Ruttenber and Clark's history, as stated, discredit the tradition regarding the early settlement of the Minisink by Hollanders, as accepted by Clinton, Tappan, Depuis, Preston and others. It represents the Mine road to be simply an enlargement of an old Indian trail, and the mines to have been of copper and located in what is now the town of Warren, Sussex County, N. J. It says that the Dutch at Esopus during the war of 1660-63 had little knowledge of the country, even east of the Shawangunk, and that if the Minisink was penetrated at a much earlier period it was by way of the Delaware River. The historian discusses the subject further, and concludes that the first settler of the Minisink was William Tietsort, a blacksmith from Schenectady, who barely escaped the slaughter at that place in 1689, and went to the Minisink country from Esopus, by invitation of friendly Indians, and purchased lands of them in October, 1689. "There is little doubt that he was the first settler on the western border," says the history. But Stickney, after recapitulating the traditions and evidence of the early settlement of the region, says: "Here generations lived the fleeting span of life in blissful ignorance of any outer or happier world beside, and were alike unknown outside the boundaries of their own domain until some wanderer chanced to come across their settlement, and went on his way, thereafter to remember with gratitude and envy the affluence and comfort that marked their rough but happy homes." If Tietsort was the first white settler of the Minisink, Arent Schuyler was probably the second, as he settled there in 1697, having been granted a patent of 1,000 acres of its lands by Governor Fletcher. The governor had sent him there three years before to ascertain whether the French in Canada had been trying to bribe the Indians to engage in a war of extermination against the New Yorkers from their fastnesses in the Shawangunk Mountains. The earliest land transfers and titles were so thoroughly investigated by Ruttenber and Clark that we cannot do better, perhaps, than condense mostly from their history.