Off to the Blue Ridge
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.