 Nearly all of the men who volunteered as Union soldiers stayed in the West, within the Department of the Pacific, to guard forts and other facilities, occupy secessionist regions, and fight Indians in the state and the western territories.Some 2,350 men in the California Column marched east across Arizona in 1862 to expel the Confederates from Arizona and New Mexico.The California Column then spent most of the remainder of the war fighting hostile Indians in the area.