[SOC] Re: The Honey War (looooooooong)

[Rob Mathery]

I was close to right - wasn't the natn'l gaurd of the respective states, but
rather militas formed by the counties in question.

Here's a map of the disputed region (border there about 5 miles south of me,
current border is about 25 or so):
http://www.iowa-counties.com/historical/honeywar.shtml

And here's a story from some MO conservation Dept written by a humorist :^)

-----
War Was NEVER So Sweet

by Joel M. Vance

In 1839, Missouri and Iowa mobilized their ragtag militias, ready to start
shooting over a tree full of honey.

The bee tree is an artifact of Missouri history. Cutting bee trees for honey
once was a food gathering exercise in many rural Missouri households.

Honey turned the lowly biscuit into manna, Biblical sweetbread (manna is
described in Exodus as tasting "like wafers made with honey").

In old rural Missouri, there were no cans that burst open to reveal premixed
and precut biscuits inside and few farmers kept hives. Some places, flour
still was locally ground, but if not, a peddler came down the road every so
often in his rickety Model T truck and sold flour in colorful sacks which
later became dresses for the girl children.

On a cold winter morning, farm families ate homemade biscuits from the oven
of a Warm Morning wood cookstove, slathered with butter churned from the
milk of Ol' Sue, and with honey from a bee tree that had been cut down on
the branch.

It was a time that will not come again.

Today, there is no incentive to "line" bees (follow them from water or
nectar sources to their hive). Domestic honey is plentiful and cheap and
environmentalists frown on cutting down a tree to rob its bees.

Honey as a food is as old as recorded history. The Bible is filled with
references to honey. In the book of Joshua, as well as in the old folk song
about the blue-tailed fly, there's reference to a "land of milk and honey."
The Egyptians put hives on barges to transport bees close to flowering
fields.

Honey can range from almost inedible to delicately flavored, depending on
the source of the nectar the bees carry back to their hive. John Frye,
retired assistant chief of Protection for the Conservation Department, has
kept bees and tracked wild ones for years. He once found some honey that
tasted exactly like bourbon whiskey, but never could find the source.

Wild honey is a hard-won treat, both for humans and for the bees who make
it. A researcher once found bees were flying eight miles each way from their
hive to an alfalfa field and estimated it took 300,000 miles of travel to
produce a pound of honey.

Each bee carried back up to half its own weight in nectar, flying about 15
miles an hour. It's estimated a worker bee will literally work itself to
death in six weeks.

Most don't know that honeybees aren't native. They are a European import,
certainly one of the few that hasn't proved a pest (like starlings, English
sparrows and gypsy moths).

Settlers imported the first honeybees in 1638. Once bees escaped to the
forests, they quickly adapted and spread, and by 1820 when Missouri became a
state, the wild bee tree was a prize for a settler with a sweet tooth. It
also was the reason for the weirdest near-war in the state's history, the
abortive Honey War of 1839.

The Honey War today is remembered only by a few historians. It didn't last
long and it didn't amount to much, but as wars go it was the best of all
possible worlds. It provided entertainment for everyone and no one got hurt.

There's a metal marker on the northeast Missouri farm of Mr. and Mrs.
Charles Longnecker. It's about three feet high. Time and the Des Moines
River silt are burying it. Mrs. Longnecker's late father, Albert Evans, who
rented the farm around World War One, remembered the post as being his
height.

Perhaps in another century, the rich dirt will bury the last monument to the
silliest war in American history, the Honey War. In 1839, Missouri and Iowa
mobilized their ragtag militias, ready to start shooting over who owned a
wild river bottom full of bee trees.

The dispute got its name when a Missourian, whose name apparently has been
lost by historians, cut three bee trees in an area claimed both by Missouri
and Iowa. The trees were valuable both for the honey, which sold for up to
$.37 a gallon, and for beeswax, which was used in various ways (the finest
candles were of beeswax).

Iowa tried the bee tree thief in absentia and fined him $1.50.

That inflamed Missourians, who have never been reluctant to bash heads over
real or imagined wrongs. Missouri had been a state since 1821. Iowa
Territory was about to become one, so the legal boundary between the two was
an immediate issue.

In 1837, Joseph Brown, a Missouri surveyor, set a boundary line which no one
paid much attention to. In 1838, Maj. Albert Lea, a federal surveyor, laid
out four possible boundary lines, all representing different interpretations
of historical data.

