Off the Wall: When Missouri and Iowa Nearly Went to War Over Honey
The Honey War of 1839
The Honey War of 1839
(Commonplace Fun Facts) - …Despite the whimsical name, the Honey War involved genuine political tension, armed militias, and enough frontier stubbornness to power a dozen Western movies. The fact that no one was killed was largely due to the rare, distinctly Great Plains approach to life known as “everyone eventually realizing how ridiculous the situation had become.”
How a Surveying Problem Turned into a Border Crisis
The roots of the Honey War go back to one of the great villains of early American geography: vague descriptions.
Just as in the Toledo War, where Ohio and Michigan nearly came to blows over a strip of land that most maps had trouble noticing, the Honey War’s origins come out of ambiguous lines on a map.
When Missouri became a state in 1821, its northern boundary was described using language that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time but later proved to be about as precise as saying, “Somewhere over there near the river.”
The northern Missouri border was defined as running east from the “rapids of the Des Moines River.” That sounds clear enough until one remembers that the Des Moines River is hundreds of miles long and…