The struggle for the Rio Grande was as important as any of the military operations on the plains. At the beginning of the war the confederate forces seized the river around El Paso in time to make clear the way for Johnston as he hurried east. The Tucson country was occupied about the same time, so that in the fall of 1861 the confederate outposts were somewhat beyond the line of Texas and the Rio Grande, with New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado threatened. In December General Henry Hopkins Sibley assumed command of the confederate troops in the upper Rio Grande, while Colonel E. R. S. Canby, from Fort Craig, organized the resistance against further extension of the confederate power. Sibley's manifest intentions against the upper Rio Grande country, around Santa Fé and Albuquerque, aroused federal apprehensions in the winter of 1862. Governor Gilpin, at Denver, was already frightened at the danger within his own territory, and scarcely needed the order which came from Fort Leavenworth through General Hunter to reënforce Canby and look after the Colorado forts. He took responsibility easily, drew upon the federal treasury for funds which had not been allowed him, and shortly had the first Colorado, and a part of the second Colorado volunteers marching south to join the defensive columns. It is difficult to define this march in terms applicable to movements of war. At least one soldier in the second Colorado took with him two children and a wife, the last becoming the historian of the regiment and praising the chivalry of the soldiers, apparently oblivious of the fact that it is not a soldier's duty to be child's nurse to his comrade's family. But with wife and children, and the degree of individualism and insubordination which these imply, the Pike's Peak frontiersmen marched south to save the territory. Their patriotism at least was sure.