Frame and log buildings strung along the dirt road through the valley, with poles carrying a line into town and a wagon on the road. Taken in the loudest year of the boom, and worth counting.
Dated to 1913, which puts it in the middle of the boom the 1913 clippings describe. The photograph's own details agree with that date. Poles carry a wire along the road, and the Monte Vista Journal of 25 March 1913 reports Mountain States Telephone linemen working to within eight miles of Jasper that week. The large wall tent pitched on the flat matches the Colorado Statesman's note two months later that the hills were beginning to fill up with the tents of prospectors.
The useful thing to do with this photograph is count. About a dozen roofed buildings stand along the road, most of them small. There is one large wall tent. On the road there is a wagon and team with a man standing beside it, and a handful of other figures near the buildings. That is the town.
Now set that against the language of the same few months. In 1896 the Rocky Mountain News had Jasper as the most noted rival Cripple Creek will have before winter. In May 1913 the Colorado Statesman called the Miser find the richest strike in the history of this country. Three hundred citizens of Monte Vista raised ten thousand dollars in under five minutes to rebuild the road to it.
Read the same clippings for where people actually were and the picture changes. The Monte Vista Journal of 24 May 1913 says prospectors arriving by train have brought their families to live here while they put in the summer prospecting in the Platoro district, and here is Monte Vista, thirty nine miles away. The only head counts tied to Jasper itself anywhere in this collection are small. The smelter announced in 1922 was to employ twenty five men.
A photograph is one afternoon and not a census. The camp rose and fell with the season and with whoever was working the tunnels, and men camped in the hills do not appear in a view of the road. But any account of hundreds or thousands of people living at Jasper has to be set against this, taken in the year the boom was at its loudest.
The poles are discussed further in the record for the Hemingray insulator found here.