Jefferson (proposed Pacific state)
Based on Wikipedia: Jefferson (proposed Pacific state)
Every Thursday, for a few remarkable weeks in late 1941, young men with rifles stopped cars on Highway 99 in rural Northern California and handed drivers a proclamation. The State of Jefferson, they declared, was in "patriotic rebellion" against California and Oregon, and would "continue to secede every Thursday until further notice."
It was guerrilla theater with loaded guns.
The men weren't joking, exactly. They represented a genuine grievance that has simmered for nearly two centuries in the mountainous borderlands between California and Oregon—a feeling that the people who live there have been abandoned by distant state capitals that neither understand nor care about their needs. The proposed State of Jefferson has never come close to existence, yet it refuses to die. Understanding why tells us something important about American federalism, political identity, and the enduring tension between urban and rural America.
Gold, Trees, and Abandonment
The region that would become Jefferson is defined by its geography. The rugged Klamath Mountains and Cascade Range create a natural barrier between the population centers of California and Oregon and the vast, sparsely populated territory along their shared border. Rivers carve through the landscape—the Klamath, the Rogue, the Sacramento—creating valleys where small communities have eked out livings from mining, timber, and ranching for generations.
The first stirrings of separatism came with the gold rush. In 1851, prospectors discovered gold in the Klamath River Basin, extending California's famous gold rush northward into what would become the heart of Jefferson country. As happened throughout the West, this brought a flood of white settlers into lands occupied by indigenous peoples, culminating in the Rogue River War of 1855 to 1856.
The newcomers quickly decided they had little in common with the rest of their respective states. Sacramento and Salem were hundreds of miles away over difficult terrain. The settlers believed their economic interests—primarily extracting wealth from the region's natural resources—would be better served by their own state government.
They tried repeatedly. In 1852, local politicians proposed a "State of Shasta" to the California legislature. The bill died in committee. They revived it in 1855. Someone proposed a "State of Klamath" in 1853 and again in 1854. Different configurations, same basic idea: we're different, we're far away, and you're not listening to us.
In 1860, Congress actually passed legislation allowing the region to vote on independence from California and Oregon. Then Fort Sumter was fired upon, and the American Civil War consumed the nation's attention. The Jefferson movement went dormant for eighty years.
The Week That Almost Was
Gilbert Gable was an unlikely revolutionary. The mayor of Port Orford, a tiny Oregon coastal town, Gable became convinced in 1941 that rural Southern Oregon and Northern California were getting a raw deal. Roads were unpaved. Infrastructure was neglected. The state governments, he believed, catered to the populous urban areas while ignoring the hinterlands.
Gable proposed that seven counties—four in Oregon, three in California—should form a new state. He found an ally in Randolph Collier, a California state senator from Siskiyou County, whose support led to selecting Yreka, California, as the provisional capital. Gable managed to get himself appointed to a commission investigating secession, and his supporters drafted both a declaration of independence and a flag.
The flag they created remains the movement's symbol today. On a green field sits a gold circle representing a mining pan, with "The Great Seal of State of Jefferson" inscribed around the rim. Inside the pan are two black X marks, positioned askew of each other. This "Double Cross" represents the founders' feeling that both state governments had betrayed—double-crossed—the region's residents. That original gold pan is still on display at the Siskiyou County Museum in Yreka.
In November 1941, Gable and a San Francisco Chronicle reporter named Stanton Delaplane hatched a publicity stunt after what was by all accounts a very long night of drinking. Hence the men with guns stopping traffic on Highway 99, the proclamations, the promise to secede every Thursday. Even a California State Trooper was stopped and told to turn around and go back to California.
Gable died of a heart attack the day after planning the campaign's next major push. His supporters appointed a local judge named John Childs as "governor" on December 4, 1941, but the momentum was already fading.
Three days later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The State of Jefferson movement collapsed overnight. Whatever grievances rural Californians and Oregonians had against their state governments suddenly seemed trivial compared to a world war.
The Persistence of Regionalism
But regional identity doesn't disappear just because circumstances change. The feeling that Jefferson country is distinct—culturally, economically, politically—from the rest of California and Oregon has persisted across generations.
This identity gets reinforced in unexpected ways. In 1989, KSOR, the National Public Radio station at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, rebranded itself as Jefferson Public Radio. The station had built a network of low-powered translators throughout the region, and when it mapped its coverage area, the staff realized it corresponded almost exactly to the original proposed State of Jefferson. The name stuck.
There's now a State of Jefferson Scenic Byway, a 109-mile route between Yreka and O'Brien, Oregon, with informational signs about the would-be republic. Jefferson has become a brand, a tourist attraction, and a persistent political identity all at once.
The Modern Revival
In 2013, a rancher and former sheriff's deputy named Mark Baird revived Jefferson as a serious political movement. Baird's specific grievance was federal forestry policy. Environmental regulations had largely shut down logging on the federally managed forests that dominate the region, devastating what had been the area's primary industry. Baird argued that if Jefferson were its own state, it would have more leverage to negotiate with the federal government about land use.
The timing seemed right for rekindling old resentments. The 2008 financial crisis had hit rural communities hard. Political polarization was intensifying. And Northern California's concerns were increasingly drowned out by the state's coastal metropolitan areas, which had grown to dominate its politics and economy.
