• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

f

This is fun. I'll have to think about it.

I think your biggest issue would be finding that Klondike Gold Rush equivalent, something to make Port Franklin grow larger than its neighbors around the turn of the century. After WWI, you could maybe get some aircraft manufacturing going, like we talked about in that alternate industrial development for Portland conversation a while back. Port Franklin is still inside the spruce belt, so if you already had some industry going there by the 1920s it's easy to see how it could become the home of alt-Boeing or whatever. That provides an industrial backbone for the rest of the 20th century.
 
Is there any industry or natural resource that could attract immigrants from the east or abroad?

Could the place attract Chinese and Japanese immigration? Maybe leftovers from all that railway or port building in the second half of the 19th century.

Less likely might be Chileans and Peruvians, without something similar to the Gold Rush. (Unless they're the ones kicked out of San Francisco by angry mobs, and settle in Port Franklin for whatever reason.)
 
A more aggressive Hudson's Bay Company, maybe someone other than McLoughlin being in charge at Oregon City, could make some American settlers leery of the Columbia / Willamette confluence and maybe more inclined to push south a little further.

Early Chinese and Japanese community is easy to do, a major PNW fishing port will have lots of salmon canneries and that work was mostly done by Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century - just have to not have the kind of pogroms that happened elsewhere. Likewise, just have the Kaiser shipyard be in Port Franklin instead of Portland and you've got a large black community after WWII.
 
A black population that large would be difficult. Maybe have a naval base nearby or a major war industry for Great Migration jobs. OTL Seattle's black population was never more than around 10% and Portland's even less. Just too far away from the migration routes of the first wave.
 
Portland's black population is also lower than it could be because the Kaiser housing complexes, which had become a black-majority unincorporated city by the end of the war, were completely destroyed in a flood in 1948 and their inhabitants scattered. If Vanport had been better prepared for the flood there would probably be a larger African-American presence in Portland - but of course that would require the city to be less racist and to care about setting up dikes etc. for Vanport, so it's chicken and egg. But hey, if the Tolowa doesn't flood, there's no need for that to happen in Port Franklin.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Yes
So for early history:

Should Tolowa Bay be a Russian outpost?
1824: McLoughlin isn't in charge at Oregon city, the HBC isn't as conciliatory to American settlers
1827: Jedidiah Smith, coming north from California, discovers Tolowa Bay. He doesn't get into trouble with the Umpqua and surveys a route from Tolowa Bay back to the Columbia. The best way I can see on a map from the Klamath basin is to get into the Deschutes drainage, so it's not a straight shot like the future railroad will be.
Maybe the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, which is struggling by the early 1830's, makes a last shot at relevance by attempting to get into the Pacific trade, maybe in partnership with a shipper from back east. We can say it's a Philadelphia company to explain the "Franklin" name. Instead of going on the Santa Fe trail, maybe Smith guides them back to Tolowa Bay.

That actually gives me an idea about the political characteristics of Jefferson as opposed to Washington, Oregon, and California. You could say that the first pioneers out there were Pennsylvania Quakers and that shaped the attitudes people had. I guess with the name "Jefferson" early on you'd have to say that the early pioneers were Democrats, right?

Quakers setting the tone would probably mean a less vigorously racist attitude than 1850s Oregon, so that could work towards your idea of greater ethnic diversity.

By the same token though they're less likely to name the state Jefferson. Are you wedded to that name? Not, idk, Siskiyou or some other term for the region?

Maybe strong ties to Philadelphia and a more Whig / Republican attitude means a greater emphasis on industrial development rather than yeoman farming, which makes sense given the area isn't as conducive to farming as the Willamette Valley or the Central Valley and also fits with your end goal
 
Philadelphia has a naval base for three reasons:
1. It’s the old capital.
2. It’s near the US’s big iron and steel firms.
3. [MOST IMPORTANT] It’s a fresh water port.

I cannot stress 3 enough. Before the Civil War, the Philadelphia Naval Yard was in its way out, being essentially irrelevant between New York and Norfolk. However once we start building large numbers of monitors and investing in ironclad R&D, someone realized that all these new expensive ships would be nice to hold onto in peacetime, but not nice for the bottom line if they need constant maintenance to not rust to pieces. Instead, they decided to base the reserve and mothballed fleet out of Philly so the ships wouldn’t rust as fast. And to this day, that’s the primary purpose of the yard: hold on to older ships either looking for a museum home, a scrapyard, or WWIII.

now, you could do that and take away Bremerton and San Diego’s thunder (the main mothball fleet bases on the West Coast), or you could do the shipyard route, but that’s going to cause stiff competition with San Francisco for most of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
 
That way you have four major West Coast naval bases instead of just three as per OTL.


“But does the US need four naval bases on the West Coast?” - every bean counter in Washington.

There’s nothing wrong with what you have proposed. Just remember that a naval base and a naval shipyard are different things. Best example I can think of is Ingalls Shipbuilding down in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The shipyard there still produces much of our surface combatants, but NS Pascagoula was closed down in 2006 for being redundant.

