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.

Gable and a delegation traveled to Sacramento to ask California governor Culbert Olson for help. The Governor was flattered, telling the petitioners that he was “glad to know they think enough of California to want to join it,” but he really wasn’t up for starting a border war. The renegades needed to look closer to the ground for allies. So Gable took his campaign to Del Norte County in California, where his grievances sounded much like those of northern Californians. The capital ignored them, distant interests exploited them, and city slickers ridiculed them.

As Western historian Richard Reinhardt wrote, “it was in Yreka,” the Siskiyou County seat “which had suffered for close to a century from a cruel and widespread slander to the effect that the place did not really exist but was just a way of misspelling Eureka,” that Gable’s gambit struck gold. The Yreka Chamber of Commerce suggested linking adjacent Oregon and California counties in a new state of Mittelwestcoastia. Good idea, rotten name. The Yreka-based Siskiyou Daily News sponsored a contest to find a better tag and wound up with a grab-bag of some of the most infelicitous monikers this side of the (Fill in Name of the Butt of Your Local Jokes) maternity ward. Many of them, wrote Reinhardt, were “equally repulsive” as Mittelwestcoastia—Del Curiskiyou, Siscurdelmo, Bonanza, Discontent, Orofino. The winner was Jefferson; its minter, J. E. Mundell of Eureka, who received a prize of two dollars, wished to honor the author of the Declaration of Independence, “the great instrument that states that the people have a right to govern themselves.”

Mayor Gable, jumping the gun on his anticipated governorship of the new state—but then what did you expect: that he’d be satisfied being Clerk Gable?—declared that Jefferson would impose no income, sales, or liquor taxes; its modest bureaucracy would be funded by a royalty—don’t dare call it a tax!—on the mining and timber industries. Lest this sound like a laissez-faire paradise, he also pronounced a pox on slot machines (a protectionist measure to shore up the vital stud-poker sector) and a ban on strikes.

Jefferson, editorialized the Siskiyou Daily News, was composed of “people who are wearied of governmental pap, demagoguery, waste and excessive taxation.” Yes, they protested the “lack of roads,” but this was an ephemeral complaint, hardly the basis of a vigorous statehood movement. Jeffersonians were “tired of being regarded as a hill-billy group who are not of sufficient importance to be given considerate treatment.” The two essential ingredients of any successful secession movement—love of place and resentment of the capital—were present. The state seal consisted of two crosses—a double cross, get it?—on the bottom of a mining pan.

On November 27, 1941, hell-bent members of the Yreka 20–30 Club (“a group of guys in their twenties and thirties with a sense of humor and nothing to do,” explains Brian Petersen, current keeper of the Jefferson flame) set up roadblocks on Highway 99. Cradling deer rifles, warmed by bonfires of revolution, they stopped traffic and posed for ineffably cool photographs in which all the men look like Robert Mitchum and the women either Jane Greer or Jane Darwell.

This was a far cry from Checkpoint Charlie: motorists were handed “I have visited JEFFERSON, the 49th state” windshield decals and a copy of the state’s Proclamation of Independence, which read, in its entirety:

You are now entering Jefferson, the 49^th State of the Union.
Jefferson is now in patriotic rebellion against the States of California and Oregon.
This State has seceded from California and Oregon this Thursday, November 27, 1941.
Patriotic Jeffersonians intend to secede each Thursday until further notice.
For the next hundred miles as you drive along Highway 99, you are travelling parallel to the greatest copper belt in the Far West, seventy-five miles west of here.
The United States government needs this vital mineral. But gross neglect by California and Oregon deprives us of necessary roads to bring out the copper ore.
If you don’t believe this, drive down the Klamath River highway and see for yourself. Take your chains, shovel and dynamite.
Until California and Oregon build a road into the copper country, Jefferson, as a defense-minded State, will be forced to rebel each Thursday and act as a separate State.
(Please carry this proclamation with you and pass them out on your way.)

Stories bearing a Jefferson byline appeared far and wide, thanks to Stanton Delaplane, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter whose romantic dispatches from the forty-ninth-state front earned him a Pulitzer Prize. Delaplane, who in later years was credited with introducing Irish coffee to America, described the secessionists as “partly mad, partly in fun, partly earnest about the new state.” In other words, they were red-bloodedly insubordinate Americans who blended poetry, patriotism, good-natured humor, and orneriness.

Jefferson comprised four counties: Curry in Oregon, and the California counties of Siskiyou, Del Norte, and Trinity. Others—Modoc, Lassen, Shasta—were in and out, or interested but not willing to take the leap of faith. When the solons of Shasta County, California, haughtily informed the Jeffersonians that they might throw in, too, if Redding were made the state capital, the rebels mailed ’em a bottle of castor oil with the message, “start your own movement.” (Admittedly, the contemplated state of Jefferson was shaped like a clumsily gerrymandered congressional district. California’s elongated Trinity County dipped and dangled into the Golden State like a man clinging desperately to a window ledge.)

Jefferson was on the verge of . . . something. Imaginations fired, her partisans had gone beyond pranks and into the dizzying realm of “hey—who knows?”

