Reuben (also Rubin or Rheubin) Lewis McDaniel was born in 1896 in Livingston, Kentucky. He was a concrete worker for Claude Hood in Bearden, Knoxville, Tennessee, prior to the war. He died of broncho pneumonia on 4 February 1919 at the Base Hospital at Camp Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina. He is buried somewhere in Knoxville, Tennessee.