The second son, George Michael Holstein, is the real hero of this narrative; he is the person who later took the name of Michael Stoner. He was born in 1748 on the Schuylkill River, near Philadelphia and he was only four or five years old when his parents died. Older sisters and their families raised him and they must have thought it best, in typical Palatine tradition, that he learn a trade as soon as possible. So, he was apprenticed to a saddle maker in Hickory-Town, now Lancaster, while quite young. However, according to the writings of Stoner's grandson, "his nature was sutch that he could not bare to be tied to a sadlers bench." Thus, after a quarrel with his master, he left his apprenticeship at age sixteen and went from Berks County to New River, Virginia. There is where he met Daniel Boone and the two first formed a friendship that was to last throughout their lives. By the late 1760's, when he settled at Castle's Wood in the Virginia back country near Cumberland Gap, he had already been over the mountains and into the continent's interior, including Kentucky. According to the journals of Nathan Boone, Daniel's son, Michael Stoner was "an awkward Dutchman" who spoke with a heavy German accent. Also, he was known as "truthful and reliable"; a man who always got the job done. In 1767, at age nineteen, Stoner accompanied Daniel Boone on his first long hunt expedition into the Kentucky country. He, along with Samuel Harrod and Boone passed through Cumberland Gap to winter over in the difficult mountainous region of eastern Kentucky. They made their first headquarters at a place that came later to be known as Crab Orchard, named after a grove of crab apple trees growing there. They separated here. Stoner went northwest to the Falls of the Ohio (near present day Louisville, Kentucky). After staying there a short while, he pushed south across Central Kentucky to the Cumberland River, and then went down the Cumberland to near present day Nashville, Tennessee where he met up with Boone and they went back to Virginia together. This long hunt served as preparation for later expeditions that led to Kentucky's first settlement by Whites. The first settlement attempt into Kentucky, an unsuccessful one, was led by Daniel Boone in September, 1773. He was employed by Richard Henderson, later the leader in the formation of the Transylvania Company. Among the fifty people who set out that Autumn day were William Bush and Bush's nephew, Michael Stoner; reputed to be the two best shots in southwest Virginia. The expedition started out too late in the year and was not sufficiently supplied. They barely covered one hundred miles in the first two weeks. Then disaster struck. The group was strung out over several miles on the trail when Boone decided that they needed more supplies. Daniel's son , James, along with several others, died victim to Indian ambush while traveling back to Virginia to buy more food. It was a time of despair; the group turned back; they were not yet ready for Kentucky. We next hear of Michael Stoner, again acting with Daniel Boone, just before the outbreak of Dunmore's War. This predecessor to the Revolutionary War happened mainly along the Ohio and Hocking Rivers between Fort Pitt and Point Pleasant during the late summer of 1774. It may have been an attempt by John Murray, Earl of Dunmore and Governor of the Colony of Virginia, to divert the resources and attention of his subjects from the unrest developing in Boston and Philadelphia. More likely, though, is that the whole thing was carried out to secure large sections of the Ohio country for groups of wealthy and influential land speculators, not the least of whom was Dunmore himself. At any rate, teams of surveyors had been out for the last year or so establishing claim to as much of the Ohio country as they could lay instruments to for their shadowy employers. In the Spring before the campaign, in April of 1774, Dunmore asked for two good men as volunteers to go out and warn the survey teams of the hostilities to come in time for them to escape the war zone unharmed. The first to volunteer was Michael Stoner. The second was Daniel Boone. (There are discrepancies in the records about this. Some sources state that Boone was the first volunteer and he persuaded Stoner to join the enterprise. The Holstein Family history has Stoner as the first volunteer.) The two were directed to go down the Ohio to the Falls (just downstream from present day Louisville, Kentucky--the Falls, really little more that a set of rapids, have long since been blasted away to improve navigability of the river), and then to turn inland following the string of surveyors and ordering them to return in Dunmore's name. -- Larry DeFrance, Helena Montana USA Caretaker: The DeFrance Family Home Page - http://www.helenet.com/~larry/fam_home.html The DeFrance Mailing List - [email protected], The Susquehanna River Mailing List - [email protected] Co-Caretaker: The Boone Mailing list - [email protected]