The lineage of what is now known as the Queensland Mounted Infantry is quite convoluted and less linear than sentiment would suggest. Initially after the Russian scare of the Crimean War when every state in Australia carried a paranoid belief that they were the secret targets of the Russian invasion fleet, the response was to establish militia units to confront this menace. In Queensland, this culminated in a group of enthusiastic horsemen creating the Queensland Mounted Rifles in 1860 with two troops formed at Brisbane and Ipswich. This experiment lasted until 1863 when numbers dropped off and the Brisbane troop was disbanded. The Ipswich troop was renamed the Queensland Light Horse in 1864 and remained so until it too suffered declining number and was disbanded in 1866.