the fight for and against the state of Jefferson
The Elusive State of Jefferson, Peter Laufer
While the “Proclamation of Independence” was being posted around Jefferson and handed out at the armed roadblocks, something called the Northern Counties Anti-Jefferson Committee reacted with their own handbills and press releases, distributed anonymously in Yrkea from a secret basement headquarters in Dunsmuir, a basement that was equipped with a printing press. The opposition argued that the statehood movement was misguided. The secret committee was, in fact, a gang of high school students who decided to attack the Jefferson promoters just for the fun of it. Nevertheless their arguments were added to serious sounding newspaper accounts of the rebellion. Years later, one of the gang exposed their plot. Robert D Stone, a graduate of the Dansmuir High School class of 1943, explained that he and his cohorts called off their campaign “due to the fragile nature of pre-1940 automobiles, the price of gasoline, nubile Dunsmuir girls, and homework.”