The rush to Carson valley drew attention away from another mining enterprise further south. In the western half of New Mexico, between the Rio Grande and the Colorado, there had been successful mining ever since the acquisition of the territory. The southwest boundary of the United States after the Mexican War was defined in words that could not possibly be applied to the face of the earth. This fact, together with knowledge that an easy railway grade ran south of the Gila River, had led in 1853 to the purchase of additional land from Mexico and the definition of a better boundary in the Gadsden treaty. In these lands of the Gadsden purchase old mines came to light in the years immediately following. Sylvester Mowry and Charles D. Poston were most active in promoting the mining companies which revived abandoned claims and developed new ones near the old Spanish towns of Tubac and Tucson. The region was too remote and life too hard for the individual miner to have much chance. Organized mining companies here took the place of the detached prospector of Colorado and Nevada. Disappointed miners from California came in, and perhaps "the Vigilance Committee of San Francisco did more to populate the new Territory than the silver mines. Tucson became the headquarters of vice, dissipation, and crime.... It was literally a paradise of devils." Excessive dryness, long distances, and Apache depredation discouraged rapid growth, yet the surveys of the early fifties and the passage of the overland mail through the camps in 1858 advertised the Arizona settlement and enabled it to live. The outbreak of the Civil War extinguished for the time the Mowry mines and others in the Santa Cruz Valley, holding them in check till a second mineral area in western New Mexico should be found. United States army posts were abandoned, confederate agents moved in, and Indians became bold. The federal authority was not reëstablished until Colonel J. H. Carleton led his California column across the Colorado and through New Mexico to Tucson early in 1862. During the next two years he maintained his headquarters at Santa Fé, carried on punitive campaigns against the Navaho and the Apache, and encouraged mining.