Golden, Colorado: A Prospector, a Pass, or the Gold?

Old histories give three reasons for the name Golden, Colorado: a prospector named Tom Golden, a mountain pass called the Golden Gate, and the gold itself. One of those histories manages to give you two of the three, about 90 pages apart.

Tom Golden’s winter camp

The most detailed version starts in the fall of 1858. Frank Hall’s History of the State of Colorado says Tom Golden, James Saunders and George A. Jackson were hunting and trapping on the plains that year, and set up their winter camp in the basin where Golden now stands. At the end of December they headed into the mountains, and early in 1859 Jackson found gold up Clear Creek.

Hall is careful about how much credit Golden deserves. “Neither Jackson nor Golden, notwithstanding the town took the latter’s name,” he writes, “had any further part in its creation than to take some informal steps toward staking out a town site.” The town itself came in June 1859, when a group from Boston called the Boston Company and others organized a town company, with George West as president.

Wilbur Fisk Stone’s 1918 History of Colorado agrees. Jackson and two other men built a cabin on the site, Stone writes, and the town “afterward grew up and was named after one of these men, Tom Golden.” Stone also gives Jackson’s find its due: without the strikes he and John Gregory made early in 1859, “nothing might have come of this historic stampede.”

The Golden Gate

Henry Gannett, writing his place-names list for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1905, told it differently. His list says Golden was “named from the Golden Gate,” which he describes as a “narrow pass in the mountains in Jefferson County, Colorado, which at the time of naming led to the principal gold mines of the State.”

There really was a Golden Gate. Stone describes a town by that name at the mouth of a gulch about two miles above Golden, on the wagon road that carried all the travel to the Gregory “diggins” in the mountains. He also lists who organized the Golden Gate Town Company in July 1859, and the first name on the list is Thomas L. Golden. So if you follow Gannett’s pass far enough, you may run right back into the same man. Neither source spells that out, though, and Gannett doesn’t mention him at all.

Or just the gold

Now for the twist. In his section on how Golden City was founded, Stone calls it “this town, named after the character of the surrounding district.” He doesn’t spell it out, but in a gold-rush district the plain reading is the gold. That’s the same Stone who credits Tom Golden later in the same volume.

It wasn’t a strange idea for the time. Back in September 1858, several men at the Cherry Creek camp that became Denver had insisted on calling their town “Golden City,” months before this one existed.

Which one wins

The prospector has the best paper trail. Hall names him plainly, Stone names him once, and the Golden Gate story may lead back to him anyway. The gold-country line in Stone reads more like a passing description than a claim, and nobody explains it further. Still, you can’t call it settled: the man and the metal share a word, and none of these sources quotes anyone from 1859 saying which one they meant.

The town was Golden City until a legislative act of January 22, 1872, shortened the corporate name to Golden. By then it had already had a turn as a capital. In 1862 the territorial legislature named Golden City the seat of government, and the lawmakers bounced between Golden and Denver until December 9, 1867, when Denver was made the permanent capital.

Sources & further reading

• Frank Hall, History of the State of Colorado, vol. 3 (1891). Tom Golden, James Saunders and George A. Jackson in 1858, their winter camp, and the town that “took the latter’s name” (pp. 499–500); the Boston Company and the founding in June 1859 (p. 500); the 1872 change from Golden City to Golden (p. 505).
• Wilbur Fisk Stone, ed., History of Colorado, vol. 1 (1918). The “Golden City” suggestion at St. Charles in 1858 (p. 135); the Golden town company, the Golden Gate on the road to the Gregory “diggins,” and “named after the character of the surrounding district” (p. 147); Thomas L. Golden and the Golden Gate Town Company (p. 150); the capital at Golden (p. 175); the town “named after one of these men, Tom Golden” (pp. 236–237).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 139. Golden “named from the Golden Gate,” the pass to the gold mines.
• History of Clear Creek and Boulder Valleys, Colorado (O. L. Baskin & Co., 1880), p. 365. An earlier county history listing the first settlers and the men who organized Golden City; it doesn’t explain the name.