The region under consideration was then a dreary forest, but land speculators soon began to deal in tracts of it, and New York Province claimed that the line, 41.40 latitude north to the northernmost branch of the Delaware River, ran from its beginning on Hudson's River to the mouth of the Lehigh River (which they asserted was the branch of the Delaware referred to in the deed) where is now Easton, Pa. On the other side the owners of New Jersey claimed that the branch referred to in the deed was a tributary of the Delaware River at what is now Cochecton, N. Y. It will be seen that this disputed territory was of great extent, the apex of the triangle on the Hudson River widening out to a base of near 50 miles from present Easton to present Cochecton. In this triangle was comprised nearly all of what we now call Sussex County, N. J., and, according to the New Jersey claim, taking in the present city of Port Jervis and about all of the present towns of Greenville and Minisink. The great dispute as to the ownership of this triangle lasted for a hundred years and its tales of warfare and contests in courts are of great interest, but not altogether pertinent to our subject. The start upon Hudson's River is thus mentioned in N. J. Archives, Vol. I, page 531, in 1685-6: "Gawen Lawrie of New Jersey, Governor Dongan of New York and others" fixed at a point nigh Colonel William Merrit's house (see mention in first census of Orange County) on the west side of the Hudson River and "marked with a penknife on a beech tree standing by a small run." How different surveyors could locate the degree of latitude from thence to such widely different points was explained in old documents to be the fault of the crude quadrants then used. In 1704 Queen Anne of England granted 23 persons a patent (deed), for a tract of land which was named "Minisink," because it embraced the land in Minisink along the Delaware River down as far as Big Minisink island, and as far north as Peenpack (a nickname for the Gumaer settlement on the Neversink). March 20th, 1765, Alexander Colden, of New York, said of this patent, Vol. III, p. 988, Documentary History of New York: "It contains not less than 250,000 acres, under the very small Quit-rent of nine pounds current money of this Province."