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The Minisink or (more recently) Minisink Valley is a loosely defined geographic region of the Upper Delaware River valley in northwestern New Jersey (Sussex and Warren counties), northeastern Pennsylvania (Pike and Northampton counties) and New York (Orange and Sullivan counties). The name was derived by Dutch colonists from the Munsee name for the area, as bands of their people took names after geographic places which they inhabited as territory throughout the mid-Atlantic area. Originally inhabited by Munsee, the northern branch of the Lenape or Delaware Indians, the area's first European settlers arrived in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and were Dutch and French Huguenot families from colonial New York's Hudson River Valley. The term "Minisink" is not used often today. It is preserved because of its historical relevance concerning the early European settlement of the region during the American colonial period and as an artifact of the early "first contact" between Native Americans and early European explorers, traders and missionaries in the seventeenth century. Much of the historical Minisink region has been incorporated into the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area after defeat of a controversial dam project proposed to be built by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the Delaware River near Tocks Island. ==Meaning of the name "Minisink"== The name Minisink comes from the Munsee dialect of Lenape, a group of similar Algonquian dialects that were spoken by the various groups of Lenape, Lenni Lenape, or Delaware Indians who inhabited the region before European colonization. ''Minisink'' means "at the island" from the Algonquin root word ''minis'', meaning island. During the colonial period, the Minisink was also an area of significant skirmishes and raids between British and French-allied forces in the French and Indian War (the North American front of the Seven Years' War). In response to attacks by larger forces of Delaware, Benjamin Franklin ordered the construction of a series of forts along the Pennsylvanian side of the Delaware River. These forts included Fort Hyndshaw, Fort Depuy, Fort Norris, and Fort Hamilton, among others.〔Old fort sites create sense of Colonial past, ''Pocono Record'', October 19, 2012 http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121019/NEWS13/210190367/-1/rss28 Accessed September 17, 2013〕〔Oplinger, Carl. ''The Poconos: An Illustrated Natural History Guide'', Rutgers University Press, 2006, page 248〕 Earlier historians posited that Minisink meant "people of the stony country" or "where the stones are gathered together." However, Smithsonian linguist Ives Goddard states that any of the attempts to derive either ''Minisink'' or ''Munsee'' from words meaning "stone" or "mountain," as proposed by these writers (including Lenape scholar Daniel G. Brinton), are incorrect.〔Goddard, Ives. "Delaware" in Trigger, Bruce (editor) ''Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15. Northeast.'' (Washington: The Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 237.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Minisink」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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