California secede? It already has a flag

David Lavender writes in “California: Land of New Beginnings,” that “some of the Americans regaled themselves with Vallejo’s brandy” while Todd created the flag.

“His materials were a Mexican manta (a sheet of unbleached homespun,) a red strip cut from his wife’s flannel undergarments, and brown paint” or, by some accounts, brown berry juice. Lavender wrote that the next step was sewing the strip along the bottom of the rectangular sheet. Then Todd painted a large star reminiscent of the Lone Star of Texas in the upper left-hand corner. In the center of the field, he drew an animal that he said was a grizzly bear and under it printed “California Republic.”

Lavender doesn’t mention if anyone saluted the flag when it was run up the flagpole in Sonoma Plaza, but he wrote that the watching Californios thought the bear “looked more like a hog.” The California Republic lasted for about 30 days, ending with the Mexican War that made the area American territory.

Backers of pulling California out of the union should remember the old saying about “being careful what you wish for.” Consider the case of Jefferson, consisting of an area in the northern part of the state and a county in southern Oregon. Some residents threatened to secede, not from the United States but from California.

The sovereign state of Jefferson would have consisted of about 5,000 people in Siskiyou, Modoc and Del Norte counties, along with Curry County in Oregon, who wanted to form the 49th state in 1941. The movement was serious enough that the San Francisco Chronicle sent reporter Stanton Delaplane up north where his stories about the rebels won the Pulitzer Prize.

One dispatch quoted a garage worker who said “folks wanted roads up here and if they didn’t get them pretty soon, there was no telling what they might do.” The man told the reporter people in the area “were worn out with yammering at Sacramento for 30 years with no results.”

The campaign for statehood had a solid financial reason, Delaplane wrote, pointing out that the area was larger than the New England states and was ripe for development because it was rich in copper, chrome and manganese.

In November, men with pistols barricaded the main highway in Yreka and declared for “patriotic independence” for their part of the state. Also in November, Lassen County offered to join forces with the rebels.

The drive to become Jefferson seemed to be gaining momentum, so what happened?

In “The San Francisco Chronicle Reader” published in 1962, editors William Hogan and William German asked “where it all might have ended, who knows? Because a week later it was December 7, 1941 — and who cared?” Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese, bombing America into World War II. It was no time for rebels.

The Rear View Mirror by history columnist Jim Clifford appears in the Daily Journal every other Monday. Objects in The Mirror are closer than they appear.