But as the luckless protagonist in the classic noir B-movie Detour (1945) explained, “Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you.” On December 2, 1941, fifty-five-year-old Mayor Gable dropped dead of a heart attack. Flags dipped to half-mast, but the show—in this case a “Provisional Territorial Assembly” scheduled in Yreka on December 4—must go on.

Fortunately for Jefferson, the very able Judge John Childs of Crescent City, California, was the obvious choice for governor. The Yreka assembly tapped Childs for the position. It also filled the offices of lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and U.S. senator and representative.

(Governor Childs was my friend June Chamberlain’s great-great uncle’s brother by marriage—okay, it’s tenuous, but it fits under the six-degrees-of-separation rules. Judge Childs had proposed secession back in 1935, when Jefferson wasn’t yet a gleam in Gilbert Gable’s eye. Judge/Governor Childs grew up in my neck of the woods: Genesee County, New York, specifically Indian Falls. He studied at the Batavia high school and taught in nearby Basom. Pneumonia drove him westward, to Crescent City, where in rapid succession he bought a newspaper and was elected clerk, district attorney, and then superior court judge of Del Norte County. He was an associate of that scourge of the corporations Hiram Johnson, the antiwar Republican U.S. senator from California. Politics was in his bloodstream and there warn’t no cure: he would serve as district attorney until he was eighty-seven years old. Till the end of his long life he strolled the streets of Crescent City, hobbling about on a cane, smoking a big cigar, and walking his dog. Now there was a governor.)

Governor Childs explained in his inaugural address of December 4, 1941—which, unlike most inaugural addresses, the governor wrote on his own, without the purpling of hired inkslingers—”The State of Jefferson is a natural division geographically, topographically, and emotionally. In many ways, a world unto itself: self-sufficient with enough water, fish, wildlife, farm, orchard land, mineral resources, and gumption to exist on its own.”

Inauguration Day featured a torchlight parade through Yreka led by brother bears named Itchy and Scratchy. Marchers carried signs reading OUR ROADS ARE NOT YET PASSABLE, HARDLY JACKASSABLE; IF OUR ROADS YOU WOULD TRAVEL, BRING YOUR OWN GRAVEL; and THE PROMISED LAND—OUR ROADS ARE PAVED WITH PROMISES. Well, look—Mayor Gable had been a flack for the phone company, so don’t expect poetry on the order of “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” But what a pity that Gable the p.r. man had not lived to see this rally and the gaggle of newsreel photographers from Paramount, Pathe, News of the Week, and other genuine Hollywood articles. Time and Life were there, too. “Please wear western clothes if they are available,” the Siskiyou Daily News advised its readers. Local color sells.

Of course Jefferson had its collaborators, too, loyalists who modified an old Oregon war-cry to “Forty-eight States or Fight!” But the fight was called off.

Three days after Governor Childs’s inauguration, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The governor announced that “the acting officers of the provisional territory of Jefferson here and now discontinue any and all activities.” A grim and bland unity replaced hell-raising and knee-slapping and neighborly anarchy. The war came, and state identities (not to mention Thomas Jefferson) lost a relevance they have not since regained. Rallying to the national cause, the Jeffersonians put their movement in abeyance. The roads did get built, though—there was manganese up in them thar hills.

A California split, however, remained more than just the title of one of Robert Altman’s only good movies.

The State of Jefferson lives still, and in adopting a strategy of cultural awareness before lobbying it offers, perhaps, a more promising route to statehood than mere wearying political agitation. State of Jefferson signs adorn the region, most spectacularly in ten-foot-high letters painted by the late Jefferson advocate Brian Helsaple and his nephew atop a hay barn near Yreka.

The NPR affiliate in Ashland, Oregon, KSOR, calls itself Jefferson Public Radio; there is a State of Jefferson Community Band based in Yreka, a State of Jefferson Mathematics Congress organized by Humboldt State in California and Southern Oregon State University, even—aptly, one supposes, given the grievances of November ’41—a 108-mile State of Jefferson National Scenic Byway authorized by Uncle Sam himself, in the guise of the Forest Service. There are locksmiths, plumbers, pest exterminators, and other businesses proud to embed Jefferson in their names. (Business names are a strong indicator of regional self-awareness. The great sociologist John Shelton Reed, in trying to answer the question “Where is the South?” opted for defining it as that territory wherein the percentage of “Southern” business entries in telephone books is at least 35 percent of the number of “American” listings. “This one statistic,” writes Reed, “indicates the presence of the sort of regional institutions . . . [and] regional enthusiasm” that underlay a healthy self-identity.

There is even a musical, State of Jefferson, a delightful work based on the 1941 uprising by the Oregon composer Jason Heald.

“I had just completed a musical, National Insecurity, about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg,” Heald tells me, “and was looking for a lighter historical subject for a musical drama. The ‘mythical state of Jefferson’ is a frequent reference in this region, and I was very pleased to discover that the State of Jefferson was not mythical at all!” State of Jefferson ran on the Centerstage Theater in Roseburg, Oregon, for eighteen performances in May 2006; long may it run!

I am reminded of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, which holds that the development of a national theater is more critical to the island’s health than any gross national product. The road to self-determination, or statehood, is paved with poetry, not asphalt.