I wasn’t particularly excited to read Dan Morgan, Rifleman. I had never heard of Morgan and didn’t know if he was a real person. I thought this was going to be another story with a young character inserted into a famous historical incident to make it more attractive to young readers.
However, Dan Morgan was a real person! He lived from 1736 to 1802, and the story begins in 1848 when Dan is twelve years old. The first paragraph sounds like it could be the beginning of the kind of story I was expecting:
AFTER A DAY of hunting in the woods, young Dan Morgan was on his way home. He walked slowly along the trail wishing he had shot something to take home with him.
“I guess I’m not a good hunter yet,” Dan said to himself. “If I don’t bring something home Father may not let me take his gun again. Maybe tomorrow—”
But in the next moment, Dan spots a moccasin print on the trail. He decides to follow the print, and what he finds changes the course of his life.
Dan had been hunting with his father’s musket, but he meets a man who has the longest gun he’s ever seen. The man tells Dan it’s a new kind of gun, a rifle, and he explains why rifling matters. Dan decides then and there that he will have a rifle someday, and that he will be a woodsman like his new friend, Jed.
For the next five years, Dan works on the farm with his father and mother and grows taller and stronger than any man around. Then he leaves home to find Jed and begin life as a woodsman, and he takes a job driving a freight wagon into Indian country. It isn’t long before he sees his first battle with the Indians, and he learns that in order to fight the Indians, he will need to fight the way they do. This happens to be 1754, at the beginning of the French and Indian War. Dan is a wagoner with the British army under General Braddock and Colonel George Washington at the disastrous battle for Ft. Duquesne where Braddock is killed.
The story moves quickly through the years to Dan’s involvement in the American Revolutionary War when he forms his own company, Morgan’s Rifles. He leads his men on a hair-raising 300-mile march to Quebec with Colonel Benedict Arnold!
Dan Morgan survived many amazing exploits, and the action in this story is exciting and almost non-stop. But the story doesn’t read like an adrenaline-soaked superhero tale. Dan was a real man who learned how to work hard, and who was dedicated to honing his craft and serving his country. He had astounding success, but also suffered losses and severe injury. He served valiantly throughout the Revolutionary War, and later was sent to Congress from Virginia.
I love that Dan’s story detailed some events of the period that I only vaguely remember hearing mentioned in history classes in school. In my experience, the battles Morgan was most involved in were peripheral to the better-known incidents of the American Revolution.
Tucker managed to write this story using language accessible to the youngest independent readers while also keeping it interesting and compelling for parents and grandparents.
