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198 Washington's laborious method of securing necessary information concerning the West, and his earnestness in not omitting any phase of the project are exemplified in a letter to Richard Butler, newly appointed superintendent of Indian affairs, written in 1786: "As I am anxious to learn the nature of the navigation of Beaver Creek, the distance, and what kind of a portage there is between it and Cayahoga, or any other nearer navigable water of Lake Erie, and the nature of the navigation of the latter; and also the navigation of the Muskingum, the distance and sort of portage across to the navigable waters of Cayahoga or Sandusky, and the kind of navigation therein; you would do me an acceptable favor to convey them to me, with the computed distances from the River Ohio by each of these routes to the lake itself."

In a letter to Henry Lee WashingtonHenry Lee [sic], again, he writes: "Till you get low down the Ohio, I conceive, that, considering the length of the voyage to New Orleans, the difficulty of the current, and the time necessary to perform it in, it would be the interest of the inhabitants to bring their