Iowa vs. Missouri: The Honey War - My State Monday

Today I think I'm going to do a more My State Monday than a My Town Monday. I can recall something I read during Composition II class in college about a war between the two states. That's not entirely accurate as Iowa was still more a territory than a state but Missouri was a state.

Dorothy Schwieder writes:

[Robert] Lucas had little time to enjoy the prestige of his appointment, as many issues demanded his attention. Land surveys had gotten under way in Iowa in 1836, with land sales beginning in 1838. Large numbers of settlers were arriving daily, and interior county governments had to be organized.

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Robert Lucas was the first territorial governor of Iowa.

One website states:

When Governor Lucas arrived at Burlington in 1838, he found that he had many problems to solve. One of these was a serious dispute as to the location of the boundary between the Territory of Iowa and the State of Missouri. A strip of land from nine to thirteen miles wide along the border was claimed both by Missouri and Iowa.

Governor Lucas had been through a similar dispute with Michigan when he was governor of Ohio. He insisted that the quarrel was not between Missouri and Iowa, but between Missouri and the United States, since Iowa was still a territory. If the Missourians started a war about the location of the boundary, they would be fighting the United States, he declared.

The trouble had its beginning long before any settlers came to Iowa. In 1816, J. C. Sullivan had been employed by the United States government to survey and mark the boundaries of the Osage Indian lands in Missouri. When Missouri became a state in 1821, that part of the Sullivan line which extended due west from the Des Moines River to a point near the present northwestern corner of Missouri was regarded as the northern boundary of the new state. In 1824 an extension of this line from the Des Moines River to the Mississippi was regarded as the northern boundary of the Half-Breed Tract.

No question was raised about the boundary until after settlers began to move into northeastern Missouri and southeastern Iowa in the late thirties. By this time the marks of the old Indian boundary or Sullivan line could scarcely be found, and the settlers in this region did not know whether they lived in Iowa or Missouri.

In 1837 the legislature of Missouri ordered the line to be resurveyed. The constitution of Missouri defined the northern boundary as the parallel of latitude which passed through the "rapids of the river Des Moines." J. C. Brown, who was employed to survey the line, apparently did not know that the Des Moines Rapids were in the Mississippi River. He looked for them in the Des Moines River and found a riffle at the Great Bend near the present town of Keosauqua. There he began his survey running the line due west. This line was several miles north of the Sullivan line, which for many years had been considered the boundary.

Then the trouble began. When Missouri officers tried to collect taxes in the region that is now the southern part of Davis and Van Buren Counties, the settlers refused to pay. They appealed to Governor Lucas and he defended their action. Then Governor Lilburn W. Boggs of Missouri came to the rescue of the Missouri officers who had tried to collect taxes. The quarrel grew hotter and hotter.

In the region under dispute were several bee trees which the settlers valued because of the honey stored in the hollow trunks. When a Missourian chopped down three of these trees it made the Iowans very angry. An Iowa officer tried to arrest the man who chopped down the trees but he escaped into Missouri. On account of this bee-tree incident the quarrel has sometimes been called the Honey War.

Wikipedia has some great information about the Honey War as well.

The tract of land they were fighting over wasn't very large:



I guess if you term that in size of tax monies collected then that might seem like a large tract of land to invade a territory for.

This state has a lot of history behind it and over the summer Middle and I made a visit to one of our oldest cemetaries in our area: Woodland Cemetary. The crypt creeped me out. It felt cold even though it was a warm day. I'm not sure why but I almost felt anger from inside for taking a picture of it. This one (Cassidy):



Middle said "That's wierd mom. All the other crypts are locked but this one isn't." The gate was locked but the interior door was open. It is hooked on to the old Des Moines Receiving Vault where bodies would go when the ground was too frozen to bury them. If you have time - go back and look through that link because there are quite a few historical points made on it.

For more My Town Monday posts please visit the founding father of My Town Monday, Mr. Travis Erwin.

* Iowa: The Middle Land by Dorothy Schweiber, p. 38