This Christopher Gist was a Colonial-era explorer, scout, and frontier settler who was employed by the Ohio Company and had served with 21-year-old Colonel George Washington.

(Christopher Gist is credited with twice saving Washington's life when they were surveying land in the Ohio country in 1753.)

In 1776, Gist was appointed major of Smallwood's Maryland Regiment, and was with them in the Battle of Long Island, where they fought a delaying action at the Old Stone House (Brooklyn, New York), allowing the American army to escape encirclement.

At one time after a bayonet charge, his force secured fifty prisoners, but the British under Lord Cornwallis rallied, and the Marylanders gave way.

(Gist appears (back row, right side) in John Trumbull's painting Surrender of Lord Cornwallis which hangs in the rotunda of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.) He joined the southern army under Nathanael Greene,[5] and he was given the command of the light corps again when the army was remodeled in 1782.

On August 26, 1782, he rallied the broken forces of the Americans under John Laurens after they had been scattered in an ambush set by a British foraging party.