It was exciting to see an article on the State of
Jefferson. However, the article was not historically accurate. The
State of Jefferson is not “a dream that has been around since 1941”
as alleged by Emma Brown. Actually, a state was proposed for
northwest California and southwest Oregon in 1852 — the State
of Shasta. Southern Oregonians preferred that the state be named
after Jefferson, and in 1854, a bill for creation of the State of
Jefferson was introduced into Congress. Advocacy for the state did
not die down until the creation of the State of Oregon in 1859.
The modern revival of the State of Jefferson did not
begin with Brian Petersen and his friends as a response to “the
Klamath water war” in the 1990s. In the early 1980s, a group of
back-to-the-land bioregionalists promoted the State of Jefferson
through Siskiyou Country, a monthly journal distributed throughout
northwest California and southwest Oregon. Even earlier in the
1980s, a group of anthropologists and archaeologists sought to
revive interest in Jefferson by naming their annual regional
conference after it. It was that group that created the first State
of Jefferson bumper sticker with the double X seal later adopted by
Petersen and his friends.
Felice Pace
Klamath, California
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The Jefferson state bird is not the spotted owl, either.
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