And I am sorry if this sounds a bit like belittling, this is a great idea and I’m really interested in seeing it develop.
 
I'm aware of what a naval shipyard is and does. The U.S. Navy of 1900-1920 would absolutely have made a fourth west coast naval base if an appropriate choice was available. Again, this is no expansion beyond what was actually done OTL, it's just that Hunter's Point is at Port Franklin instead of San Francisco. This shipyard almost certainly would not survive the 1980's, just like Hunter's Point. My model is Hunter's Point. Hunter's Point started as a private shipyard that contracted with the Navy before being taken over by the Navy in 1940.

Excellent.

On a completely unrelated matter, how are you going to address the dynamic of the Union having another state? A 51-state nation is going to behave a bit differently than a 50 state nation. Or are you planning to eliminate a state to keep that number?
 
Excellent.

On a completely unrelated matter, how are you going to address the dynamic of the Union having another state? A 51-state nation is going to behave a bit differently than a 50 state nation. Or are you planning to eliminate a state to keep that number?
One could just have Dakota admitted as a single state and it’s still a fifty-state union.
 
One could just have Dakota admitted as a single state and it’s still a fifty-state union.

I’ll confess that my initial thought, based on how much of Oregon was carved out to create the new state, was to reward it with a chunk of the thicker part of Idaho, give Washington the thinner part, and the remainder of the state be given to Wyoming (complete with adjustments to its Utah and Montana borders for asthetics’s sake). Something like this:

0D36AAA9-FFA5-4D77-8AA0-1908088CA0A0.jpeg

(And sorry for image quality, quick little thing done on iPhone)

But I’m almost certain that there’s probably a reason somewhere why the congresses of the mid-19th Century would be dead-set against this. Eh, one can dream...
 
I’ll confess that my initial thought, based on how much of Oregon was carved out to create the new state, was to reward it with a chunk of the thicker part of Idaho, give Washington the thinner part, and the remainder of the state be given to Wyoming (complete with adjustments to its Utah and Montana borders for asthetics’s sake). Something like this:

View attachment 8458

(And sorry for image quality, quick little thing done on iPhone)

But I’m almost certain that there’s probably a reason somewhere why the congresses of the mid-19th Century would be dead-set against this. Eh, one can dream...
I don’t remember enough details of why those particular states were drawn that way to give a good answer. It was probably, as with most western states, part geography, part special interests, part population and part nice neat lines.
 
I just realized something a bit awkward while trying to come up with a map for this state (and some proposed changes based on my "Idaho delenda est!" kick that I'm currently on). California was only a US territory between 1848-1850 before becoming a state, mostly due to the Gold Rush that started in 1848 before Guadalupe Hidalgo was even signed. That does not give the good souls of Jefferson much time to claim a chunk of CA to add to their existing holdings in Oregon, especially if the Californian legislature realizes there's gold along the Klamath and the upper reaches of the Sacramento. How can Northern CA be lopped off then to become Jeffersonian clay?
 
Alright, here's something awful looking that I made up in MS Paint real quick.

Jefferson is precisely as you suggested and outlined in red. It actually has really interesting borders. Eureka, CA sits 14 miles south of the border, Crater Lake less than two miles within Jefferson's borders, and most of the northern fields of the California Gold Rush sit squarely in this state. It would be a very interesting place, even if it didn't have a unique history differentiating it from the other Pacific Coast states.

The rest of the map and all it's horrors are a bit of wider AH worldbuilding I indulged in as a possible suggestion. Obviously, the pre-1848 border between the US and Mexico was on the 42nd Parallel. With Jefferson taking up to the 43rd though, someone is going to look at a map and realize that there is nothing of value in the whole rest of the Oregon Country below that line up until the Snake River. Ergo, I extended the line west to the Snake River, and gave everything below it to the Utah territory. With Nevada having the silver and Utah having the polygamists, I decided to keep the border shifting westward from the 116th to 114th Meridians as OTL. Likewise Colorado in its present borders.

Now… I tried so hard to kill Idaho. I really did. But every time I thought I had things done perfectly, there would be some fact I would discover that would force me to start from scratch. Instead, I have let it live. In sadness I give up and let it live. I even give it the Continental Divide as it's border rather than the Bitterroot just to make the map neater.

However, I am optimistic that it may be possible to kill Wyoming. :)

untitled.png
 
Another thing I thought about is to bring the Jefferson border down to the 40th parallel, but that, as you said, takes a bite out of the California goldfields.

Well at 41st, it already takes a good chunk of the gold fields. Moving it down to 40th swallows the northern field whole.
 
So apparently the first people into the goldfields left their farms in Oregon, or I could be misremembering something I read years ago. The first ships didn't come in for almost a year. Either way, the Port Franklin people have as much if not more claim on the gold than California. They've been there a few years longer than most of the California people, too.

The question is still who exactly it is who settled there in the late 1840's and how exactly Congress declares it its own territory, but I don't think that's critical.

Makes enough sense.

And I have a premonition that one day, far off into the future after we’re gone, “So apparently the first people into the goldfields left their farms in Oregon“ will be used to justify Cascadia Irredenta.
 
Back
Top