miners lining the riverbanks between there and Kanaka Bar. For some time in the months leading up to this incident, tensions had risen due to increasing conflict between indigenous people and the encroaching miners. Conflict broke out amongst the parties when a group of goldseekers sparred with a party of Indians that had previously killed several white men and dumped them into a pool in much the same manner as the incident at Yale. Due to the reputation of the Nlaka'pamux, the riverbanks north of Yale were emptied, as miners in the thousands fled south to the relative safety of Spuzzum and Yale. The miners held meetings. Most of them had been in the California Gold Rush but they were a diverse lot of men, from all over the world. Of the six regiments hastily organized to respond to the war, one, named the Austrian Company and captained by a John Centras, was composed of French and German irregulars who had served with the William Walker filibustering campaign in Nicaragua in 1853, and relocated to the California goldfields afterwards, following the other Californian miners northwards to Yale when news of the Fraser rush reached San Francisco (many of the Americans in the goldfields had also served in Walker's rebellion). Another regiment, the Whatcom Company, was formed of mostly southerners, under the command of Captain Graham. Bent on a war of extermination, the Whatcom Company's name was taken from that of the Whatcom Trail, which traversed what is now Whatcom County, Washington state from Bellingham Bay on Puget Sound, and which was used in open defiance of the British colonial administration's edict that access to the goldfields be made from Victoria and via steamboat from there only; in other words, their name implicitly indicated their annexationist sentiments. The largest and most influential company formed in the chaotic situation was the New York Pike Guards, led by a Captain Snyder , who swayed the assembled miners' committees for a war of pacification, rather than a war of extermination as was the wish of Captain Graham and others. . Snyder proposed a distinction between warlike and friendly Indians, and messengers sent up the Canyon ahead of the advancing companies to tell friendly natives to display a white flag as a sign of peace.. The war parties left Yale and progressed to Spuzzum, where the companies found 3000 panicked miners encamped in a small