Klamath National Forest Headquarters

About forestry service, 94022, Los Altos, CA, US, California

Yreka ( wy-REE-kə) is a city in and the county seat of Siskiyou County, California, United States, near the Shasta River; the city has an area of about 10 square miles (26 km2), most of it land. As of the 2020 census, the population was 7,807, reflecting an increase from 7,765 counted in the 2010 census. Yreka is home to the College of the Siskiyous, Klamath National Forest Interpretive Museum and the Siskiyou County Museum. == History == In March 1851, Abraham Thompson, a mule train packer, discovered gold near Rocky Gulch while traveling along the Siskiyou Trail from southern Oregon. By April 1851, 2,000 miners had arrived in "Thompson's Dry Diggings" to test their luck, and by June 1851, a gold rush "boomtown" of tents, shanties, and a few rough cabins had sprung up. Several name changes occurred until the city was called Yreka. The name comes from wáik'a, a word meaning "north mountain" or "white mountain", the name of nearby Mount Shasta in the Shasta language. Mark Twain tells a different story: [Twain's mentor Bret] Harte had arrived in California in the [eighteen-]fifties, twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and had wandered up into the surface diggings of the camp at Yreka, a place which had acquired its mysterious name – when in its first days it much needed a name – through an accident. There was a bakeshop with a canvas sign which had not yet been put up but had been painted and stretched to dry in such a way that the word BAKERY, all but the B, showed through and was reversed. A stranger read it wrong end first, YREKA, and supposed that that was the name of the camp.