Daniel West was born around 1822 in Maine. He married Susan W. Rounds on December 17, 1854, and their daughter Jenny was born on September 1, 1855. They lived in Bangor, Maine, and West worked as a ferryman. By 1860, he owned $150 of personal property. He strongly supported the Union war effort, and he joined a Union Club in Bangor in the fall of 1861.
He enlisted in the Union army on October 3, 1861, and he mustered in as a corporal in Company K of the 11th Maine Infantry on November 2, 1861. The regiment’s colonel later remembered him as a “good soldier – one of the best.” He took part in the Peninsula Campaign, and he fell ill during the spring of 1862. He died of “sickness induced by exhaustion” in Yorktown, Virginia, on June 5, 1862.