In 1865, Yreka, Calif., celebrated several Union victories in the far-off Civil War.
When news reached the mining town that Union forces had captured Charleston on Feb. 20, celebrants fired off a 36-gun salute. When Richmond fell, demonstrators filled the streets and the local newspaper reported a 100-gun salute in Yreka’s plaza. A torchlight procession paraded in the street on April 6 and men intermittently fired a six-pound artillery piece.
When the Rev. A.C. McDougall announced at the Methodist Episcopal Church that Gen. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, an elaborate parade marched through town and enjoyed a 100-gun salute. Some Union supporters carried a gigantic effigy of Jefferson Davis suspended from a branch with the label “secession.”
Much later, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Schuyler Colfax said when he was leaving Washington for the Pacific Coast, President Lincoln told him, “Mr. Colfax, I want you to take a message for me to the miners whom you visit... their prosperity is the prosperity of the nation; ... and we shall prove, in a few years, that we were indeed the treasury of the world.”
Lincoln was assassinated that evening.
Source: Jones, J. Roy. Saddle Bags in Siskiyou. Happy Camp, CA, Naturegraph Publishers, Inc., 1953, pp. 128-129.