The contested area between Lea's southernmost possibility and the
northernmost was about 2,600 square miles, ranging from nine to 11 miles
wide from the Des Moines River west to the Missouri River.

Missouri Gov. Lilburn Boggs, a contentious type, proclaimed in August 1839,
that Brown's 1837 boundary, the northernmost line, was the state line.
Perhaps Boggs was ticked off because the tree cutting Missourian had been
fined by Iowa in what Boggs considered Missouri.

Almost immediately, Iowa Gov. Robert Lucas authorized the arrest of anyone
trying to exercise authority in what he called "the seat of excitement."

Enter Uriah (Sandy) Gregory, Clark County sheriff from Missouri. He was
ordered north into the contested territory to collect taxes on, among other
things, bee trees.

Most of the residents in the "seat of excitement" were Iowans by nature and
they ordered Sheriff Gregory to go home. He was outnumbered about 1,200 to
one, so he prudently went back south of all the possible boundaries.

Plaintively, if ungrammatically, he wrote Gov. Boggs, "I am at a loss what
to do 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 fourse and put me in
confinement."

Gov. Boggs ordered Gregory to go get those taxes. The Iowans weren't
kidding. They took the beleaguered sheriff by "fourse" and confined him in
Burlington. He later said they treated him pretty well and let him roam
around town, but wouldn't let him go home. He apparently enjoyed his
enforced vacation and seemed relieved to have his problems solved for him.

It now was December, snowy and bitterly cold. Both sides began to arm for
battle. The alarmed Gov. Lucas prophesied, wrongly as it turned out, that
the dispute "might ultimately lead to the effusion of blood." He called up
1,200 men who cried, "Death to the Pukes," and drank plenty of whiskey. They
were a bit officer heavy. They had four generals, nine general staff
officers, 40 field officers and 83 company officers.

The Missourians tried to raise 2,200 militiamen, but less than half showed
up. However, they were armed with the latest technology: one carried a
sausage stuffer. The mind reels a bit at the thought of the probable effects
of an attack with a sausage stuffer.

Meanwhile, Clark County officials, exhibiting rare common sense, sent a
delegation to Iowa to work out a truce. The two sides came up with a classic
political solution: they dumped the problem in the lap of the federal
government and both sides told their soldiers to go home.

The Lewis County, Missouri, militia had spent two nights bivouacked in the
cold and snow without tents or enough blankets. They did, however, have
plenty of whiskey. One company brought six wagons of provisions and five of
them were reputed to be filled with booze.

Even so, they weren't the happiest of campers. They wanted to shoot
something. So they split a haunch of venison, labeled one half "Gov. Boggs,"
the other "Gov. Lucas," shot them full of holes and held a mock funeral.

Then both sides made a rowdy retreat and the Honey War was over. Ultimately,
the two states compromised on a state line close to the middle of the four
possible boundaries, and in 1850 set markers every 10 miles.

Some have vanished (one showed up in the back yard of a fraternity at
Northwest Missouri State College at Maryville), but many still exist.
However, the one on the Longnecker farm is the only one to mark the "seat of
excitement."

(from http://www.conservation.state.mo.us/conmag/1997/01/5.html)

----

Also ran across some interesting Iowegia (slang term for Iowa curteousy of
MO) factoids:

(from http://educatetheusa.com/iowa/history.html)

Many think of Iowa as a land of huge farms and small cities populated by
people right out of Meredith Willson's The Music Man. True, it is one of the
greatest farming states in the country, producing about one-fifih of the
nation's corn supply and containing about a quarter of the country's richest
farmlands. But it is also a leader in manufacturing cereals, tractors, and
washing machines. Iowa also has one of the finest writing schools in the
country (the University of Iowa), and among Iowa's notables are many authors
and artists, including Grant Wood. The state is known as the "Hartford of
the West" because of its many insurance company headquarters. The state is
experiencing rapidly increasing growth in the manufacturing and service
industries.

Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, first U.S. president born west of the
Mississippi River.

The first state ever to produce a billion dollar harvest from a single crop.

Produced the first "traction machine" (tractor).

World's largest tractor plant, at Waterloo.

The mechanical washing machine, first manufactured in Iowa.

HISTORIC MOMENTS

In 1673, European explorers first glimpsed present-day Iowa as Father
Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet marveled at the bluffs above the
Mississippi River.

The French claimed the region, and expIorer Joseph Des Noyelles fought a
little known battle with the Fox and Sauk Indians in 1735, at the junction
of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers.