County governments began passing symbolic resolutions. Siskiyou County's Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 for withdrawal from California in September 2013. Modoc County followed three weeks later. Then Glenn County in January 2014, Yuba County in April, Tehama County in July (following an advisory vote where residents favored secession 56 to 44 percent), and Sutter County later that month.
By January 2016, twenty-one Northern California counties had either sent declarations to the state government or approved doing so. The combined population was about 1.75 million people—which, if Jefferson became a state, would make it the 39th most populous, ahead of Wyoming, Vermont, and Alaska.
The Electoral Map Problem
To understand the modern Jefferson movement, you have to understand how dramatically California's political geography has diverged. In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton won San Francisco by nearly 80 percentage points. Donald Trump won Lassen County—deep in Jefferson territory—by more than 50 points.
San Francisco's population: 827,500. Lassen County's population: 28,300.
This is the fundamental tension. California's electoral votes, its state legislature, and its policy priorities are all dominated by the urban coastal population centers. Rural Northern Californians feel they have no meaningful voice in their own state government. Their votes for president are swamped by Los Angeles and San Francisco. Their state legislators are outnumbered. Their policy preferences—on environmental regulation, gun rights, water usage, land management—routinely lose.
The State of Jefferson proposal would give these voters their own two senators, their own representative in the Electoral College, and their own state government that actually reflects their values. It would be a rural, conservative state carved out of two progressive ones.
The Constitutional Maze
There's a problem, though: the Constitution makes creating new states from existing ones nearly impossible.
Article IV, Section 3 says no new state can be formed within the jurisdiction of an existing state without the consent of that state's legislature. California would have to agree to let Jefferson leave—and why would California's Democratic-dominated legislature voluntarily reduce its congressional delegation and electoral votes while creating a new Republican-leaning state?
Jefferson supporters have looked for workarounds. In 2017, a pro-Jefferson group called "Citizens for Fair Representation" sued the California Secretary of State, arguing that the state's constitutional cap of 40 senators and 80 assembly members creates unconstitutional underrepresentation of rural areas. The lawsuit was dismissed, and the Ninth Circuit rejected the appeal.
Some Jefferson advocates have hoped for more creative scenarios. When California progressives floated secession from the United States after Trump's election, some Jefferson supporters noted that if California left the Union, the dissenting counties might be able to petition Congress for admission as a new state—similar to how West Virginia was formed when Virginia seceded in 1861. This is more thought experiment than practical politics, but it shows the lengths to which Jefferson's supporters will go to imagine their state into existence.
Greater Idaho and the Fracturing of the West
Jefferson isn't the only movement trying to redraw Western state boundaries. The "Greater Idaho" campaign proposes annexing Eastern Oregon—and potentially Northern California—into Idaho, which is more politically aligned with those regions' conservative populations.
There's overlap between the movements. Some of the same Oregon counties that would be in Jefferson are also targets for Greater Idaho annexation. The Greater Idaho movement has explicitly said that incorporating Northern California is "Phase Two" of their plan.
In 2021, Greater Idaho successfully held referendums in five Oregon counties supporting the idea of joining Idaho. These were advisory votes with no legal force, but they demonstrate that the desire to redraw state lines remains potent.
The logic is similar to Jefferson's: rural residents feel they have more in common with the residents of a different state than with the urban majorities that dominate their own. Portland and Salem don't represent rural Oregon. San Francisco and Los Angeles don't represent Northern California. Why should arbitrary lines drawn in the 19th century force these communities to remain in political marriages they never wanted?
COVID-19 and the Return of Rebellion
The coronavirus pandemic reignited Jefferson sentiment in unexpected ways. Shasta County, one of the movement's strongholds, became a flashpoint for resistance to public health orders. The Board of Supervisors pledged to ignore state mandates. Public hearings featured claims that vaccines were health hazards, masks were tools of government control, and the pandemic itself was a hoax designed to influence the 2020 election.
Activists read out the home addresses of health officers who were enforcing lockdowns, calling for their "citizen's arrest." A Shasta County militia that advocated for secession and armed resistance to COVID-19 regulations saw its membership surge.
This culminated in the election of explicitly anti-government, pro-Jefferson candidates to the Shasta County Board of Supervisors. The pandemic had transformed Jefferson from a nostalgic regional identity into an active political force, at least locally.
In the 2021 recall election targeting Governor Gavin Newsom, the would-be Jefferson counties voted overwhelmingly in favor of removal—some by margins of 6 to 1. Newsom survived easily statewide, carried by the urban areas that Jefferson's supporters feel have abandoned them.
What Jefferson Tells Us
The State of Jefferson will almost certainly never exist. The constitutional barriers are too high. California has no incentive to let it go. The population is too small to matter much in national politics even if it somehow achieved statehood.
But the feelings that created Jefferson are real, and they're not unique to Northern California and Southern Oregon. Across America, rural populations feel increasingly disconnected from the urban majorities that dominate their states. They feel their values are disrespected, their economies neglected, their voices silenced.
The American system of federalism was designed, in part, to manage regional differences—to give local communities meaningful self-governance while remaining part of a larger whole. Jefferson's persistence suggests that system may be straining. When people feel they need their own state to have any political voice at all, something has gone wrong with the existing arrangement.
Those young men stopping traffic with their rifles in 1941 weren't just publicity seekers. They were expressing a genuine grievance about political representation and geographic isolation. Eighty years later, their successors are still expressing the same grievances, in many of the same places, for many of the same reasons.
Every Thursday until further notice.