On Thursday morning, October 22, 1863, citizens of Bloomfield found Union troops drawn up before the military headquarters in the former home of physician Thomas W. McDoniel as a mutiny unfolded within the 2nd Battalion of the 6th Cavalry Regiment of Missouri Volunteers. The officers believed their commanding officer, Major Samuel Montgomery, aided by his son, Capt. Richard H. Montgomery, and the battalion surgeon, Lt. Thomas W. Johnson, intended to turn the post over to Confederate forces, so five Union officers moved to arrest him and seize control of the post. Although they respected Montgomery as a hard-fighting officer, they objected that he had ridiculed superiors, allowed Rebel soldiers to return to the area without trial or bond, and showed little concern over rumors of an approaching Confederate force. Suspicion also centered on his recent marriage to Martha Owen Walker, a young widowed school teacher from a prominent Bloomfield family whom local Union loyalists accused of being a Confederate spy and courier. The mutineers refused Montgomery's order to dismiss the troops and took control of the telegraph operator and his machine, but after Montgomery met privately with Capt. William Crockett, the assembled troops were dismissed back to their barracks. District headquarters then sent Lt. Col. H.M. Hiller to Bloomfield, and he arrested four of the five officers, reported the town quiet and orderly with no Confederate forces nearby, and concluded that nothing justified their actions and that they had acted very sillily. Four of the five officers were court-martialed and dismissed from service, while the fifth, Lt. Reber, deserted and resigned his commission. Following the war, Montgomery returned to Bloomfield and served as mayor, a member of the school board, and a county judge until his death, and on May 17, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln notified Missouri's governor that the sentences of J.H. Paynter, William H. Crockett, E.J. Burross, and Luther Potter were dismissed and that they were eligible to be re-commissioned into the U.S. Army, though none rejoined the military.