Around this sheltered spot, discarded oyster-shells, the unfailing sign of local aboriginal occupancy, were at one time observable in great abundance.1

About this site there also spread tracts of cultivable land. The space now composing City Hall Park was of such a nature, though limited in area. A larger tract afterward formed the old Out Ward of the Colonial city, broad and level land extending on the north alongside the earliest pathway, the present Bowery. The position and

INDIAN NOTES

MANHATTAN

evident facilities of this site, and the extent of the visible debris, indicate it as that probably occupied by the largest settlement of natives at the lower end of the island and doubtless that in which were resident the Indians who sold the island to Minuit in 1626, and thereafter removed to reside in the territory of their kinsmen, the Canarsee of Kings county (68) . The native name of this locality was fortunately preserved in a grant from the Dutch government to Augustine Heermans in 1651, which described "the land called Werpoes" containing about fifty acres, extending on the north side of the Kalch Hoek and its adjoining ponds. According to Tooker, this name should have been more correctly written Werpos, or "the thicket," a designation which describes the known conditions of the locality, the hillsides around the ponds being covered in bygone times with bushes and blackberry brambles. Such a name, in the prevalent Indian fashion, was doubtless derived from the most significant feature of the locality to the native mind, and