In front of their village on the river flats south of the island lay their great national cemetery covering acres of ground, where many generations of their nation lay entombed. Some of them were buried so close to the river that the sweep of its current often washed away the dirt and exposed their bones as the writer saw them. The early white people in the valley, all German, at first assumed that the name Minsi, pronounced by them "munsey," was derived from the fact that the water had at some time been drained by the Water Gap from the lands in the valley and that the name was derived from "the water is gone." We have never found any corroboration of that theory. The village was the source of the name, but what is meant in the Lenni-Lenape language we probably shall never know. From their village the white settlers applied it to the whole valley. William Tietsort, whom they induced to settle among them near present Port Jervis, and do their blacksmithing, in 1690, found the name there. Arent Schuyler, who has left on record his diary of the visit he made there to find whether the French spies had been there from Canada, said of it: "1694 ye 6th, Tuesday, I continued my journey to Maghackemeck (Indian name for the neighborhood of the junction of the Neversink with the Delaware) and from thence to within half-a-day's journey of the Minisink." A half-day's journey would about represent the distance to the village and castle of the tribe mentioned, and where he was bound. The Indians who occupied the territory in these three towns were one of the three divisions of the Lenni-Lenapes. On the first map of the country made they were called Maquas, which was later corrected to Munseys and by the English to Minsies. The name of their headquarters, Minisink, has come down to us from all the various languages spoken by white settlers as Minisink. That corroborates it as an original Indian word. Every clan or sub-division of the tribes used an accent of their own, so that they were easily distinguished, but the difference was not so radical but that the whole Lenni-Lenape people could understand each other. Therefore the name Minisink was a name known over a vast region before the white people came here. Its meaning is a mystery which all linguists can guess at with some probability of nearness. ORGANIZATION AND BOUNDARIES. June 23rd, 1664, this region belonged to Holland, at least that country claimed it; but Charles, then King of England, deeded that day, to his brother, James, Duke of York, a tract "to the northward as far as the northernmost branch of the Delaware River in 41 degrees and 40 minutes north latitude, thence in a straight line to Hudson's River, to be called 'Nova Cesaria' or New Jersey." England sent over a fleet and captured the whole country in this vicinity a little later the same year, and that made the Duke's patent valid.