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Dr. Thomas Spencer, a history professor at Northwest Missouri State University, has recently published a piece on the Honey War, which reshaped the Missouri-Iowa border in the 1830s.

History remains a realm of headstrong governors and foolish disputes, of sovereignty challenged and men ready to do battle with pitchforks.

Thomas Spencer stands hours in courthouse back rooms looking to document long-gone people and events. The historian’s burden brings with it assorted dead ends and some treasured “aha!” moments.

Age recommends the courthouse in Keosauqua, Iowa. Built in 1840, it somehow eluded the infernos that claimed so many other firetrap courthouses in the 19th century. Hence, primary-source records survive, and Dr. Spencer found himself amid them, going through boxes of court cases dating back more than 160 years.

The Northwest Missouri State University associate professor went digging for information about the Honey War, an obscure episode of Midwestern history that had sabers rattling over ... well, a legal description.

His resulting work, published in the October edition of the Missouri Historical Review, describes not only how the state’s northern border came to be drawn but the run-up to a conflict that proved short on bloodshed and long on quirkiness.

This latter aspect appeals to Dr. Spencer, an academic who serves his serious studies with a light touch befitting historical figures not always ruled by good sense. The approach drew complaints from graduate school professors, but he prefers his work in its most readable form.

“I always try to write for a general audience,” he says. “I’m going to try to explain this in such a way that everybody can follow it.”

As a topic, the Honey War seemed ripe with eccentricities. It hinges on two windy souls, Gov. Lilburn Boggs of Missouri and Gov. Robert Lucas of the Iowa territory, and a bit of land both claimed in 1839.

Mr. Boggs seemed an especially rich subject, a man willing to deploy the militia to answer almost any problem. He hounded the Missouri Mormons and dispatched troops to fight the Seminoles in Florida. The Honey War made the governor’s third military venture in a single term of office.

Add to this a mix of frontier militiamen, a collection of men intermittently impassioned and often drunk. Disgruntlement appeared to bond them, especially the Missourians who had yet to be paid for their service in the Mormon War.

Iowans had only a marginally better attitude, the soldiers instructed to bring their own provisions. Dr. Spencer includes the writings of a Davenport merchant: “We were willing to shed our blood for our beloved Territory and, if necessary, to kill a few hundred Missourians, but we were not going to do that and board ourselves besides.”

In September or October of 1839, a Missourian apparently cut down three “bee trees” on the argued-over ground, certainly after the prized honey. In November, the Iowans arrested a Missouri sheriff who came into the area to collect taxes.

As winter set in, passions cooled, and even fiery generals looked around to find no one to lead. The Honey War fizzled, and years passed before the U.S. Supreme Court decided the Missouri-Iowa boundary. Less stubborn leaders, Dr. Spencer points out, would have probably seen that as an earlier option.

Texas-born and Arkansas-raised, Dr. Spencer discovered a love of history his second year at Trinity University. (Both his parents worked in higher education.) He earned a master’s degree at the University of Missouri and a doctorate at Indiana University in 1996. The next year, he arrived at the Maryville campus.

A graduate school adviser at Missouri, Dave Roediger, remembers his protege’s feet-first approach to research about the Veiled Prophet cotillion in St. Louis. The student went to meet Percy Green, a civil rights activist who organized protests against the Veiled Prophet events.

“The two hit it off, and Green shared remarkable research materials with him,” said Dr. Roediger, now at the University of Illinois.

That research eventually became his doctoral dissertation and the basis of a book by Dr. Spencer.

Married and with two children, plus as the new director of Northwest’s Honors Program, Dr. Spencer defers his next research project for the short term but wants to complete a book on the Mormon conflicts in Missouri during the 1830s. Days in archives await, the historian eschewing questionable sources and looking for the offbeat anecdote.

“Sometimes you have to go to a lot of different places,” he says. “You never know what you’re going to find.”

Ken Newton can be reached at kenn@npgco.com.