Imagine, for a moment, Scotchtown without its suburban homes, shopping malls and few remaining farms. Take away its paved roadways and its apartment complexes. Now put in their places acre upon acre of untouched wilderness. Imagine the scant forests not as they are now, but instead stretching out across the horizon as far as the eye can see, with trees hundreds of years old reaching up towards the sky. This was what the land on which we now live was like when no one but the aboriginal peoples of this continent tread through its forests, farmed on its fields, and fished in its streams.

When the first Dutch colonists arrived in the Hudson Valley, this location appears to have been part of the territory of the Warranawonkong Indians. Adrian Vanderdonk, for example, labeled the Indians in the areas north and west of the Highlands of what is now Orange County as Warranawonkongs on a map he drew in 1656. [1] The Dutch gave them this name after the river on which they lived, now called the Wallkill, but the name they gave themselves is unknown. [2] Their area of control embraced the waters of the Shawangunk Kill and the Wallkill and Esopus Rivers. The Warranawonkongs were a chieftaincy of the Minsis, or Wolf tribe, of the Lenni Lenape. [3]

The Lenape nation was divided into three principle tribes – the Turtle, the Wolf and the Turkey. The members of these tribes painted the emblems of their corresponding animal on their property and their person. [4] The Turtle tribe was the oldest and the Wolf the most warlike. Each tribe had a chief and a war chief. Their leader, called a sachem, was similar to a king. He came from the Turtle tribe and his office was hereditary. The Lenape used arrow or spear to kill fish and game, but they also grew maize, squash, beans, sweet potatoes and tobacco. Maize, what we now call corn, was unknown outside of the New World. The Lenape did not have mills like the Europeans, so instead they broke up their maize in stone or wooden mortars and pestles. They manufactured pottery, feathered mantels and stone pipes. They dressed deerskins and made beads called wampum that they used as currency. They hammered native copper into ornaments, arrowheads and pipes. In war they carried clubs, tomahawks, bows and arrows, scalping knives and spears. Their warriors also used shields of thick hide. When they fished they used brush nets and fishhooks made of bone and dried bird claws. Using dyes and paints made from plants and minerals, they decorated themselves for war or made their picture writing, which they used to keep historical records and communicate with one another. They had two classes of priests, or medicine men, one devoted to divination and one to the healing of the sick. [5] The Lenape are now more commonly known as Delaware Indians.

The territory of the Warranawonkongs north of the Shawangunk Kill in what is now Ulster County was from 1656 to 1664 the stage of many battles with the Dutch. Sometime around 1670, after a succession of wars with the Dutch, the English, and the Iroquois, the entire Lenape nation was subjugated by the Seneca and they lost the power to make war or peace. [6] To make matter worse, as colonists began to settle the Hudson Valley, the Lenape tribes were being cheated and defrauded of hundreds of thousands of acres elsewhere. In 1686, William Penn allegedly drafted a treaty with the Lenape that conveyed to the English lands on the Delaware River. One of the boundaries of this tract was to be “as far as a man could walk in a day and a half.” When Penn’s successors surveyed the land more than fifty years later, they chose the swiftest man they could find, and had him run not walk along a cleared and prepared road in order to secure as much land as possible. By taking advantage of the vagueness of the treaty they were able to obtain a million acres of land, when a fairer assessment would have given them about three hundred and fifty thousand acres. When the Lenape protested to their Seneca overlords, their claims were dismissed and they were forced to leave those lands. The Minisink Patent, which encompassed much of what is now western Orange County, was obtained under different circumstances but by no means less fraudulently. The land was purchased, but never paid for, when the buyers made the grantors drunk and obtained their signatures when they did not know what they were doing. They then refused to pay whatever compensation was promised to the Indians by claiming that they had already given it to them. At least one settler of that region witnessed one of these alleged transactions. He later recalled how a certain man named Depuy made the Indians drunk and never paid them the purchase money agreed upon. He also remembered hearing the Indians frequently complain of the fraud and claim they would be uneasy until they were compensated for the lands taken from them. [7]

Fraudulent land deals and continued encroachment on Indian territory was now angering the Lenape’s overlords, the Seneca, who had in the past sided with English authorities in matters of land disputes. In 1755, at the commencement of hostilities between the French and the English, the Seneca sided with the French and encouraged the Lenape to attack the English colonists. For their part the local Lenape tribes unleashed their pent up aggression to such an extent that the white settlers in northern Orange and southern Ulster County were held under such continued military duty as to be rendered incapable of supporting their families. Many settlers were killed and a large swath of territory west of the Wallkill was abandoned. There were block-houses built along the frontier, one of these places of defence and refugee was in Scotchtown, but many families fled to the east side of the river and depended on the charity of their neighbors for survival. Others removed even farther, and some left the province entirely. [8] David Moore, an early settler near what is now Middletown, was forced to abandon his homestead and retire to Goshen. [9]

For modern readers it is not hard to understand why the local tribes would be so eager to fight, and some of the early settlers were equally cognizant of the reasons for their anger. According to one man, “the reason of their quarreling with and killing the English in that part of the country was on account of their lands which the Pennsylvania government cheated them out of … and that the people of Minnisink used to make the Indians always drunk whenever they traded with them, and then cheated them out of their furs and skins, also wronged them with regard to their lands.” On a few occasions the English authorities also recognized that not all Indians were their enemies, and made efforts to reach out to the ‘domestic’ clans living in the Hudson Valley. These Indians lived near and traded with white settlers, adopted some of their customs and often their religion. In December of 1755 the Justices of Kingston invited peaceful Minsis living in Ulster County to remove from the frontier settlements, where they could be mistaken for enemies, to the towns where they could be protected. Despite these efforts there were occasions when misguided settlers killed some of these peaceful Indians. [10]

At the same time, attacks against settlers continued to be a constant worry. Indians staged a nighttime attack on an early settlement made by John McCord near Stony Ford. The building in which he lived was loop-holed for musketry, like almost all other homes of this era, so that the inhabitants could fire from these openings on attackers in relative safety. This Scotch family was not saved by their home’s defenses, however, but by their neighbors who thankfully arrived in time to drive the natives off. [11] The activities of the militia charged with protecting these settlements are not well recorded, but it is clear they were under constant alarm. Col. Thomas Ellison described the situation in 1757:

In October of 1758 negotiations with Teedyuscung, chief sachem of the Lenape, finally resulted in a treaty of peace. Boundary lines were agreed to, the Minsis were paid for their lands in the Minisink country and an exchange of prisoners was made. [12] The end of the frontier war signaled the beginning of new and vigorous settlement in what is now the Town of Wallkill. It is difficult to imagine just how these colonists got along with their Indian neighbors given the recent history between them.

According to the early settlers a number of Indians lived near a spring just east of what is now Michigan Corners. There was an Indian hut at this location, where some of the foundation stones were still visible in 1846. When the surrounding land was ploughed for the first time arrowheads in lengths of two to six inches were found, as well as a hard flint axe as large as a hand. And so this place was later given the name Indian Spring. The historian Samuel Eager recorded a tradition describing a conflict between a number of these Indians and the family of Daniel Butterfield who lived very close to their settlement:

The record is not clear on exactly when the Indians disappeared from our neighborhood. When the settlement at Indian Spring was abandoned, probably around the time of the Revolution, it seems the native peoples at this location disappeared from our memory and sadly from our history.