US 395, Part 16: Lassen County (Susanville to Modoc County Line)

Susanville, population 13,541 [2000], is the pleasant jewel of Lassen county and also its county seat. US 395 does not directly enter it, but we will (mostly because I was badly in need of lunch and batteries by this time) along CA 36. It is a moderately sized, friendly city that, like so many along US 395, is totally out in the middle of nowhere. In the present time, its days of logging and mining are largely behind it and today Susanville's major industry is the clink; the High Desert State Prison is a few miles out of town, and we'll go by it, opened in 1995.

The city's history, however, is much more colourful than its modern gentle sleepiness would indicate. Susanville is named for the daughter of Isaac Roop, the same Isaac Roop we talked about in Part 12, who became the territorial governor of Nevada. Why would he be involved in California?

The answer is quite complex and interesting. Although Peter Lassen (see Part 15) was the first explorer of this area, in 1851 William Nobles started taking settlers over a route passing through the Honey Lake valley and several, including a younger Isaac Roop, decided simply to stay put. Roop was born in 1822 in Maryland and reared as a farm boy. He married his tutor, Nancy Gardner, in 1840 and moved to Ohio, where he was devastated by her loss ten years later and became widowed with two sons and his daughter Susan. Possibly motivated by grief or desperation, he pulled up stumps for California that same year and tried to rebuild his life, only to have it lost to a fire in 1853 after nearly pulling it back together. It was then that Roop retreated to the mountains and to Honey Lake, in which Lassen had put down roots some three years before, where he concentrated on his own backcountry holdings and nearly single-handedly erected the burg of Rooptown which he would later name for his daughter (his fort-slash-stockade is still standing in downtown Susanville, off Main St).

By this time, California was well-established and claimed the settlement as its own under Plumas county. This probably wouldn't have mattered much to the local inhabitants were it not for the county's attempt to levy and collect tax revenue, and in 1856, Lassen and Roop spearheaded an effort to declare the region as the independent Nataqua territory as they believed themselves not subject to either California, or to the Utah territory to the east. Nataqua, a Paiute name, operated in semi-autonomy with its own elected officials and public works for several years, with Lassen as its president. It was during this time in 1861 that the new territory of Nevada was established by sectioning of Utah, and Roop himself assumed the position of territorial governor after Lassen's death in 1859.

Prevailing surveys of the region would indicate that California was indeed correct; Susanville was on the western side of the official state boundary and thus part of California. For that matter, however, the Esmeralda gold strikes and the town of Aurora (the original declared county seat of the newly established Mono county) were on the eastern side, but neither Nevada nor California was interested in relinquishing its hold on either city and insisted that both belonged to each one. Despite California's threats, Governor Roop heeded the pleas of the settlers who resented the Plumas tax collectors, and organized the disputed region into the new Roop county with Susanville as its seat. A complex and increasingly acrimonious series of legal challenges ensued between the two counties, culminating in an actual shootout, the so-called Roop County or Sagebrush War, on 15 February 1863. Holed up in Roop's old fort, Roop county residents traded shots with Plumas county officials in a nearly comical and mostly inaccurate back-and-forth of bullets.

After two days of pointlessly wasting ammunition, Plumas county sheriff E. H. Pierce negotiated a deal with the Roop county locals and the matter returned to arbitration, which commissioned a new survey to verify the previous one. Unfortunately for the outraged residents of Susanville, the new survey upheld the old one and left them firmly back in the hands of Plumas county, which they had been trying to escape in the first place. Rather than start shooting again, however, the citizens took their grievance to the state legislature and finally got their wish to create their own independent county from the disputed section of Plumas and a portion of Shasta county, named Lassen in Peter Lassen's honour, in 1864. The two states would finally ratify the border in 1865.

As for Roop himself, while unable to absorb his old home into the state he once governed, he seemed content in the knowledge that it still maintained some manner of independence and returned to Susanville in 1865. There, he became Lassen county's district attorney for two terms and stayed in the town that he had built and loved until his death in 1869. His daughter Susan resided in the town as well until her own death in 1921, and both were buried in the town's cemetery. There is a charming mural depicting father and daughter in downtown Susanville on Lassen St.