in-;- terms to the State convention: "Upon a Survey of our Stores we find we are not so fully stocked as we could wish. Flour is what is most likely to be wanted. His Excellency therefore rails upon your Convention in the most pressing maimer, and begs you will set every Engine at work to send down every Barrel you can procure towards the Army." Yet at the last some eighty or ninety barrels of provisions had to be left at Kingsbridge for lack of means to transport them. By the 20th all of Washington's troops on Manhattan Island (with the exception of the garrison of Fort Washington) had been transferred to Westchester County, and he now took up his headquarters a( Kingsbridge. The most advanced American post on the 20th was apparently that of General Lord Stirling, who, according to a private letter of that date, written from the ''Camp of Yonkers " by the noted General Gold Selleck Silliman to his wife, lay " with a large force of troops and three field-pieces about six or seven miles northeast " of Yonkers, " on the road from New Kochelle to the North River, at the distance of about two or three miles from the seashore." There was at this time no force whatever at White Plains but the militia guard of 300, already noticed. On the morning of the 20th Washington dispatched Colonel Rufus Putnam, an able engineer and very trustworthy officer,1 to reconnoiter the country in the vicinity of the enemy. Colonel Putnam proceeded to within two or three miles of White Plains. From his observations of the easy accessibility of that place to the enemy, he became profoundly convinced of the immediate necessity of having it occupied by a respectable body of men, so as to secure its large ami vitally important magazine of provisions against attack.