The men who served with him were German, Irish, and Scottish settlers. They were fiercely independent frontiersmen, farmers, and artisans who had settled in the wilds near the forks of the Allegheny, Pennsylvania.
Thompson was a hardy man. Born in Ireland, he emigrated to British-ruled colonial America and served as a captain in the Crown’s military in Western Pennsylvania during the French and Indian War. The war lasted seven years and remains a pivotal yet often overlooked episode in American history.
The war, which destroyed the French Empire in North America and sparked the fire that would eventually lead to the American Revolution, started right there in Western Pennsylvania as a skirmish between another young soldier serving the Crown’s militia lieutenant, Col. George Washington, and French troops under the command of Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville in Fayette County.
According to research done by the Army War College, William Thompson’s commission as the colonel of the Pennsylvania Rifle Battalion in late June of 1775 made him the first colonel of what became George Washington’s Continental Army, the U.S. Regular Army.
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