Meetings were held by the miners, most of whom had been in the California gold rush but 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, 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 had 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. This regiment was of the "a good Indian is a dead Indian" persuasion and was 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.