Along the Delaware River the Indians had been complaining that the whites appropriated lands which they had not bought, and by getting them drunk had defrauded them of the purchase money for their lands and their furs. These complaints led the Pennsylvania proprietaries to call a council, with the head chiefs of the Six Nations as arbitrators, and by bribing these chiefs with presents they obtained from them a decision which obliged the Delawares, then wards of the Senecas, to give up their lands and move to Wyoming. Soon whites followed them and bought in fraudulent ways their Wyoming lands. This angered the Senecas, and they drove away their chief who had aided the whites, and bade the Delawares defend their homes. The eastern and western chiefs met at Allegheny, rehearsed their grievances, and resolved on vengeance. The bloody scenes that followed have seldom been surpassed in barbarous cruelty and cunning, and the ravages of the Minsis were mostly confined to the western frontiers of Orange and Ulster Counties within the limits of the original Minisink patent. The settlers of the Minisink observed that the Indians there, including squads who had been friendly, had suddenly disappeared, and the few that remained said they had gone west to join hostile tribes. Foreseeing trouble, some of the settlers sent their wives and children to places of comparative safety, and a well-settled region on the west side of the Wallkill, eight by fifteen miles in extent, was abandoned, some of the residents moving to the east side and others far away. Before they moved seven men and one woman had been killed by the Indians. In 1756, pending negotiations for peace, four men and two women were killed in the Minisink. Three of the men went into the harvest field with their guns and laid them down, when concealed Indians seized them, shot the men dead and scalped them. At Fort Westfall, which the Indians tried to capture by surprise, there was a fight in which several Indians and seven soldiers were killed. A large party of Indians attacked the upper fort at Neversink, which was well garrisoned, but the fort took fire from a burning barn near it, and its inmates had to leave. Only one of them escaped the Indian bullets and tomahawks, and among the killed was the wife of the captain, who was absent. Only a colored woman, hidden from view by the smoke, escaped. The captain returned a day or two afterwards, and took an oath of vengeance by the grave of his wife. A man named Owen was killed by strolling Indians in Asa Dolsen's meadow in the northwestern part of present Wawayanda, and Dolsen immediately moved to Goshen. David Cooley lived near him, and his wife was shot dead as she was walking from her house to an outdoor oven. In 1758, on the New Jersey frontier, one day, when Nicholas Cole was absent from home, thirteen Indians rushed in, tomahawked and scalped his two daughters and a son-in-law, and carried off his wife and a young son.