We may assume that the path from this place was a well-trodden and probably widened way on which the bearers of bundles of furs, carcasses of moose and deer, baskets of oysters, and strings of fish, passed one another on their way to and from their distant homes. The line of this pathway was directed by the physical conditions of the tract over which it passed to a connection with the main trail at Astor place. From the landing place it probably proceeded east over the line of Gansevoort street to the head of Greenwich avenue. This is the old Monument ' lane of the Colonial period,

AND MONOGRAPHS

60 INDIAN PATHS which proceeds in a straight line toward Washington Square. At this point the path crossed the rivulet known to the natives as Minetta, 5 and to their successors as the Bestavaer brook. It turned eastward at this crossing, and cut across the present lots north of Waverly place, passing there between two hillocks, one of which was known as the Sandberg, or Sand hill, and that on the south by a native name, which Schoolcraft gives as Ispetong, probably Aspetong, referring to an elevated place. 6 The line of Astor place is doubtless the result of the junction of the two paths at this point. 7 It is quite likely that another branch pathway extended farther eastward, which Stuyvesant later used as the means of access to his bouwery, on the line of Stuyvesant street, by which the head of the narrow creek that set in from East river (as far as First avenue at East 12th street) was reached, affording a short cut by canoe to the mouth of Newtown inlet directly across East river. From Astor place we now follow the path