The supply of water within this settlement, upon which it depended, was a spring at the head of a small stream leading to Jamaica bay. This brook extended between Avenues K and L, and found an outlet in the watercourse that made of Winippague an island. Flatlands thus appears to have been, from all these circumstances, and from its situation in the general direction in which the council-place was undoubtedly situated, the Keskaechquerem referred to in several of the early sales of lands. Its sachems in 1638 were Kakapetteyno, Menquaeruan,

INDIAN NOTES

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TH E C AN ARSEE

and Suwiran. With Pewichaus, the local owner, the first-named sachem agreed to the sale in 1637 of Governors island, and the Rinnegaconck tract at Wallabout. The three chiefs entered into the deed for the sale in the following year of the great tract of Bushwick.

Into this station a trail, the later Flatlands Neck road, came from New Lots. On this road, at the place of its crossing the Paardegat, there stood a white oak tree (on the line of Avenue G) which in 1666 marked the boundary of the township, and was so described in the Dongan patent of 1685. The place was known to the natives as Muskyttehool, a Dutch application of the word, hole, to the Indian word musquetaug, "a place of rushes," very well describing the characteristic feature of the Paardegat (pi. xxi). This path was a direct means of communication between the Flatlands station and Canarsie. It connected directly with the Hunterfly Road trail, of which it was evidently an extension, at the sharp bend in the latter at Howard and Sutter avenues