His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis Page A

Washington immediately wrote Thomas Gage, a fellow survivor of the Monongahela massacre, requesting an introduction to Forbes. This time he dispensed with the awkwardly obsequious tone of the Loudoun letter and suggested he was not asking a favor so much as offering one himself:
I mean not, Sir, as one who has favors to ask of him—on the contrary, having entirely laid aside all hopes of preferment in the military line (and being induced at present to serve this campaign from abstract motives, purely laudable), I only wish to be distinguished in some measure from the general run of provincial Officers, as I understand there will be a motley herd of us. This, I flatter myself, can hardly be deemed an unreasonable request, when it is considered, that I have been much longer in the Service than any provincial officer in America. 55
    Forbes and his extremely capable second in command, Henry Bouquet, welcomed Washington’s advice, in part because they found it compelling, in part because the entire expedition moved beneath the shadow of the Braddock tragedy and needed to avoid his mistakes. First, they agreed to retain a large detachment of Cherokees as scouts, which Washington insisted were “the only Troops fit to Cope with Indians on such Ground.” Second, they adopted the ranger uniforms of enlisted men in the Virginia Regiment instead of the traditional redcoats of the British army. Forbes called it “Indian dress,” adding that “wee must comply and learn the Art of Warr, from Enemy Indians, or anything else who have seen the Country and Warr carried on in it.” In effect, Forbes was acknowledging that the Virginia Regiment was the professional model and the British regulars the rank amateurs in this kind of campaign. Third, Forbes and Bouquet agreed to train their lead units in the forest-fighting tactics Washington had developed. If ambushed, the troops should “in an Instant, be thrown into an Order of Battle in the Woods,” meaning they should advance in two groups to the tree line and flank the enemy on the left and right while the Indian scouts circled to the rear. Finally, the Virginia Regiment would be included in the vanguard, since, as Washington put it, “from long Intimacy, and scouting in these Woods, my Men are as well acquainted with all the Passes and difficulties as any Troops that will be employed.” 56
    In all respects save one, Washington got his way, but the one exception drove a wedge between him and Forbes that eventually caused him to display his bottled-up contempt for British superiors in a form that verged on gross insubordination. The contentious issue was the proper route to Fort Duquesne. Washington presumed the expedition would follow Braddock’s course across northern Virginia and southern Maryland, then northwest across Pennsylvania to the forks of the Ohio. Braddock’s Road seemed the obvious choice to Washington because it had already been cut. And it was vastly preferable to all Virginians because it linked the prospective bounty of the Ohio Country to the Old Dominion. The clinching argument, as Washington saw it, was that Braddock’s Road followed an old Indian path, so that the people who knew the region better than anyone else had identified it as the preferred route. 57
    The trouble was that Forbes’s main force was based at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and British engineers had proposed cutting a new road straight across that colony which would be about thirty miles shorter than Braddock’s Road and did not require an initial detour south to the Shenandoah Valley. (It follows much the same course as the modern-day Pennsylvania Turnpike.) Washington proposed a special meeting with Bouquet to protest this decision, which he believed had been unduly influenced by Pennsylvanians eager to make their colony the permanent gateway to the American interior. Bouquet agreed, presuming that, whatever the resolution, Washington would accept it as final. “I See with utmost