MILES. From Carlisle to Shippensburg 21 " Shippensburg to Chambers's 12 " Chambers's to Pacelin's 12 " Pacelin's to Fort Frederic 12 " Fort Frederic to Fort Cumberland 40 ---- 97 " Fort Cumberland to Fort Duquesne 115 ---- 212 "From this computation there appears to be a difference of nineteen miles only. Were all the supplies necessarily to come from Carlisle, it is well known, that the goodness of the old road is a sufficient compensation for the shortness of the other, as the wrecked and broken wagons there clearly demonstrate.... "... From what has been said relative to the two roads, it appears to me very clear, that the old one is infinitely better, than the other can be made, and that there is no room to hesitate in deciding which to take, when we consider the advanced season, and the little time left to execute our plan." But Forbes's letter of the thirty-first was decisive, and, following his orders, Colonel Bouquet began cutting a new road westward from Raystown August 1. CHAPTER V THE NEW ROAD The correspondence included in the chapter preceding affords probably the utmost light that can be thrown today upon the reason of the making of the great Pennsylvanian thoroughfare to the Ohio. It cannot be affirmed, as has often been said, that Forbes was early prejudiced in favor of a Pennsylvania route; he never could have been such a hypocrite as to pen the words to be found on page 94. That his first plans were completely altered at the advice of Sir John St. Clair is very plain from his letters to Governor Denny (March 20) and to Colonel Bouquet (July 6); but up to the very last he leaves the question open, to be decided wholly according to the reports of the guides and explorers. It is difficult, however, to reconcile the words in Forbes's letter to Bouquet of July 23, in which he states that St. Clair, when advising the Raystown route, affirmed "that he nor nobody else knew anything of the road leading from Laurell hill." It is evident from this that Forbes originally expected to fall down to the Braddock road from Raystown, but that when once on the ground, with the distances clear in his mind, he was compelled to find a shorter road westward if there was one to be found. This is the only explanation of his immediate change of plan at St. Clair's advice, knowing that St. Clair had found no route westward by Laurel Hill; it seems that St. Clair thought only of proceeding via Raystown to Fort Cumberland, as he affirmed in his letter of June 9 to Bouquet. St. Clair was undoubtedly right in deciding that the best