YUBA
Yuba is the name of a county in the Central Valley, of Yuba City, the county-seat of Sutter County, and of the Yuba River, which is formed by the union of three branches rising in the Sierra Nevada.
The name Yuba was first applied to the river, the chief tributary of the Feather. The theory has been advanced that it received the name of Uba, or Uva, the Spanish word for grapes, from an exploring party in 1824, in reference to the immense quantities of vines loaded with wild grapes growing along its banks, Uba, becoming corrupted into Yuba, but Powers, in his Tribes of California, says Yuba is derived from a tribe of Maidu Indians named Yu-ba, who lived on the Feather River. This is probably the true explanation of the name. It is to be noted that Fremont, in his Memoirs, speaks of it as Indian: “We traveled across the valley plain, and in about sixteen miles reached Feather River, at twenty miles from its junction with the Sacramento, near the mouth of the Yuba, so-called from a village of Indians who live on it. The Indians aided us across the river with canoes and small rafts. Extending along the bank in front of the village was a range of wicker cribs, about twelve feet high, partly filled with what is there the Indians’ staff of life, acorns. A collection of huts, shaped like bee-hives, with naked Indians sunning themselves on the tops, and these acorn cribs, are the prominent objects in an Indian village.”