This book brings to life the epic march of 1,000 men recruited from Colorado's towns, farms, and mining camps to fight 3,000 Confederate soldiers in New Mexico. Drawing on a host of previously overlooked diaries, letters, and contemporary newspaper accounts, military historian Flint Whitlock, tells the stories of Union heroes such as Colorado governor William Gilpin and Colonels John Slough, John Chivington, Kit Carson, and Edward Canby, along with average soldiers - men on both sides who marched, fought, and overcame immense distances and privations.On their way to Colorado's rich mines in search of gold and silver for the Confederacy's dwindling coffers, Confederate leader Henry Hopkins Sibley and his 3,000 Texans won a series of engagements with Union troops along the Rio Grande until they were turned back by the ragtag, hastily assembled Coloradans in an epic conflict at Glorieta Pass, just east of Santa Fe. The western theatre shaped the fate of the West and of the nation, and its story is a powerful one of miners, farmers, and peacetime officers turning themselves overnight into soldiers and combat leaders.