Ere long, thine every stream shall find a tongue
Land of the many waters!
—Charles Fenno Hoffman

There are no unsacred places
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places
—Wendell Berry

Locality gives art.
—Robert Frost

America, turn in and find yourself
—Paul Engle

Last time I visited my sister-in-law and brother-in-law in Lewis & Clark territory, I was amused by the “Don’t Californicate Oregon” bumper stickers on pickups and Lexi and everything in between. (Many of these likely were driven by ex-Californians, but never mind that—in best Booker T. Washington fashion, these good folk were casting down their buckets where they were.) No doubt Californication is a sin both venereal and venial, but let us not similarly damn conjugation—in particular, the joining of far northern California with southern Oregon. That is a match made in . . . well, in Yreka, California, 1941.

The kinship of southern Oregon and the northern cap of California has long been as obvious as a John Denver lyric. In January 1854, the Mountain Herald of Yreka, California, announced a meeting of citizens of Siskiyou County “for the purpose of taking measures to secure the formation, at an early date, of a new Territory out of certain portions of Northern California and Southern Oregon.” That early date never did arrive, but legislative hoppers were filled to bursting throughout the 1850s with proposals to create such states as Shasta, Klamath, Jackson, and Jefferson out of that magnificent land of mountains and forests and wild rivers. In the early twentieth century, citizens of the region discussed creating a state of Siskiyou, but nothing came of it, and the idea slumbered—until autumn 1941, when the ought-to-be state of Jefferson was born of high spirits and sweet rebellion.

So what was the beef that fed Jefferson: Confiscatory taxes? Onerous regulations? Curtailed liberties? Nah—just bad roads, “oiled dirt lanes,” impassable in bad weather, which impeded efforts to transport minerals and timber from mountain to market. Chromium and copper laced the hills, as did ponderosa pines and oak trees, but it was a hard slog getting them down. The people of the counties of Jefferson “shared the ironic circumstance of a flagging economy amid an embarrassment of natural riches,” wrote Michael Di Leo and Eleanor Smith, authors of the useful survey Two Californias (1983). Locals were tired of begging Sacramento and Salem for better roads. They would have to do it themselves. Thus, Jefferson was born under a strange sign indeed: it was a secession based on the failure of the central authorities to intervene in local life.

The dynamo behind Jefferson was Port Orford, Oregon, mayor Gilbert Gable, a hustling public relations man from back east (Philadelphia) who called himself the “hick mayor of the westernmost city of the United States.” He’d only been in Port Orford, a fishing and lumber port on the Oregon coast, since 1935, but that was long enough to have absorbed the local attitude toward the bloodsucking leeches and malefactors of great wealth in Salem and Portland. Gable was an engaging mix of huckster, booster, and dreamer—he was, among other things, a “hunter of dinosaur eggs”—and he envisioned Port Orford as a bustling harbor connected to the treasures of the mountains by a system of good interior roads.

On October 2, 1941, Mayor Gable and his band of brothers requested that the Curry County Court take steps to transfer their forgotten slice of southwestern Oregon to California, which might better appreciate—or at least pave the roads in—Curry County. The court appointed a commission to consider the matter, which it did, moving with a most un-commission-like alacrity to break from Oregon.