St. Clair and Denny reached Fort Hamilton on the seventh, and on the day following pushed on after the army over the narrow course it had made; this was running "north sixteen degrees." Four encampments were passed and the militia, and St. Clair reached his army that evening. There was full need of him. The army was making but five miles a day; and at that disastrously slow pace the stores were not keeping up. Tonight (the eighth) St. Clair wrote a stinging letter to Israel Ludlow. Instead of having ninety thousand rations, as was promised, St. Clair had to write "by day after tomorrow I shall not have an ounce unless some arrives.... If you found the transportation impracticable, you ought to have informed me, that I might have taken means to have got supplies forward, _or not have committed my army to the wilderness_.... No disappointment should have happened which was in the power of money to prevent; and money could certainly have prevented any here.... Want of drivers will be no excuse to a starving army and a disappointed people."[105] Another exceedingly unfortunate affair demanded St. Clair's attention, in his opinion, that night. He had given carefully studied and explicit orders by which the army should march. As noted, General Butler changed the order of march as he threatened to do in his letter to St. Clair from Fort Hamilton. The reasons for the change did not appeal to the commander-in-chief; Butler was called to account for his action, apologized, and stated his reasons. St. Clair had ordered that the army march in three lines, contending that it was far more easy to cut three roads, ten feet in width each, than to cut one road of thirty or forty. St. Clair's method was that pursued by the wisest and most successful generals--Forbes and Bouquet--in hewing the first roads across the Alleghenies. "The quantity of timber," St. Clair records, "increases in a surprising proportion, as the width of the road is increased;"[106] the veteran conqueror of Fort Duquesne, General Forbes, wrote his right-hand man Colonel Bouquet under the same circumstances, urging the cutting of several paths, saying, "I don't mean here to cut down any large trees, only to clear away the Brushwood and saplins...."[107] Temporarily, St. Clair allowed Butler's alteration to stand, but insisted that it should soon be corrected as the army pushed on.