Yreka: Gold Rush County Seat

Yreka is the county seat of Siskiyou County, and it came into existence almost overnight in the spring of eighteen fifty-one when a mule-train packer named Abraham Thompson discovered gold in a gulch near here on the Siskiyou Trail. Within weeks the camp had a name, Thompson's Dry Diggings. Within months it had two thousand miners. The settlement went through several name changes before adopting Yreka in eighteen fifty-two, a word likely drawn from the language of local indigenous peoples meaning white mountain or north mountain, a reference to the great white cone of Mount Shasta that dominates the skyline to the south.

Siskiyou County was organized in eighteen fifty-two with Yreka as its seat, and the town became the center of county government. The town survived the boom-and-bust cycle that erased most California mining camps, in part because the county government gave it durable institutional weight. Today Yreka's Victorian commercial blocks remain largely intact, and it serves as a gateway community for the Klamath Mountains and the Marble Mountain Wilderness.