Sixth Plate

HE WORE . . . A shirt with multiple buttons underneath his plaid vest that was tinted blue. An unidentified operator also applied bright red pigments to the garment that was strongly associated with gold miners and to a lesser extent, firemen. Although the freckle-faced lad might have seemed callow to the uninitiated men in the gold fields of California, can there be any doubt, after studying his massive hands, swollen and filthy from panning for those magical nuggets in rapidly flowing western streams that he really was one of them? I suspect that the pale-eyed subject arrived in California during the initial rush for fortune and fame. After surviving the trek and establishing himself he most likely hired an itinerant daguerreotypist to produce this sixth size image so he could send it home to ma and pa. His maker also touched his florid face with red pigment. Studying the man?s expression more closely and his underlying youthfulness revealed a determination and intensity that was reaching out to any admirer. The specks you see in my reproduction of this remarkable holographic dag are superfluous. A complete composite case with a fabric spine contains the fellow.