Colonel Edward Richard Sprigg Canby and Colonel Henry Hopkins Sibley were seasoned soldiers and leaders with many Indian campaigns behind them when they faced each other in the 1862 Civil War Battle of Valverde near Fort Craig. Canby, the son of a Kentucky country doctor and a graduate of the American Military Academy, had served in campaigns against the Seminoles, Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Navajos before coming to Fort Craig. He was named colonel of the Nineteenth Infantry at Fort Defiance in New Mexico Territory soon after the Civil War began, and in battles at Valverde, Apache Canyon, and Glorieta, his troops effectively prevented Confederate expansion from Texas into the greater Southwest. After the war, he aided Reconstruction in the South, supervised the process that gave blacks the right to vote in Texas, and became widely known for the judiciousness of his political appointments. He was later killed by Modoc Indians in California during an attempt to parley, making him the only army general killed in the Trans-Mississippi Indian Wars. Sibley, a graduate of West Point and a veteran soldier from Nacogdoches, Louisiana, had served in the Mexican-American War and on the New Mexico frontier against the Navajos. He resigned from serving the North at Fort Union in New Mexico in 1861 to join the Confederacy. He aimed first to seize the Colorado gold fields to support the Southern cause and then to establish a Pacific Coast supply port beyond Union blockade, but his expeditions were undone by miscalculations and by his poor health. He failed to gain the support he expected from New Mexico Hispanics, who had grown tired of mistreatment by Texans, and he could not obtain the supplies he expected along the western route. During the Battle of Valverde, he suffered badly from kidney-stone pain and was known to become incapacitated from the alcohol he drank to dull it. He never matched the achievements of his fellow West Point graduates during or after the Civil War, and accounts differed on whether he died in 1883 in Egypt while serving in that army or in Louisiana in poor health and spirits.