What's In A Name
There have been numerous fires in northern California in 2022. Some of them were near Yreka.
The town in the lower left is Eureka and the town in the upper right near the McKinney fire is Yreka. Are “U”reka and “Y”reka related? As it turns out Yreka’s name has nothing to do with Eureka or even a bakery. A bakery?
There is a tall tale in Mark Twain’s autobiography regarding the origin of Yreka’s name:
”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.”1
The true story of the city’s name is still quite interesting, however. Yreka comes from the Shasta Indian word “wáik'a',” which roughly translates to “white mountain,” in reference to nearby Mount Shasta. An article from 1876 in the Yreka Journal said that the city was intended to be named Ieka, but through some kind of mistake, it was called “Wyreka.” The name stuck and the error continued (other than the dropping of the “w,” which officials considered superfluous.)2
It is hard to miss Mount Shasta when driving up Interstate 5.
https://nibmehub.com/opac-service/pdf/read/Autobiography%20of%20Mark%20Twain-%20Volume%202%20_%20the%20complete%20and%20authoritative%20edition.pdf page 139
https://www.californiacitynews.org/2014/06/city-trivia-tuesday-what-origin-yreka%E2%80%99s-name.html