California’s rebel spirit
Chronicle reporter Stanton Delaplane won a Pulitzer Prize in 1942 for his reports on the secessionist movement in Northern California and southern Oregon. The rebel cause of creating a state of Jefferson fizzled when Pearl Harbor was bombed and California was drawn into the war effort. Yet the notion of a state of Jefferson has resurfaced from time to time.
Last week, the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to secede from California for reasons that echo the complaints in 1941 — Sacramento ignores rural residents’ needs.
Excerpts from Delaplane’s winning reports follow:
Folks wanted roads up here and if they didn’t get them pretty soon, there was no telling what they might do.
They were worn out, (the Yreka mechanic) said, with yammering at Sacramento for 30 years with no results. …
That’s the personal side of the story. And probably one of the main reasons that 5,000 people in Siskiyou, Modoc and Del Norte counties in California and Curry county in Oregon, are more than half serious about forming the 49th, sovereign State of Jefferson. …
Gun-toting citizens of these rebel counties are partly mad, partly in fun, partly earnest about this new state.
“We’ll either get the roads or we’ll scare hell out of the Legislatures,” one of them told me.
— Nov. 27, 1941
Miners hope that national defense measures might make the road a necessity.
“It’s the only road to the coast between San Francisco and Klamath Falls,” (Alex) Rosborough (a miner with five patented claims) said.
“If this was Los Angeles County, they’d have the roads in no time. They’ve got the votes, but we’ve got the copper.”
— Nov. 28, 1941
This rebellion is coming from the citizenry who are more than partly in earnest as they watch copper jump to 14 cents a pound and realize that they
have $3 (million) or $4 million worth blocked out in the mines in the hills but no way to truck it to the coast.
— Nov. 29, 1941
HARD SCRABBLE CREEK, Secession Counties — In San Francisco, they said: “Look for the publicity man behind this secession counties movement.”
I found him today on the rim of the continent. He is the mayor of a logging town of less than 1,000 persons.
Mayor Gilbert Gable is not strictly a publicity man, but he is not by any means the man he describes himself to be — “the hick mayor of the Western-most city of the United States.”
Gable is the sparkplug that is setting this new world on fire. He calls the five secession counties, Modoc, Del Norte, Siskiyou and Lassen in California, and his own Curry County, Ore., “the promised land.”
“We’ve been promised everything, and we haven’t been given any of it,” is the way Gable puts it.
— Nov. 30, 1941
Everyone in these counties has a piece of a mine, a copper or chrome deposit that he thinks would be rich with present prices and development.
The gas station man and the restaurant owner will tell you about their cinnabar claim up creeks with names out of Bret Harte
This is the amazing and unknown land of America. This is the last frontier and the hard stand of rugged individualism that is not a political slogan. …
… Transportation would solve a lot of problems up here. And until Oregon and California give it to the mountain men, I wouldn’t sell short on this movement for a 49th State of Jefferson.
— Dec. 1, 1941