A little more chicanery and misjudgment and the entire army would have mutinied. St. Clair, before mounting his horse, wrote Knox that his troops amounted in all to twenty-three hundred. "I trust I shall find them sufficient," he added. The words remind one of Braddock's last letter to the British Ministry before leaving Fort Cumberland for the death-trap on the Monongahela in 1755. Major Ebenezer Denny traveled with St. Clair as aide-de-camp and has left us the official account of the army's march. Denny was not anxious to serve. "You must go," General Harmar declared, "some will escape and you may be among the number."[1]
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
- ↑ St. Clair Papers, vol. ii, p. 252.
