Page:The youth of Washington (1910).djvu/248

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chiefs were too little considered or consulted. Their women were insulted or worse, and those that came to-day, receiving no gifts, were gone to-morrow.

On June 6, Sir John St. Clair was sent on in advance with some six hundred choppers to widen and better my old road. After him came Sir Peter Halket's force. On June 10, if I remember aright, the general followed with his staff and the rest of the army. As soon as the march began, the lack of discipline became plain, and the officers were worse than the men and altogether too much drunkenness.

Captain Croghan said to me: "I should like to give these fellows a wood drill and upset half the rum-kegs." This was as we led our horses over the second mountain. "Why, sir," he said, "here are hundreds of waggons and enough gimcracks and nonsense to fit out a town, and all the officers of foot on horseback."

I said that I had represented to the general and Colonel Dunbar the risk of this long train, and urged that we use our horses for packhorses and to carry only what we really needed. "That would be," Captain