There appear to have been no conflicts with the Indian owners of the territory of the three towns under consideration, and its white settlers, previous to the Minisink war, or as some historians call it, "The French and Indian War" of 1754-1758. We call it the Minisink war, because the Minsi tribe, at the outset of the war between France and England, which led to the great struggle between Canada for France and the colonies of our country for England, got permission to take up the hatchet against the settlers in Pennsylvania Minisink from their (the Minsis') masters, the Six Nations, to avenge their wrongs in that region. The wrongs were alleged to be that the proprietors of Pennsylvania had cheated the Indian owners of the lands there, and there is now no doubt that the allegation was true. There was no redress to be had for an Indian wrong in those years. Teedyuscung and the leaders of the Indians issued imperative orders that the war should be confined to Pennsylvania and they were pretty generally obeyed. Occasional straggling parties of them, however, in small numbers, disobeyed orders in order to avenge some injury to some person or clan, and passed through east of Shawangunk Mountains on marauding expeditions. They were vagrant Indians who had no standing as warriors in their tribe and they perpetrated wanton murders without the knowledge or sanction of their leaders. Of this class no doubt were the ones who surprised a man named Owens at work in Dolsen's meadow, in what was then Dolsentown, now in Wawayanda, near Middletown, in 1756, and shot him. David Cooley, who is believed then to have had a settlement at what is now the Charles O. Carpenter farm near Pine Hill cemetery, about a mile south of where Dolsen was located, alarmed at the murder of Owens, moved his family to Goshen. The next spring he moved back. That summer a party of Indians, in passing by his place, shot a woman of his household who at the time was passing from the outdoor oven to the house. A company of militia had been organized in 1738 in the county called the "Company of the Wallakill (Willinskill)"; but none of the 144 names of its members appear to belong to our territory, except it may be those of John Monell, Lieutenant William Borland, Benjamin Haines, James Monell, Johannis Crane and James Davis. John Bayard was its captain. The murder of the widow Walling in 1758 was mentioned in the Philadelphia _Gazette_ and in New York papers in that year and made a profound impression throughout the colonies.