Page:History of Delaware County (1856).djvu/267

 DELAWARE COUNTY. 243 the reader^ we may be pardoned for drawing aside the curtain of time, and glancing at those early grants which indirectly proved the source of after disturbance. The first of these grants was made to J ohanus Hardenburgh and others, of the county of Ulster, on the twenty-third of April 1708. The defined limits of this patent, now familiarly known as the Hardenburgh patent, were, owing to the unex- plored state of the interior or western part, vague and uncer- tain. An ancient settlement had been made at Minisink, on the Delaware — above which place no white settlement existed. The idea of the source of the Delaware, or as it was then appellated, Fish-kill,'' had been gathered from the friendly Indians, who resided upon that stream, or from traders who had boldly penetrated into the wilderness to trafiic with them. From these sources of information it had been established that the source of the stream lay many days' journey to the north- east, and hence the description in the original grant — to the main branch of the Fish-kill or Delaware river;" whereas the two streams are so evenly poised at their junction, that even the more practised eye of the engineer, cannot without elaborate investigation and computation, detect the larger. It is not strange, then, that the question should at an early day be agitated, which is the main branch of the Delaware, or Delaware river proper?" and consequently the western limits of the Hardenburgh patent. It was urged by those who assumed that the Hardenburgh title extended only to the East Branch, that it was so understood by the patentees themselves, and that the original survey extended only to that boundary line. The facts relating to this controversy, so far as I have been enabled to glean them, are these. In 1749 Ebenezer Wooster run up the East Branch, and the same year, or the year succeeding, Robert Livingston, also in the employ of the proprietors of the patent, surveyed and located the West Branch. The Indians, who still held peaceable possession