While Walker and his men were battling for their lives in Rivas, during the months of March and April, 1857, another and a bloody scene in the tragedy of filibusterism was being enacted on the stage which had witnessed the failures of De Boulbon and Walker. Towards the end of March one hundred and fifty men from California were led across the boundary line into the northern part of Sonora by Henry A. Crabbe, a former friend of Walker, and like him, a man of bold and ambitious character. He had been one of the most useful agents in organizing the latter's expedition to Nicaragua, and through him Walker had secured some of his most efficient officers, Hornsby, Fisher, and De Brissot, all of whom had been concerned in a contract between Crabbe and Jerez similar in its terms to that afterwards made between Castellon and Walker.
Crabbe was an ex-Senator of the State of California; in his party were seven former members of the legislature and one present senator, together with the former State treasurer and State comptroller; men who had outlived their popularity, perhaps, or who had become tired of humdrum life and sought a new career in Sonora, the graveyard of adventurers. Nor was the military element lacking. Colonel Watkins, who had been with Walker in his expedition to the same country, and a former lieutenant in the regular army, Colonel T. D. Johns, superintended the military department as the expedition crossed the line. They marched through the country without hindrance until they passed Sonoyta and approached Caborca, on the Gulf of California, near Point Lobos. There for the first time the Mexicans showed a hostile front. Crabbe had issued an address to the inhabitants, in which he claimed that his business in the country was peaceable, his object being the prosecution of a mining scheme in Sonora; and maintained that, while his party were armed, they had come so only for self-defence against the Apache Indians. The truth of the matter was that Crabbe had been invited to Sonora by the partisans of a political minority, whose leader, Don Ignacio Pesqueira, had meanwhile gained his political ends without the aid of foreign allies, and was much disturbed lest the inopportune arrival of the latter should reflect upon his present loyalty. Crabbe, who had at much cost and labour organized his immigrants and arranged for the future immigration of nine hundred more men, was not disposed to abandon his project. He was allied by marriage with some of the leading families in the State, and may have cherished hopes of exchanging places with Pesqueira in Sonorian affairs. If he counted upon the assistance of the native population he was doomed to a cruel disappointment.