In 1762, France turned over to Spain its claims west of the Mississippi,
including Iowa.

In 1788, Julian Dubuque settled at Catfish Creek on the Mississippi,
founding the community of Dubuque, where he mined the plentiful lead of the
region.

In 1800, Spain secretly returned the Louisiana Territory to France. The
Louisiana Purchase of 1803 brought Iowa to the United States.

In 1804, Sergeant Floyd of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition died and was
buried at the site of Sioux City-, he was the only member of the party to
dic during the journey.

At present-day Burlington, explorer Zebulon Pike hoisted the first U.S. flag
to fly over Iowa, in 1805. The bluff near McGregor was named Pike's Peak but
is less prominent than the Colorado peak bearing his name.

In 1819 the first steamer, the Western Engineer, reached the area of Council
Bluffs on the Missouri River.

On December 28, 1846, Iowa became the first free state in the old Louisiana
Territory.

Progress continued rapidly with the first state fair, at Fairfield in 1854,
at the University of Iowa at Iowa City in 1855, and at the new capital at
Des Moines in 1856.

In 1856 the bridge between Davenport and Rock island was die first to span
the mighty Mississippi River.

Notorious abolitionist John Brown headquartered for a time at Tabor as he
helped slaves escape to freedom over the Underground Railroad.

Iowa Civil War troops were especially prominent in the Battle of Wilson's
Creek (August 20, 1861) and Luka (September 19, 1862).

In 1869, Council Bluffs became the eastern terminus of the Central Pacific
Railroad.

In 1889, Grinnell College and the University of Iowa played the first
intercollegiate football game west of the Mississippi.

In the 1890s, Independence became famous as a center for trotting races.

In 1917, Iowa serviceman Merle Hay was one of the first three Americans to
be killed during World War I,  Iowan J. C. Sabin is said to have fired the
first U.S. shot of that war.

During World War II, 260,000 Iowans served, and 8,398 lost their lives.

The 1980s brought increasing problems to Iowa farmers, with rising costs,
falling prices and values, and over extended debt, but the 1990s brought an
upturn.

In 1994, Representative Fred Grandy (remembered for his role as "Gopher" on
the television show The Loveboat) failed in his bid for the Iowa
governorship.

Iowa celebrated its sesquicentennial of statehood in 1996.

When the Fox Indians refined to do a favor for Julian Dubuque, he threatened
to burn the Mississippi. At the mouth of Catfish Creek, Dubuque set fire to
oil poured into the creek upstream by an assistant. The frightened Indians
quickly came to terms, and Dubuque called on the fire to die just as the oil
gave out.

The honey trees of a region disputed between Iowa and Missouri were so
prized that the two states almost came to blows in a territorial dispute
called the Honey War.

Iowa's Civil War Greybeard Regiment, made up of men over the legal age of
45, was the only one of its kind ever authorized.

The first "road" in Iowa consisted of a furrow plowed by Lyman Dillon from
Dubuque to Iowa City, thought to be the longest continuous furrow ever
plowed.

One Iowan traveling in Scotland was so taken with the local oatmeal that he
ordered a barrel of it sent to him in Iowa. When it arrived from Scotland,
it bore the legend "Quaker Oats, made in Cedar Rapids, Iowa."

The popular delicious apple originated in Iowa.

----

I'll also note that we invented the fountian pen and sliced bread.  So the
next time you make a sandwich, remember that not only was the grain for it
and the meat in it probably grown here, but if it wasn't for us yokles you'd
be slicing that bread yourself ;^)

We also invented the computer (check around, EMIAC wasn't the first) up at
ISU, and the term "computer bug" came from a moth getting caught in a relay
in the computer of the USS Iowa.  Which, by the way, was the first computer
on a battleship ;^)

Oh - we also may have invented the electric refrigerator.  I know that Amana
and Maytag are both based here.  Des Moines also beat out Hartford for
Insurance Capitol of the World (the Gov of CT conceded it to us) because of
how many insurance compainies are HQ'd here.  AAMOF, the Principal Bldg
(think that's what it's called) is the tallest skyscraper between Chicago
and Dallas (last I heard anyway).

Des Moines is also a big hub for magazine subscription fulfilment places
(they process the orders and such).  Used to be the porno capital of the
world because of how many millions of porno mags passed through there, lmao

72/73/oo
Rob, w0jrm

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