William Clyde Thompson

William Clyde Thompson (c. 1839–1912) was a Texas Choctaw-Chickasaw leader of the Mount Tabor Indian Community in Texas and an officer of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. After moving north to the Chickasaw Nation in 1889, he led an effort to gain enrollment of his family and other Texas Choctaws as Citizens by blood of the Choctaw Nation in Indian Territory. This was at the time of enrollment for the Final Roll of the Five Civilized Tribes, also known as the Dawes Rolls, which established citizenship in order for the nations to be broken up for white settlement and to allot communal tribal lands to individual Indians. The Choctaw Advisory Board opposed inclusion of the Texas Choctaw as well as the Jena Choctaws in Louisiana, as they had both lived primarily outside of the Choctaw Nation. Thompson's case eventually went to the United States Supreme Court to be decided where he and about 70 other Texas Choctaws who had relocated to Indian Territory ultimately had their status restored as Citizens by Blood in the Choctaw Nation.

Born in about 1839 near Fort Towson in the Choctaw Nation, Thompson was an infant when his family moved to what was then Mexican Texas. They returned to the Choctaw Nation in 1840 after an attack on their village on Attoyac Bayou in what is now Rusk County, Texas. Soon afterwards both of his parents died, leaving him and a brother Arthur to live with their elderly grandmother Margaret McCoy-Thompson near Fort Washita, before being sent back to Mississippi, where they were raised by their maternal grandparents. The brothers entered the Confederate Army there when the Civil War broke out.

After the Civil War, Thompson initially returned to Texas and re-established connections with extended family among the Mount Tabor Indian Community. He married and started a family there. They moved north to Indian Territory in 1889, settling at Marlow in the Chickasaw Nation.