Some ten years after Braddock’s defeat, we can picture a strong rude wagon drawn by two horses, crawling along the stumpy, rock-roughened, and mud-mired road through the dense woods that led to a valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In the wagon sat a young woman. By her side a sturdy red-cheeked boy looked out with alert but quiet interest showing from his brilliant black eyes. And three other children cried their delight or vexation as the hours wore on. The red-cheeked boy was John Marshall. In this wagon, too, were piled the little family’s household goods. By the side of the wagon, strode a young man dressed in the costume of the frontier. Tall, broad-shouldered, lithe-hipped, erect, he was a very oak of a man. His splendid head was carried with a peculiar dignity. And the grave but kindly command that shone from his face, together with the brooding thoughtfulness and fearless light of his striking eyes, would have singled him out in any assemblage, as a man to be respected and trusted. A negro drove the team, and a negro girl walked behind. So went little John Marshall with his father and mother, from the log cabin to their new Blue Ridge home, which was not a log cabin, but a frame house built of whipsawed uprights and boards. _Making an American_ John Marshall lived near the frontier, until he was nineteen, when as Lieutenant of the famous Culpeper Minute Men, he marched away to battle. And during those nineteen years he had been growing up to be _an American_. The earliest stories told little John Marshall must have been frontier ones of daring and sacrifice. Almost from the home-made cradle, he was taught the idea of American solidarity. Braddock’s defeat was the theme of fireside talk of the Colonists, and from this grew in time the conviction that Americans, if united, could not only protect their homes from the savages and the French, but could defeat, if need be, the British themselves. So thought John Marshall’s father and mother, and so they taught their children. For the most part, the boy’s days were spent studying and reading, or rifle in hand, in the surrounding mountains and by the pleasant waters that flowed through the valley of his forest home. He helped his mother, of course, did the innumerable chores which the day’s work required, and looked after the younger children. He ate game from the forest and fish from the stream. Bear meat was plentiful. Whether at home with his mother, or on surveying trips with his father, the boy continually was under the influence and direction of hardy, clear-minded unusual parents. Their lofty and simple ideals, their rational thinking, their unbending uprightness, their religious convictions--these were the intellectual companions of John Marshall’s childhood and youth. _Give Me Liberty!_ Thomas Marshall, John’s father, served in the Virginia House of Burgesses of which Patrick Henry was a member.