The Honey War of 1839: Missouri vs Iowa Over Bee Trees and a Bad Survey

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In 1816 surveyor John C. Sullivan dragged a 66-foot Gunter's chain north from the mouth of the Kansas River for 100 miles, then east to the Des Moines River, which he described as a small river with shallow, gentle water. When Missouri wrote its 1820 constitution, with Sullivan sitting as a delegate, it fixed the northern border at the rapids of the River Des Moines, wording meant to point to the Des Moines Rapids on the Mississippi. Nobody cared until 1834, when the federal government opened the Half-Breed Tract north of the line to white settlement. In 1837 Missouri hired J.C. Brown to resurvey, and he found rapids on the Des Moines River near Keosauqua, about 9.5 miles north of Sullivan's line, letting Missouri claim a strip along the whole border.

Missouri tax agents crossing into what are now Van Buren and Davis counties were chased off with pitchforks, and on the way out they cut down three hollow bee trees to settle the debt. Clark County sheriff Uriah "Sandy" Gregory was seized by an Iowa crowd and jailed in Muscatine. Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs sent militia under Major General David Willock, and Iowa territorial governor Robert Lucas called out his own. Willock refused to fight, both governors stood down, and after Iowa became a state in 1846 the Supreme Court decided Missouri v. Iowa in 1849, upholding Sullivan's line on the principle of acquiescence.

• On the frontier, honey served as sweetener, food preservative and a near currency, so the bee trees were a real economic loss.
• Iowa volunteers came armed with blunderbusses, rusty flintlocks, a plow coulter on a log chain, a six-foot sheet iron sword and a sausage stuffer.
• The Missouri militia's total pay for seven days on the border came to $46.
• A new survey in 1850 traced Sullivan's crooked line, leaving a jog near Keokuk that forms Iowa's southernmost tip.
• In 2005 surveyors with GPS were still searching for the 1850 iron markers to settle property disputes.