The Missouri/Iowa War

On the side of a lonely dirt road a few miles north of Sheridan, Missouri, a monument marks the events of November 1839, when 1,200 Iowans and 2,200 Missouri militiamen faced off over imaginary river rapids, a botched land survey, a jailed sheriff, and three honey bee trees.

Confusion

The road to November 1839 began over thirty years earlier. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 opened up roughly two million acres of the North American continent for settlement. Aside from Lewis and Clark, the vast lands west of the Mississippi were unexplored and — more importantly — not surveyed.

The United States wanted to award the veterans of the War of 1812 their promised ‘land bounties’ and realized that the land needed to be surveyed. The surveying of the Fifth Meridian in eastern Arkansas in 1815, with the baseline at the confluence of the St. Francis and Mississippi Rivers, and the meridian at the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers set the first survey lines west of the Mississippi. For settlers to move in (and for states to be eventually created), a lot more work still needed to be done.

Treaties with Native American tribes in the region also added to the confusion. The 1804 Treaty of St. Louis required the Sac and Fox tribes to give up their lands in what is now northeast Missouri, southern Wisconsin, and northern Illinois. The 1808 Treaty of Fort Clark convinced the Osage Nation to forfeit most of their lands in present-day Missouri and Arkansas. After the War of 1812, the 1815 Treaties of Portage de Sioux made sure that the Native tribes lived up to their former commitments.

In 1816, the head of the Missouri and Illinois Territory survey agency commissioned John C. Sullivan to survey the border called out in the Osage treaty. Starting at the mouth of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers, Sullivan was to survey two lines, one a hundred miles (approximately 161 kilometers) north and another one-hundred-fifty miles (241 kilometers) and forty chains (roughly 2600 feet, or .80 kilometers) east to the Des Moines River.

Sullivan got the northern line correct. However, when surveying eastward he did not allow for the differences between the magnetic and geographic north poles. The geographic north, where the lines of longitude and latitude converge into what we call the North Pole, differs from the magnetic north pole (a point in northern Canada) by about 311 miles (500 kilometers), a difference called the magnetic inclination. A compass needle normally points to the magnetic, not geographic North Pole. Even though Sullivan was an experienced surveyor, not accounting for magnetic inclination caused his eastern line to drift northwards by two degrees.

To add to the confusion, Sullivan’s survey notes did not mention rapids on the Des Moines River, instead describing a “small river with shallow gentle water.” He then decided on his own to survey another twenty miles (roughly 32 kilometers) to the Mississippi River, where he did encounter the Des Moines Rapids.

The “Sullivan Line,” as his imperfect line was called, created a border with one end four miles larger than the other, a mistake not realized until 1837.

Missouri Statehood

The 1820 Missouri Constitutional Convention (with John Sullivan as a participant) used the “Sullivan’s Line” as its northern border, declaring it as “extending westward at the rapids of the river Des Moines,” the rapids that Sullivan never described in his surveyor’s notes.

The late 1830s saw an influx of settlers moving into northeastern Missouri and southeastern Iowa (which was still a territory). In 1837, the Missouri General Assembly commissioned surveyor John C. Brown to clearly define its northern boundary.

Starting on the eastern side, Brown ignored Sullivan’s description of the “rapids below Fort Madison on the Mississippi” and looked for the rapids on the Des Moines River that he believed were at Keosauqua, Iowa. This would move Missouri’s border roughly nine and a half miles (15 kilometers) north of the “Sullivan Line” in the east and thirteen miles north on the western end.

Shortly after the “Brown Line” was established, it was Iowa’s turn to contribute to the surveying confusion. Along with the federal government, Iowa sponsored a third border survey, the results of which, according to the federal representative Albert Miller Lea, left him to conclude that there were four possible boundaries: the “Brown Line” (the one furthest north), the “Sullivan Line” as surveyed, the original straight line that Sullivan was supposed to have surveyed, or a line south of the “Sullivan Line” that met the rapids at the Mississippi.

Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs believed that the imaginary rapids on the Des Moines River supposedly reflected in Sullivan’s notes established the northern boundary. The Governor of the Iowa Territory Robert Lucas believed that the boundary was the “Sullivan Line,” and instructed local law enforcement to protect Iowa’s interest.

The “Honey War”

In October 1839, Clark County Sheriff Uriah S. Gregory led a group from Kahoka, Missouri into Iowa’s Van Buren and Davis counties to collect taxes. There Sheriff Gregory and his group were met by 1,200 pitchfork-wielding Iowans who chased the invading Missourians back to their side of the border. Before they left, the Missourians managed to cut down three honey bee trees, the honey taken instead of taxes.

Safely back in Missouri, Sheriff Gregory wrote to Governor Boggs, saying:

I am at a loss what to do with the Citizens of that territory, two-thirds of which is hostile to the officer and declare if I pretend to use any authority which I am invested by the State of Missouri, they will take me by force and put me in confinement.

In response, Governor Boggs ordered Missouri law enforcement back into the disputed territory to collect the taxes he believed owed to Missouri.

The first time Sheriff Gregory tried to collect taxes he was run off. This time he was not so lucky and was arrested by his Iowan counterpart, Sheriff Henry Heffleman. Charged with ‘usurpation of authority,’ he was held at the Muscatine, Iowa jail.

Missouri Governor Boggs then mobilized elements of the Missouri militia to the border to protect the tax collectors. Iowan Governor Lucas sent parts of his militia in response, and they met at the border.

The “Honey War,” as it has been called, was not much of a conflict. There is no evidence to suggest that the two forces ever met each other. The Missouri militia was called home shortly after deployment. The Iowans went home when they discovered the Missourians had left.

The only casualty turned out to be a side of venison. To express their displeasure of being called out in the middle of winter for nothing, the Missouri militia split a quarter of venison into, one for Governor Boggs and the other for Governor Lucas. According to witness, the men “fired a few rounds at them, until we considered them dead! dead! dead!” Then the venison was given a military burial. “We fired over their graves,” a participant said, “and then resumed the encampment.”

Conclusion

The Governors of Iowa and Missouri eventually agreed to let Washington settle their dispute. Iowa believed that the border should be from the Des Moines Rapids on the Mississippi near the town of Montrose. Missouri contended that the line ran from Des Moines City. Congress split the difference, roughly following the “Sullivan Line” by drawing the line slightly southwestward until it met the longitude of the rapids at Montrose, then running straight west to the Missouri River. When Iowa became a state in 1846 Congress decided to leave the line in place.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the 1849 case State of Missouri v Iowa that the original “Sullivan Line” was indeed the official border, and appointed a commission made up of surveyors from both Missouri and Iowa to resurvey and properly mark the line.

After spending several days to find the original trees marked by Sullivan, the surveyors surveyed a line west to the Missouri River and east to the Des Moines River, the line marked with wooden stakes every mile and an iron stake at every tenth.

This should have resolved the issue, but in 1895, the boundary markers were somehow erased. At the request of both states, the Supreme Court established another commission. Appointing surveyors from Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois, they resurveyed and remarked the boundary that is in use today.

The charges against Sheriff Gregory were eventually dropped. The state of Missouri paid him $250.75 for his troubles.

John Sullivan died in July 1830, probably unaware of the controversy his survey had caused.

The site of the “Honey War” is now the Lacey-Keosauqua State Park where, in the northeast corner, two granite markers sit. One marker calls out the “Sullivan Line.” The other, placed in 1989, by the Virginia chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution to remember the events of 1850.