A few days before secretly receiving the shipment of weapons from the Confederacy, Frost had sent a note to Nathaniel Lyon, informing him that the Missouri State Guard needed to construct some fortifications on a bluff overlooking the arsenal complex.
Strictly for training purposes, of course.
Why Frost thought that Lyon, or anyone else, would fall for such a transparent ruse is hard to say. If he was expecting a gullible opponent he was in for a disappointment. Any attempt to construct fortifications, Lyon informed Frost, would be greeted with cannon fire.
The fortifications were not built. But for Lyon, the episode was simply more proof that the nearby camp of the Missouri State Guard was too big a threat to ignore.
On the morning of May 10th, reports began making their way to Frost in rapid-fire fashion, suggesting that Nathaniel Lyon had immediate designs on the militia camp. Alarmed, Frost sent a note to Lyon asking if the reports were true, and expressing his disbelief that the U.S. Army officer would actually attack a lawfully assembled state militia. He then waited for a reply.
Shortly after three o'clock that afternoon, he got one.
Riding at the head of more than 6,000 recently sworn-in troops, pro-Union Nathaniel Lyon was paying a visit to the pro-Confederate Missouri State Guard, less than 1,000 strong. (Included among Lyon's officers was the newly commissioned colonel of volunteers, Frank Blair, Jr. Not wanting to miss out, the popular congressman was doing double-duty as a popular military officer.)
As word quickly spread through the city and scores of people gathered to watch, Lyon had the camp surrounded, and sent in a demand to surrender. Heavily outnumbered, an angry and resentful Daniel Frost had little choice but to comply. Without a shot being fired, Camp Jackson ceased to exist.
And then a very odd thing happened. As Lyon dismounted to oversee the surrender, a nearby horse kicked him square in the stomach, knocking the general to the ground and rendering him unconscious. (Apparently it was the second strange event involving Lyon at Camp Jackson. A popular story holds that Lyon had previously visited the camp on a personal spy mission, disguised, of all things, as Frank Blair's mother-in-law.)
A cynic might suggest that the animal was trying to knock some horse sense into the Union commander. Whatever the case, at what was clearly the most dramatic moment so far in the struggle for Missouri, Nathaniel Lyon was out like a light, felled not by an enemy bullet but by a well-placed hoof.
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