of the army were transported—without which the army could not have moved westward from Fort Cumberland one single mile. "Mr. Braddock had neither provisions nor carriage for a march of so considerable a length, which was greatly increased and embarrassed by his orders to take the rout of Will's Creek; which road, as it was the worst provided with provisions, more troublesome and hazardous, and much more about, than by way of Pennsylvania."[1]
Not to use superlatives, it would seem that the American colonial governors and St. Clair might have presented to Braddock the difficulties of the Virginia route as compared with the Pennsylvania route early enough to have induced the latter to make Carlisle his base for the Ohio campaign; but there is no telling now where the blunder was first made; a writer in Gentleman's Magazine affirmed that the expedition was "sent to Virginia instead of Pennsylvania, to their insuperable disadvantage, merely to answer the lucerative views of a friend of the ministry, to whose share the remit-
- ↑ History of the Late War, vol. i., p. 142.
