This letter is written by Colonel William Prescott, from the camp at the headquarters of the Continental Army in Cambridge, to John Adams who was in Philadelphia representing Massachusetts at the sessions of the Second Continental Congress. Prescott, a native of Groton, Massachusetts, and veteran of the French and Indian Wars, gives Adams a brief "state of the facts" of the "Action at Charlestown"—the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June 1775.  Prescott commanded the Patriot forces that fortified the heights in Charlestown and in the letter he describes the different orders sending troops to different parts of the battlefield.