They traveled around 800 miles in 62 days through increasingly hostile territory under very difficult conditions. Trails were scarce to nonexistent and the Indians, having been harassed by invading bands of ruffians for the last year, were finally beginning to strike back. The two men traveled together. Boone's journal of the expedition recounts an incident where, at a salt lick, Stoner taunted a buffalo. The animal, a cow, reacted by charging him. According to Boone, Stoner ran away shouting, "schoot her, Kapiten, schoot her!" Boone found the whole thing so funny that he couldn't stop laughing enough to do anything. Stoner remembered living constantly in fear of Indian ambush such that, whenever they stopped, they would sit back to back so as to not be surprised from any direction. However, they accomplished their mission and the surveying teams were able to safely withdraw. Still working for Richard Henderson, this time as field manager for his Transylvania Company, a land company which later tried to establish itself as a colony, Daniel Boone organized his second expedition to establish a permanent settlement in Kentucky in 1775. His account book notes: "Mikel Stoner entered, feberry the 5, 1775". After Henderson bribed the Cherokees to sell land that they did not own in Kentucky to the Transylvania Company (at the time, shady land deals could go both ways), the stage was set for establishing a permanent settlement. Boone, Stoner and a score of others, all men except for Boone's daughter Susanna and a slave woman brought along to cook, left early that Spring to enlarge and smooth out the preexisting trail, part of the ancient Warriors' Path, so that it could accommodate the wagons that the main group following them would be using. The front group would also establish the foundation of a settlement in Kentucky for the others to build on. As enticement, each of the front group was to be paid about 10 pounds for a month's road building work Also, they would get first choice at claiming land parcels in and around the new settlement. At the end of the road, the workers built the beginnings of Fort Boonesborough. Michael Stoner stayed on, claimed land, and worked as a hunter for the new settlement during its first year or so. In the West, the Revolutionary War really started in 1774 with Dunmore's war, and did not end until the Battle of Fallen Timbers twenty years later. It was largely a war between White settlers scattered east and south of the Ohio River in Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky and the Ohio Country Indian Nations living north and west of the River. By now these were a mixed group of long-time resident nations such as the Miami and groups who had been dislocated from their homes further east and south by White advance such as the Delaware and the Shawnee. Ironically, the Frontier Whites were often rather ambivalent in their loyalties. They were not particularly enthusiastic about the Revolutionary Cause. In fact, many of them had come west to escape what they considered oppression by the wealthy eastern landowners who had formulated the Declaration of Independence itself. On the other hand, they tended not to be particularly loyal to the Crown either. The irony is even greater in that, from 1775 to 1782, a greater percentage of these Westerners, relative to total population in the area, met violent death related to the Revolutionary War than in any other part of the country. One thing they agreed on was that their real enemies were the Indian Nations living across the river in the Ohio Country. Among those enemies, the most formidable were certainly the Shawnee. Boonesborough got its introduction to the Revolutionary War and its first trial by fire in the Spring of 1777. The British had urged restraint to their Indian allies in 1776, but the Ohio Indians, after their experience in Dunmore's war, saw gains by the Americans as nothing other than threats to themselves and their lands. So, by the Spring of 1777, the arguments of the Peace Chiefs were being rejected and War Chiefs such as the Shawnee Black Fish had taken command. Black Fish led an army of two hundred Shawnee warriors south across the Ohio that Spring. In all of Kentucky that year, there were 121 men available to defend the 280 settlers living there. Among the 22 men available to the defense of the ten or fifteen families living in Boonesborough was Michael Stoner. What happened at Boonesborough that Spring was a major occurrence in the lives of four of the most famous of the long hunters on the frontier; Michael Stoner, Daniel Boone, Wm. Bush, and Simon Kenton. It was an experience that was to bond them for the rest of their lives. -- 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 - PA-SUSQUEH[email protected] Co-Caretaker: The Boone Mailing list - [email protected]