When about the age of seventeen, in the year 1753, a tall, raw-boned boy, calling himself Daniel Morgan, “turned up” near the village of Winchester in Virginia. There was nothing about him to excite the good opinion of those frontiersmen, except his willingness to work. He had scant acquaintance with the three R’s. His writing was barely legible; his reading, painful to everybody who heard—especially to himself; his knowledge of the simplest principles of arithmetic, was small; his manners were rude; and his conversation so unpolished as to class him with the humblest order of men. The only occupation he understood was that of a land-grubber and rail-splitter, and it was at these hard tasks that he sought employment. He found it. And such was his strength and his industry that no man engaged Daniel Morgan to clear a piece of new land or to split white-oak rails for a snake-fence and ever regretted his contract! Within a year he became a wagoner for Nathaniel Burwell, Esquire. In a little more than two years his industry and thrift enabled him to purchase a wagon and team of his own; and then—a forerunner of the Wells Fargo—he established an express between the Valley and points beyond the Blue Ridge, east of the Range. As his fortunes improved, there came improvement in his mind. His manners, too, changed. The raw-boned boy of seventeen had developed into the man of twenty-one, and with the development came a reputation for great physical strength and a courage that was dauntless—great virtues, always, on the frontier. With these qualities he coupled a natural wit, a quick intelligence, a manliness, and a frankness of manner which won the admiration of his sturdy neighbors. When Braddock landed his army on the upper banks of the Potomac to make good the claim of his sovereign to the fertile region west of the Alleghanies, Morgan became a teamster with the ill-fated soldiers and accompanied the baggage train of the Second Division. In 1756 he was sent to Fort Chiswell with a wagon-load of supplies. It was while at this post that he received the terrible beating on his bare back which would have cost a less hardy man his life. A British lieutenant insulted him by striking him with the flat of his sword and was immediately stretched senseless on the ground by a blow from the teamster’s fist. A drum-head courtmartial sentenced him to receive five hundred lashes. He was forthwith stripped and tied to a white-oak tree. At the end of the castigation his flesh hung in tags. But his spirit was unbroken and King George was never forgiven for the cruelty his soldiers then inflicted.