Long before the bridge or its paint, an army officer looked through this strait and reached for a Greek name borrowed from a famous harbor across the world. The gold that would make the label fit hadn't been found yet. How a borrowed word ended up describing everything to come.
Now settle in a second, and mind that edge while you're looking out — the drop here doesn't care how good the view is. Because I want you to think about that water, that narrow gate the tide pours through, and the fella who gave it its name.
His name was John C. Frémont — freh-MONT — an army officer, and back around 1846 he stood somewhere near this strait and looked out the way you're looking now. And here's the thing that always tickles me. He didn't call it the Golden Gate because of any gold. There wasn't any gold yet — not the kind folks think of. The great Gold Rush was still a couple years off, hadn't happened, wasn't even a rumor most places.
No, Frémont — freh-MONT — was a reading man, and this opening in the hills put him in mind of an old harbor clear across the world — the Golden Horn, over at Byzantium, the city they'd later call Constantinople, the one that's Istanbul today. So he reached for Greek and wrote it down: kris-OP-uh-lee. Kris-OP-uh-lee. Golden Gate. Named for a memory of somewhere else, for the shape of the thing, not for anything buried in the ground.
And then, wouldn't you know it, a couple years later they struck gold up in the foothills, and the whole world came pouring through this very gate to get at it. So the name that a dreamer gave a strait for looking like an old harbor half a world away — it turned out to fit like it was made to order.
That's the part I love. The bridge came later. That famous burnt-orange color came later still. Both of them just inherited a name that was already sitting right here, waiting, given before there was a single reason a gold-hungry world would ever agree with it.
Photo: J.C. Bottre (engraver) · Public domain
