How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [68]
The brawl between Lucas and his territorial legislature subsided, however, when a bigger brawl presented itself in which they could join together: a boundary dispute with Missouri that was a mirror image of the dispute Lucas had faced with Michigan when he was governor of Ohio. What Iowa was disputing was Missouri’s interpretation of the boundary stipulated by Congress in 1820. It defined Missouri’s northern border as (fasten your seat belts) “the parallel of latitude which passes through the rapids of the River Des Moines, making the said line to correspond with the Indian boundary line; thence east from this point of intersection last aforesaid, along the same parallel of latitude to the middle of the channel of the main fork of the said River Des Moines.”
Sullivan Line, 1816
Helpfully for readers (though not for Iowans), a line along these lines already existed. It had been surveyed four years earlier by John C. Sullivan. One can only call it “a line along these lines” because the boundary stipulated by Congress contained uncertainties. The first uncertainty was that a line starting at the point on the “parallel of latitude which passes through the rapids of the River Des Moines” be made “to correspond with the Indian boundary line,” since the two were not necessarily the same. The second was the phrase “the rapids of the River Des Moines.” While it clearly seems to mean the rapids in the Des Moines River, the fact is that there are no rapids in the Des Moines River. At the time, however, there were rapids in the Mississippi River as it met the Des Moines River. This segment of the Mississippi had long been known by river men as “the Des Moines rapids.” Sullivan used these rapids in the Mississippi to determine his starting point at the western end, then surveyed eastward. As he proceeded, however, his line veered northward. Whether this deviation resulted from poor surveying or from making his line “correspond with the Indian boundary line” was yet another uncertainty, since no line in the vicinity had been stipulated in any American Indian treaty at or before 1816.
The Sullivan Line was not the line Governor Lucas challenged, but its uncertainties set the stage for the dispute. In 1836 Congress added to Missouri what is today the triangular region in its northwest corner. This region comprised all the land north of the Missouri River up to a westward extension of the state’s northern border. Missouri then appointed Joseph C. Brown to survey the northern border of this new region. Unlike Sullivan, he interpreted “the rapids in the River Des Moines” literally. Though hard-pressed to find anything resembling rapids in the Des Moines River, Brown ultimately decided that a point in the river known as “Big Bend” constituted the closest thing to rapids, and he used that point to determine the latitude of the border. He then marked off this updated border. Unlike Sullivan’s, Brown’s line was nice and straight. It was also considerably further north.
Brown Line, 1836
Two years later, Lucas arrived in Iowa and immediately challenged the boundary. His opening move was the same as that of his former boundary adversary, Michigan, in its failed challenge of Ohio. Lucas got Iowa’s legislature to pass a virtually identical resolution:
If any person shall exercise or attempt to exercise any official functions … by virtue of any commission or authority not derived from this Territory or under the Government of the United States. [he shall] be punished by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, or imprisoned … not exceeding five years.… I do hereby enjoin … all sheriffs, constables, Justices of the Peace, and other peace officers … that they cause all persons … attempting to violate any of the provisions of the act … to be arrested.
But after enactment of the same kind of resolution, Lucas departed from Michigan’s approach. Where Michigan’s territorial governor, Stevens T. Mason, had remained confrontational, Lucas