5 Would-Be U.S. States

When Statehood Collided With Indigenous Sovereignty

Five times in American history, restless settlers and dissident politicians drew new borders across the continent and declared themselves a state. From the Appalachian borderlands of 1784 to the copper country of 1941, these quixotic campaigns — Franklin, Deseret, Sequoyah, Absaroka, and Jefferson — are usually told as colorful footnotes about ambitious upstarts who almost made it. Told from the perspective of Native and Indigenous history, however, they become something far more revealing: a chronicle of how would-be states were carved out of Cherokee towns, Ute and Shoshone homelands, and the treaty-guaranteed refuge of Indian Territory. Two of the five — Sequoyah and Franklin — were defined almost entirely by Native nations. The others quietly erased the Indigenous polities beneath their proposed borders. Together they form a documentary record of jurisdiction contested, land seized, and sovereignty asserted.

The State of Franklin and the Cherokee Borderlands (1784–1788)

Shortly after the Revolutionary War, more than 5,000 settlers occupied the mountainous country of western North Carolina — today’s eastern Tennessee — on land that lay squarely within Cherokee territory. In 1784 the North Carolina legislature withdrew its militias from the region and tried unsuccessfully to cede the lands to Congress. Feeling abandoned and exposed, the settlers declared their counties a new state, initially called Frankland.

A Governor Forged in the Cherokee Wars

They chose as governor John Sevier, a soldier and politician whose reputation rested on his campaigns against Cherokee towns during the Cherokee–American wars of the 1770s and 1780s. The new state’s militias pushed deeper into Cherokee country, largely ignoring the boundary lines Britain had drawn in the Proclamation of 1763 and the limits later asserted in the Treaty of Hopewell (1785), which the United States negotiated with the Cherokee — a treaty Franklin’s settlers treated as an inconvenience rather than a law. Wampum and diplomatic protocol still governed Cherokee relations with colonial powers; the Franklin settlers answered with survey stakes. In a thin attempt to court Benjamin Franklin’s endorsement, the state claimed his name. Franklin replied politely to Sevier but never publicly endorsed the venture. Congress fell short of the two-thirds vote for admission, and Franklin operated as a de facto republic until 1788, when Sevier’s intrigue with Spanish officials in Louisiana led to his arrest for treason. North Carolina reabsorbed the region, which passed through the Southwest Territory to become Tennessee in 1796 — with Sevier as its first governor.

Deseret, the Great Basin, and the Nations It Overlapped (1849)

In 1849 Mormon settlers proposed a state they called Deseret — a Book of Mormon term meaning “honeybee” — with borders embracing parts of modern California, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, and Idaho. Had it been admitted, it would have been the largest state in the Union. The proposal overlapped the homelands of the Ute, Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Diné (Navajo) peoples, none of whose governments were consulted. Opposition centered on the disputed Mormon practice of polygamy, and critics framed Deseret as a theocracy in waiting. President Zachary Taylor explored merging Deseret with California, but the plan collapsed when Deseret’s delegate failed to reach the constitutional convention. The Compromise of 1850 substituted the Utah Territory, with Brigham Young as first governor — a territorial status Native nations in the region would contest for the next half century. Mormon elders continued privately ratifying laws under the name “Deseret” after each territorial assembly until the railroad brought non-Mormon settlement and ended the dream.

The State of Sequoyah: The Most Consequential “What If” (1905)

No would-be state mattered more to Native sovereignty than Sequoyah. By the early 1900s the eastern half of present-day Oklahoma was Indian Territory, home to some 60,000 Native people — many of them Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole families relocated west under the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Trail of Tears. The Dawes Act (1887) and the Curtis Act (1898) had already dismantled communal landholding and tribal courts, and statehood threatened to dissolve what remained.

