For purposes of telling the known facts about the strip we now come to what may be regarded as a third period. The first period is 1703 to 1810 and we know nothing about the strip then except the allotment of 1738, set against the background of two divergent facts - the Shinnecocks had deeded the entire area in 1703 but had remained in this vicinity. The facts dimly to be seen in the period 1810-1863 all favor the Shinnecock tradition that they owned and possessed the strip and had a church and graveyard on the east part of it. We now come to the period 1865-1919, when Margaret Brooker King resided on the strip in a house which stood on the west side of Canoe Place Road, a few hundred feet east from the graveyard.

She was born in the neighborhood in 1842, so she was 23 years old in 1865, when she was living in the house with Abraham Cuffee. Presumably they were married. He was a Shinnecock, first mate on a whaling vessel, and he died in 1866 in the Pacific. The King family preserves a letter Abraham wrote Margaret before he embarked on his last cruise, mostly about household expenses and his money in the bank and messages for her relatives. After Abraham's death Margaret continued to live in the house on the strip with their daughter, named Abaret from a combination of their first names. Abaret died when she was seven or eight years old.

Margaret Brooker appears to have added King to her name about 1870. She and Daniel King had three sons. Charles, the intermediate of these, was born in 1873. He became the father of Douglas King. Since 1870, and perhaps a little earlier, the name of Margaret Brooker King has signified some peculiar interest in the strip, but that the origin or nature of the interest is unknown except for the few facts already stated.

When the house was built and who built it we do not know from any evidence that is legally acceptable. A descendant of the Cuffee family, now a teacher in a Brooklyn school, had it as a tradition from her grandmother, born in 1830, that when the grandmother was a girl her family lived on the strip in a wigwam, which burned, and then they lived nearby while the house was built on the strip. According to that tradition the house was built by the Cuffee Adair family about 1840. There are numerous indications, some of them documentary, that the Cuffee family was recognized as having special rights to the east part of the strip, probably as Shinnecock allottees.

In 1873 and 1875 the strip was conveyed by deeds. These, unlike the deeds of 1860 and 1863, were recorded. The first was a warranty deed from the Shinnecock Trustees to Elisha King. He was a well known local businessman who lived on adjoining property and he seems to have been no relative of Daniel King or Margaret Brooker King. Two years after he acquired title to the strip he quit-claimed to Ursula Adair of Westport, Connecticut. She was a descendant of the Cuffee family.

These original deeds, also the 1860 and 1863 unrecorded deeds, a letter of 1876 referring to an unsuccessful attempt to have Mrs. King removed from the house, and a fire insurance policy on it in 1899 for $500 to Mrs. Adair, were among papers preserved by Mrs. Adair and her descendants. The unrecorded deeds were uncovered in the course of the recent litigation in the files of a Riverhead attorney with whom Mrs. Adair's descendants had left them about 1920. A letter of 1923 from one descendant to another at least casts some light on what they believed about Mrs. King's interest in the strip:

"The tribe sold it to Elisha King, then Grandmother Adair bought it of Elisha King. The King or Booker woman claimed to have married Abr. Cuffee, and thence had a life right in the property. Inclosed is a letter from David Bunn (a Shinnecock Trustee, father of Charles Bunn) proving that she paid rent to him."

Mrs. King died in 1919. Whether she paid any taxes is uncertain but commencing in 1896 the easterly six acres of the strip was assessed against her for about $500. Her sons never saw fit to build anything on the strip and there were several tax sales. The five acres west of Gravel Hill Road first appeared on the assessment roll in 194O, six years after Douglas King built a house there. His uncle, James Selah King, lived in the old house further east until his death in 1942, and after that Douglas King tore down the old house.

Can any reader add to our knowledge of why the Shinnecock Indians remained in the vicinity of this strip until the middle of the nineteenth century, and by what right they occupied the strip and claimed to own it?