A Pikes Peak Prospector: 1900 photo by William Henry Jackson

This amazing portrait from 1900 by William Henry Jackson, entitled "A Pikes Peak Prospector," offers lots of detail of a miner's life in the Cripple Creek Mining District.

The miner, a man of about 50 with sunken cheekbones and a smart forehead, wears checked pants, cuffs rolled up and braced suspenders. He holds a miner's tools--two sledgehammers and a couple chisels. His dog licks a paw under a rough-hewn table.

The ever-full coffee pot sits atop a gleaming almost-new wood-fired cookstove, its feet shimmed with planks. Inside the open cabin door is an eight-hole muffin tin, grater, rolling pin, drainboard with an upside down white cup, and large flour tin on the floor.

The cabin itself is made of sawn spruce logs topped with a split log roof and bark shingles. A wide trail, obviously made with a lot of care, heads away from the cabin toward a half-hidden structure on the opposite hillside, possibly the miner's pot of gold...

Photograph of "A Pikes Peak Prospector" by William Henry Jackson, 1900.