Iowa, Territory of (U.S.A.)

The Iowa Territory is formally established in the United States on July 4,  following the signing of a bill by President Martin Van Buren on June 12.

In addition to Iowa, which will become a state on December 28, 1846, the Territory also includes most of what will become the states of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Robert Lucas, former Governor of Ohio, takes office as the first Territorial Governor.

Iowa residents—allegedly carrying pitchforks—chase away tax agents from Kahoka, Missouri, who had chopped down three honey-bee trees in what is now Lacey-Keosauqua State Park to collect the honey for partial payment of taxes in what is today Van Buren County, Iowa and Davis County, Iowa.

Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs sends the state militia to the Iowa border and an Iowa mob captures the sheriff of Clark County, Missouri, jailing him him in Muscatine, Iowa.

Iowa Territory governor Robert Lucas calls out the militia.

The Sac and Fox tribes had ceded their land in Missouri in 1824 in the Treaty of Washington, and the land below the Sullivan Line between the Des Moines and Mississippi had been set aside as Half Breed Tract.

In the Indian Removal Act of 1830, all tribes were to move west and south of the line Sullivan had drawn.

Half Breed Tract had been opened to public settlement in 1834,which event, along with the movement of Iowa into Wisconsin Territory, was to spur Missouri to reconsider its northern border, first by extending its border west to the Missouri River in the Platte Purchase in northwest Missouri, then beginning to  reconsider the northeast corner.

In 1837 the Missouri General Assembly had ordered the line to be resurveyed.

When Wisconsin Territory refused to participate in the survey, J.C. Brown had begun a survey in which he ignored the traditional definition of the rapids below Fort Madison on the Mississippi and instead looked for rapids on the Des Moines River itself and identified the rapids as being at Keosauqua, Iowa about nine and a half miles (fifteen point three kilometers) into modern Iowa.

As the dispute heated up, Missouri was to note there were rapids on the Des Moines all the way to Des Moines, Iowa.

Meanwhile, Iowa had maintained that its ownership extended to a line about fifteen miles (twenty-four kilometers) into modern Missouri at the mouth of the Des Moines.

The two governors agree to allow Congress resolve the issue.

An arbitrary line is drawn between the two positions. (However, when Iowa enters the Union in 1846, Congress will rule that the border is in fact at the confluence at the Mississippi, a position that will be upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1851.

The admission of Iowa, its borders extended west to the Missouri, on December 28, 1846, offsets one of the two previous slave state additions.