Huh? Paul Bunyan is a Minnesotan thing. You don’t get to have him, California.
Groovy lettering on the “Steak house” - melted jumbled-up letters were a sign that casual-yet-adult activities could be expected therein. As for Yreka, I’ll bet they intended the pronunciation to be “You-reka.” So they went with the first letter of You, instead of U. Right? Well:
The name comes from the Shasta /wáik'a/, for which Mount Shasta is named. The word means "north mountain" or "white mountain". Mark Twain tells a different story:
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. The campers were satisfied with it and adopted it.
I like that better.
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