Welcome to Yreka, "The Golden City" - Welcome Signs on Waymarking.com

This welcome sign for Yreka is full of local fraternal and community organizations' logos that greet visitors to Yreka coming from the south on either Interstate-5 or Hwy 3.

Yreka is known as the 'Golden City' for the reason that the discovery of gold and the '49 Gold Rush played a vital role in the founding and development of Yreka. After the Gold Rush era subsided, agriculture and the timber industry soon followed as the major industries keeping Yreka alive.

The early history of Yreka is taken from the City of Yreka's website:

In March 1851, Abraham Thompson, a mule train packer, discovered gold near Black Gulch while traveling along the Siskiyou Trail from Southern Oregon. This discovery sparked an extension of the California Gold Rush from California's Sierra Nevada into Northern California. 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 little city was called Yreka, apparently taken from a Shasta Indian word meaning "north mountain" or "white mountain," a reference to nearby Mt. Shasta.

Mark Twain, in his autobiography (p. 162, Harper/Perennial Literary, 1990), tells a different story on the naming of Yreka:

"Harte had arrived in California in the 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. The campers were satisfied with it and adopted it."

It should also be noted that Yreka has prospered to the level it has because of the construction of Interstate-5 in the early 1960s, which swerved west from its originally-planned route and into Yreka from some good politicking from a California senator who grew up in Yreka and was the Director of the state's Transportation Authority. That senator being Randolph Collier. There's a monument dedicated to Collier and located in Yreka (Miner) Park in which I've waymarked as well. I've included an article from a local newspaper in the waymark that discuses the politics behind Interstate-5's route through this town. Look at Google Maps of Insterstate-5's route through Yreka and you'll see what I mean. Who says politics doesn't pay?