SUSANVILLE, Calif. _ On a cattle ranch three bridges past a giant lone poplar tree on this isolated northeastern edge of California, Jeffrey Hemphill for once feels part of something larger.
He and his Lassen County neighbors cast 73 percent of their ballots _ the highest percentage in the state _ for Donald Trump.
They voted against the rest of California on almost every other ballot issue too, rejecting increased gun regulation, a plastic-bag ban, tax increases, prison parole and the recreational use of marijuana.
"People still have morals and values here," Hemphill said, walking past the side-by-side houses his grandfather and father built in the backyard that is a 400-acre pasture. "We're up here out of sight and out of mind, and that's how the state treats us."
For much of California, the November election was another banner year for Democrats and many of the causes they champion.
Once solidly Republican areas like Orange County voted for Hillary Clinton over Trump. Democrats took every county in Southern California and the entire coast, except for tiny Del Norte County at the top of the state.
But Lassen and about a dozen other counties in the far northern reaches remained solidly Repbulican.
This is an area political scientist Eric McGhee at the Public Policy Institute of California calls "typical conservative," "a touch libertarian" and "still very white."
Lassen is 60 percent white, making it increasingly an outlier in a state where Latinos now outnumber whites.
McGhee said opinion surveys have found a widening ideological divide between the Bay Area and Los Angeles regions and more rural pockets.
"One of the key things you are missing up there is diversity," McGhee said. "Statewide, the general movement is Democratic, (but) the far north of the state is very white."
Far Northern California is in some ways much different from the Rust Belt communities that drove Trump's election, but they have some strong similarities.
Blue-collar jobs in the lumber industry all but disappeared under changing federal logging rules as old-growth forests were timbered out, and Democrats took the blame from some residents.
The mountains remain sparsely populated, meaning law enforcement is far away, so gun-rights debates focus less on hunting and more on personal safety.
Crime is a worry, but with a regional bent that city residents don't share. Thieves in the night traveled across the plateau to strip copper tubing from Hemphill's water pumps, and his first thought was to set a bear trap for them if they tried it again. The high school graduation rate is high in Lassen County, but residents are half as likely as other Californians to have college degrees, according to 2015 federal census estimates. Owing to jobs at three prisons, the median wage is only slightly lower than elsewhere in the state, but the poverty rate is high, 20 percent by federal counts.
There is clear anger when their struggle for representation is written off as something bad.
"Deplorables! What is so insulting is to be called a racist," said Hemphill's wife, Nancy, a civilian employee for the military.
Hemphill, a rancher who is also as a Lassen County supervisor, was a Trump supporter early on, but other voters in the region say it wasn't the candidate they supported so much as the stand he represented against something else _ Clinton, the rest of California, the Republican Party itself.
"Trump's an idiot, and the alternative was worse. We had the choice between a smashed tomato and a rotten smashed tomato," said Arlin Howard., one of three ironworkers from adjacent Butte County taking a table at the Pioneer bar. They were still spattered with mud from a day of irrigation work in the hayfields. They are union members, and they picked Trump.
The three grew up "when union meant something" and logging provided work and a sense of self-determination that offset the detachment from the other side of the Sierra Crest. "This place was loaded with mills and logging, ranch work, trucking," Howard said. "You were making hay or felling timber."
Not so many do so now. The local Sierra Pacific sawmill closed in 2004. Its empty water tanks loom over Susanville like a grave marker.
"People here are sick and tired of having someone control their lives," said Jim Chapman, a political history buff with 40 years as a Lassen County supervisor, more time in that office than anyone else in the state. "I think people here went to the polls to vote against government ... . It is a scream of 'enough is enough.'"
Yet an estimated 65 percent of Lassen County workers are on government payrolls. Most work at one of three prisons outside Susanville, one federal, two state. The combined inmate population is half the size of the town.
It's because of that economic tether that Chapman thinks Lassen voters in June defeated a ballot measure put before them by the county to secede from California to create a state in which they had a voice and secure regional representation in Congress. A single assemblyman represents all of seven counties and parts of two more.
The state of Jefferson movement _ a push to pull counties in southern Oregon and Northern California into the nation's 51st state _ has a barn-burning, hail Mary quality to it, Chapman said. Even so, 42 percent of Lassen voters, 3,093 county residents, voted for it. Backers want to name this state after Thomas Jefferson, who as president pushed America west.
The secession movement would require an act of Congress and consent of the Legislature. Nevertheless, it runs deep in Northern California and once in 1941 progressed as far as seeing the Del Norte County prosecutor declare and inaugurate himself as governor of Jefferson. Petitions to create a 51st state still circulate, and State of Jefferson billboards dot the rural highways along the Sierra Crest. In the past two years, five California counties have submitted petitions to the California secretary of state declaring their independence.
"The ABC movement is strong here," Chapman said.
Anything but California.
It's an old thought. Downtown Susanville has a large mural of the founding settler who led an armed revolt against California tax collectors a century ago in the two-day Sagebrush War.
A generation ago, the conservatives of Lassen County felt at home in the Democratic Party and helped elect Jimmy Carter president.
Hemphill's father was among them. It wasn't so much that his father stopped being a Democrat, Hemphill said, but that the party "changed on him."
Chapman first ran for office as a Democrat, and attended state party meetings until, he said, he could endure them no more. "I was left high and dry by my party, which I didn't want to have anything to do with anymore," he said. The last straw came at a state convention, "being told, if you want a seat at the table, this is what you have to believe in."
This, he said, was an "urban agenda" of gun control, abolition of the death penalty and support for gay rights and abortion.
Chapman shunned the Republican Party too, and built his long political career under the banner of "Decline to State."
There no longer is a Democratic Party office in Lassen County. Past county party leaders declined to be interviewed.
The county's Republican chairman is only slightly more supportive of his state party.
"I am more amused by the state party than I am engaged," said Christopher Cole, a Southern California transplant from Palm Springs who moved north to manage a hotel and raise his son. In addition to serving as county party chairman, he works as the news manager for a conservative radio station.
Dressed for a Saturday morning interview at the local Safeway in birch tree camouflage, Cole dismissed those in control at state Republican gatherings as "brie and wine sippers."
He sits tolerantly through their lectures on how to register new members. His is one of only two counties in the state where Republican registration is growing. Cole keeps his eye fixed on local issues where he can be effective, opting against engagement in state races where the county is ignored.
"It's a political civil war," he said, "and we've headed for the hills."
