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During the first half of the nineteenth century many
Shinnecock Indians moved eastward a few miles to their present reservation
near Southampton village. There is surprisingly little record of this
migration. The residence of substantial numbers of Shinnecocks in the
vicinity of Ponquogue and Good Ground (now Hampton Bays, a mile west from
Canoe Place) until the early or middle eighteen hundreds is attested by maps
and local histories and other authentic sources. Their residence there was
unexplained by title documents, in fact it was inconsistent with them. But
nowhere is to be found an explanation of how or by what right so many of the
Shinnecock Indians had remained there so long, or what caused them to leave
there and join their brethren on the present Shinnecock Reservation. These
mysteries of local history, and some which involve more directly a strip of
land a mile long and ninety-nine feet wide running from Canoe Place to
Hampton Bay, have been explored within the past two years in a Suffolk
County title litigation. The suit was brought by Douglas King against Daniel
Warner and others to remove cloud on title to the long narrow strip of land.
King lives with his family on part of the strip and claims all of it. Most
conspicuous among the "others" who were defendants were the Trustees of the
Shinnecock Tribe and the "cloud" about which King most complained was a
tradition, supported by ancient deeds and maps, that the Shinnecocks were
the true owners of the strip.
The late Supreme Court Justice Thos. J. Cuff decided on June 12, 1953, that there is no statutory authority for the suit against the Trustees so the litigation is stalemated. No regret need be felt about the "technical" nature of this decision. Much research was devoted to the rights of the respective parties but so much remains unexplained that no decision on the merits is appropriate at the present time. This paper merely will state the questions and their historical background. Perhaps a reader can solve some of the mystery. The Town of Southampton starts with patents or royal grants of 1676 and 1686 which conferred upon fifteen persons a combination of property and governmental rights. The title to the land became vested in those persons by the patents plus purchase from the Indians. By a release of 1640 followed by a deed in 1703 the Shinnecock Indians surrendered claim to all lands except they reserved to themselves a "lease" for a thousand years of about 3600 acres. This "reservation" was immediately east of the narrow isthmus called Canoe Place. It included the Shinnecock Hills and the present Shinnecock Reservation south of the Hills. On the face of these title documents it would seem that the Shinnecocks should not have been living west of Canoe Place after 1703 but the fact was that many of them, perhaps most of them, were living there until the middle of the nineteenth century. The "Proprietors,'' as the fifteen patentees and their successors in interest were called, occasionally allotted tracts among themselves and thus made the land individual private property. The Proprietors managed the undivided lands as they saw fit, with all the powers of ownership and local government, their possessiveness mitigated only by their interest in encouraging growth of the population and thus increasing the value of their lands. Until 1818, when their governing powers were cut down by statute as a result of a population which had become numerous and rebellious, the Trustees for the Proprietors, elected by them alone and responsible to nobody else. were also the governing body of the Town.
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