part early on in their marriage. Faragher quotes interviews with Josiah Collins (c. 1840s) and Nathaniel Hart, Jr. (c. 1843-44) to that effect, although he adds, "but another old Kentucky settler declared that he had never seen any evidence of lewd behavior, and that when he knew her at Boonesborough, she seemed 'a clever, pretty, well behaved woman.' What seems clear is that Susy was a high-spirited girl ... and such women came in for their share of gossip."[10] It was also said by several relatives that William came to treat his wife badly and to whip her (and that Daniel gave him a whipping when he found out).[11] In any case, William’s drinking to excess and bad temper increased after Susannah’s death.[12] This led to William’s death at his house in 1804 when he was shot in self-defense by his son-in-law, James Davis.[13]

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[1] Ella Hazel Spraker, The Boone Family (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Pub., 1993 [1922]), 115.

[2] John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 1992), 110.

[3] My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone, ed. Neal O. Hammon (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 75.

[4] My Father, Daniel Boone, 45-46. 

[5] Spraker, 115-116

[6] Faragher, 110-113.

[7] Faragher, 127; My Father, Daniel Boone, 46. 

[8] My Father, Daniel Boone, 69, 75.

[9] Meredith Mason Brown, Frontiersman (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2008), 239. 

[10] Faragher, 110. 

[11] Faragher, 286-287. 

[12] Brown, 239; Faragher, 287.

[13] Brown, 239; Faragher, 287.