The combatants of the war were six hastily assembled regiments of irregulars mustered from the goldfields around Yale, British Columbia and the Nlakaʼpamux people of the Fraser Canyon upstream from there.
The Nlaka'pamux retaliated by killing several of them, decapitating the bodies and dumping them into the river; they eventually were found circling in a large eddy near the town of Yale, the main commercial centre of the rush.
For some time in the months leading up to this incident, tensions had risen due to increasing conflict between indigenous people and the encroaching miners.
Of the six regiments hastily organized to respond to the war, one, named the Austrian Company and 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 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).
The war parties left Yale and progressed to Spuzzum, where the companies found 3000 panicked miners encamped in a small area near the native rancherie, worried for their safety but unable to proceed any further south.
The New York and Austrian companies met no resistance on the journey north, and sent messages forward to Camchin, the ancient Nlaka'pamux "capital" at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers (today's town of Lytton), that they were coming to parley peace, not make war.
This was not due to native attack, but rather to a panicked reaction to a rifle falling over and misfiring, causing a melee from which only two or three men survived, as all the rest died shooting at each other in the dark.
Snyder and Centras marched into the midst of the Nlaka'pamux war council undaunted; if they had known about the thousands of warriors watching from the surrounding mountainsides they might not have been so bold.
He was even more mortified to discover that Snyder and Centras, without a mandate, had proceeded to make treaties with the natives, which was under British law entirely the jurisdiction of the Crown.