Long before the thunder of muskets at Lexington or the echo of Jefferson’s pen across the pages of the Declaration of Independence, the American colonies were already engulfed in a struggle that would change the world.

In this week’s episode of Dave Does History on Bill Mick Live, we trace the origins of that struggle—not to July 1776, but back to the tangled frontier of 1754. That’s when a 22-year-old Virginian named George Washington led a small detachment of colonial militia into the Ohio Country, unknowingly lighting the match that would ignite a global firestorm.