Ukiah ( yoo-KY-ə; Pomo: Yokaya, meaning “deep valley”) is the county chair and largest city of Mendocino County, California, with a population of 16,607 at the 2020 census. With its accessible location along the U.S. Route 101 corridor, Ukiah serves as the city center for Mendocino County and much of neighboring Lake County.

Ukiah is located within Rancho Yokaya, one of several Spanish colonial land grants in what their colonists called Alta California. The Yokaya grant, which covered the majority of the Ukiah valley, was named for the Pomo word meaning “deep valley.” The Pomo are the indigenous people who occupied the area at the epoch of Spanish colonization.

Later European-American settlers adopted “Ukiah” as an anglicized checking account of this broadcast for the city.

Cayetano Juárez was approved Ukiah by Alta California. He was known to have a neutral attachment with the local Pomo people. He sold a southern allowance of the grant (toward present-day Hopland) to the Burke brothers. The first Anglo settler in the Ukiah Place was John Parker, a vaquero who worked for speculator cattleman James Black. Black had driven his stock up the Russian River valley and took more than a block of grazing land at that locale. A incompetent blockhouse was build up for Parker so he could have shelter to guard the herd from the hostile original local people, who resented the squatters upon their land. The blockhouse was located just south of present-day Ukiah upon the banks of what was known as Wilson Creek.