The Muskogee Convention and a Progressive Constitution

On August 21, 1905, delegates from the Five Nations met in Muskogee, with Creek Principal Chief Pleasant Porter presiding, and drafted a constitution for a state named after Sequoyah, the creator of the Cherokee syllabary. The proposal envisioned 48 counties and a remarkably forward-looking document: antitrust provisions, restrictions on child labor, and novel ethics laws. Residents of Indian Territory approved it at the polls in November 1905. Congress refused, unwilling to admit two western states at once, and in 1907 Indian Territory was folded into Oklahoma — a process explored further in this history of Oklahoma’s land and people. Sequoyah’s constitution still influenced several state charters, and the Cherokee Nation continues to call its annual policy conference the State of Sequoyah.

Absaroka: A Name Borrowed From the Apsáalooke (1939)

The Depression-era “state that never was” began in Sheridan, Wyoming, in 1939, when a former baseball player named A.R. Swickard and a circle of businessmen, frustrated with New Deal programs, proposed a state spanning parts of Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota, including the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. They called it Absaroka — a name taken from the Absaroka Range, itself derived from Apsáalooke, the self-designation of the Crow Nation, often translated as “children of the large-beaked bird.” The irony is sharp: the proposed state covered Crow, Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Shoshone-Bannock lands while offering those nations no voice. Swickard appointed himself governor, issued novelty license plates, and crowned a Miss Absaroka. No secession petition was ever formally filed, and the movement faded — preserved largely because Federal Writers’ Project researchers recorded it while compiling travel guides, including material that would inform the story of Yellowstone’s creation.

Jefferson and the Unratified Treaties of the Far West (1941)

In 1941, copper-mining counties in northern California and southern Oregon, angry over road funding, formed the state of Jefferson. A newspaper contest supplied the name; Judge John Childs was inaugurated governor on December 4, 1941, with a parade and national press coverage. The state flag bore a double “XX” for the double-cross they felt they had received, and armed men handed startled motorists flyers reading “You are now entering Jefferson.” Three days later, Pearl Harbor ended the experiment. The region is the homeland of the Karuk, Yurok, Hupa, Tolowa, Shasta, Modoc, and Klamath peoples — nations whose 1851–52 California treaties were signed but never ratified by the Senate, hidden for decades and only published in 1905.

Historical Context & Key Cultural Takeaways

• Native nations were never bystanders. Franklin and Sequoyah were shaped directly by Cherokee and Five Nations politics; every other proposal simply drew lines across Indigenous homelands.
• Legal erasure preceded mapmaking. Removal, allotment, and unratified treaties cleared the ground on which new states could be imagined.
• Names carry memory. Sequoyah honors a Cherokee intellectual; Absaroka carries an Apsáalooke word.
• Defeat was not disappearance. Sequoyah’s constitution and the Cherokee Nation’s continuing use of its name show institutional memory outlasting statehood.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was the State of Sequoyah ever legally recognized? No. Its constitution was approved by Indian Territory voters in November 1905 but Congress never admitted it; the territory became part of Oklahoma in 1907.

Who was Sequoyah, and why did the state bear his name? Sequoyah (c. 1770–1843) created the Cherokee syllabary, making literacy in Cherokee widely attainable; delegates chose his name to assert Indigenous intellectual achievement.

Did the State of Franklin have a treaty relationship with the Cherokee? The Cherokee signed the Treaty of Hopewell with the United States in 1785, but Franklin’s settlers and militias largely disregarded those boundaries.

Why is Absaroka spelled that way? It derives from Apsáalooke, the Crow people’s name for themselves, filtered through the naming of the Absaroka mountain range.

Where can this history be studied today? The Cherokee National History Museum in Tahlequah, Sequoyah’s Cabin in Sallisaw, the Oklahoma Historical Society, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian hold relevant collections and archives.

Legacy: Sovereignty That Outlasted the Maps

None of these five states exists, yet their stories remain essential to Native history because they document a recurring American pattern: drawing a border first, then negotiating — or ignoring — the nations inside it. Sequoyah stands apart as a genuine exercise of Indigenous self-government, drafted by Native leaders for Native constituents and rejected by Congress. Its principles survived in state law; its name survives in Cherokee public life. The lesson for readers of Indigenous history is that the map is never the whole story — treaties, syllabaries, oral records, and continuing tribal governments preserve what statehood campaigns tried to overwrite.