Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 5).djvu/116

112 tion, that you are above the influences of prejudice, and ready to go heartily where reason and judgement shall direct. I wish, sincerely, that we may all entertain one and the same opinion; therefore I desire to have an interview with you at the houses built half way between our camps. I will communicate all the intelligence, which it has been in my power to collect; and, by weighing impartially the advantages and disadvantages of each route, I hope we shall be able to determine what is most eligable, and save the General trouble and loss of time."

Concerning this meeting Washington wrote as follows to his friend Major Francis Halket, then in Forbes's camp at Carlisle: "I am just returned (August 2undefined) from a conference with Colonel Bouquet. I find him fixed, I think I may say unalterably fixed, to lead you a new way to the Ohio, through a road, every inch of which is to be cut at this advanced season, when we