Now rose the question whether the army should proceed in a direct course to Fort Duquesne, hewing a new road through the forest, or march thirty-four miles to Fort Cumberland, and thence follow the road made by Braddock.  It was the interest of Pennsylvania that Forbes should choose the former route, and of Virginia that he should choose the latter.  The Old Dominion did not wish to see a highway cut for her rival to those rich lands of the Ohio which she called her own.  Washington, who was then at Fort Cumberland with a part of his regiment, was earnest for the old road; and in an interview with Bouquet midway between that place and Raystown, he spared no effort to bring him to the same opinion.  But the quartermaster-general, Sir John Sinclair, who was supposed to know the country, had advised the Pennsylvania route; and both Bouquet and Forbes were resolved to take it.  It was shorter, and when once made would furnish readier and more abundant supplies of food and forage; but to make it would consume a vast amount of time and labor.  Washington foretold the ruin of the expedition unless it took Braddock’s road.  Ardent Virginian as he was, there is no cause to believe that his decision was based on any but military reasons; but Forbes thought otherwise, and found great fault with him.  Bouquet did him more justice.  “Colonel Washington,” he writes to the General, “is filled with a sincere zeal to aid the expedition, and is ready to march with equal activity by whatever way you choose.”

The fate of Braddock had impressed itself on all the army, and inspired a caution that was but too much needed; since, except Washington’s men and a few others among the provincials, the whole, from general to drummer-boy, were total strangers to that insidious warfare of the forest in which their enemies, red and white, had no rival.  Instead of marching, like Braddock, at one stretch for Fort Duquesne, burdened with a long and cumbrous baggage-train, it was the plan of Forbes to push on by slow stages, establishing fortified magazines as he went, and at last, when within easy distance of the fort, to advance upon it with all his force, as little impeded as possible with wagons and packhorses.  He bore no likeness to his predecessor, except in determined resolution, and he did not hesitate to embrace military heresies which would have driven Braddock to fury.  To Bouquet, in whom he placed a well-merited trust, he wrote, “I have been long in your opinion of equipping numbers of our men like the savages, and I fancy Colonel Burd, of Virginia, has most of his best people equipped in that manner.  In this country we must learn the art of war from enemy Indians, or anybody else who has seen it carried on here.”

His provincials displeased him, not without reason; for the greater part were but the crudest material for an army, unruly, and recalcitrant to discipline.  Some of them came to the rendezvous at Carlisle with old province muskets, the locks tied on with a string; others brought fowling-pieces of their own, and others carried nothing but walking-sticks; while many had never fired a gun in their lives.[647] Forbes reported to Pitt that their officers, except a few in the higher ranks, were “an extremely bad collection of broken inn-keepers, horse-jockeys, and Indian traders;” nor is he more flattering towards the men, though as to some of them he afterwards changed his mind.[648]