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.

[10] 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.

[11]In 1853–54, poet Joaquin Miller described Yreka as a bustling place with "a tide of people up and down and across other streets, as strong as if a city on the East Coast".

The first took place on August 26, 1895, when four men—William Null, Garland Stemler, Luis Moreno, and Lawrence Johnson—awaiting trial for various charges of murder and robbery,[13] were simultaneously hanged by a lynch mob from a railroad tie suspended from two adjacent trees.

Clyde Johnson and Robert Miller Barr robbed a local business and its patrons in Castella, California.

Barr, who was holding the $35 that they obtained from the robbery, panicked during the shootout and ran off into the woods, then escaped on a freight train.

The night of Daw's funeral a dozen cars from Dunsmuir, carrying approximately 50 masked men, drove north to Yreka to lynch Johnson.

Deputy Marin Lange, the only guard on duty at the jail, opened the door slightly and was quickly overtaken.

"[22] The secession movement ended quickly, though not before Del Norte County District Attorney John Leon Childs of Crescent City was inaugurated as governor of the State of Jefferson on December 4, 1941.

[24] The only known specimen of Calochortus monanthus, the single-flowered mariposa lily, was collected near Yreka along the banks of the Shasta River, by botanist Edward Lee Greene, in June 1876.

Yreka is home to the Siskiyou County Museum[35] and a number of Gold Rush-era monuments and parks.

Visitors also come to enjoy trout fishing in the nearby Klamath,[36] Sacramento[37][38] and McCloud[36][37] Rivers, or to see and climb Mount Shasta, Castle Crags or the Trinity Alps.

Butte Valley National Grassland is in northern Siskiyou County, near the Oregon border, but is administered from Yreka offices.

[43] Yreka is home to a branch campus of the College of the Siskiyous[44] which hosts the Rural Health Science Institute[45] and Administration of Justice programs.

In Yreka, the gold-mining era is commemorated with a gold museum, as well as with a remnant of a silver mining operation in Greenhorn Park.

Interstate 5 is the primary north–south route through Yreka, connecting Redding and Sacramento to the south and the Oregon border to the north.

[49] California State Route 3 runs east to Montague, and west to Fort Jones and Weaverville.

California State Route 263 serves as a business loop of Interstate 5 through the northern part of the city.

Siskiyou transit (STAGE), Route 1 – Cascade Flyer (Express), services Yreka 3 times daily going thru Mt Shasta and Dunsmuir.

The loss of the "B" in a bakery sign read from the reverse is mentioned as a possible source of the name Yreka in Mark Twain's autobiography.

[66] The Yreka Bakery moved eventually to its longtime location, 322 West Miner Street, where it remained under several ownerships until it closed in 1965 on retirement of the baker "Martin", and clerk Alta Hudson.