Experts Spot Something Odd In Wild West Photo, Then Zoom In & Are Left Stunned | HO

PUEBLO, COLORADO — In the back room of a quiet regional museum, an old leatherbound photo album sat untouched for decades, gathering dust among the forgotten artifacts of a defunct historical society. Its contents, for years, were considered unremarkable: black-and-white portraits, images of dusty streets, the occasional shot of a schoolhouse or church.

But when an intern named Clara West decided to catalog the album during a slow off-season, she made a discovery that would leave historians and labor experts across the country stunned—and would forever change how we think about the hidden heroes of the American West.

It started with a single photograph, dated approximately 1901 and stamped with a faded photographer’s mark: S. Trainer Studio, Creek. The scene was rich with detail—a roulette table dominated the foreground, flanked by a group of blurred men in hats, most of them grinning or deep in conversation. Behind the table, a woman in a corseted top and skirt looked straight at the camera, arms stiff at her sides, her expression unreadable.

But it was the second woman, just a few feet away, who caught Clara’s attention. She posed with one leg on a wooden chair, her body leaning forward as she adjusted the laces of her boot. Her face bore a faint smirk—confident, knowing, and out of place. Unlike the others, she wasn’t performing for the camera. She seemed almost candid, as if caught mid-action, yet she too was looking directly into the lens. Clara flagged the photo for further analysis.

When she digitized it at high resolution and uploaded it to the museum’s archival system, Clara began making notes on every detail. Days later, she brought the image to Mark Dit, the museum’s head curator. Dit dismissed it at first: “We’ve got hundreds of saloon shots like this.” But Clara persisted. “Zoom in,” she said, tapping the screen. “Look at the pin.”

At first glance, it looked like a decorative brooch, fastened near the woman’s bodice, just below the frilled strap of her chemise. But under magnification, the object became clearer. It was a lapel pin—small, oval-shaped, and remarkably detailed. Around its edges were tiny, stamped letters, almost impossible to decipher. With contrast adjustment and digital enhancement, the text finally revealed itself: WWU.

Women’s Workers Union.

Dit leaned back in his chair, stunned. “That doesn’t make sense,” he murmured. “They didn’t have organizations out here until 1904, and definitely not in Creek.”

That discrepancy—just three years—might seem trivial, but for a trained historian, it was enough to raise red flags. The Women’s Workers Union was a controversial, semiformal labor network during the early 1900s, with links to textile protests in Massachusetts, garment strikes in Chicago, and early suffrage marches in St. Louis.Colorado’s mining region was still under tight corporate control in 1901, especially after the violent strikes of the late 1890s. Any woman associated with organized labor, especially in the circles of mine workers or their families, would have been considered a threat.

Creek had been the epicenter of brutal conflict between laborers and mine owners just a few years earlier. The Western Federation of Miners had led a bitter strike there in 1894, only for the town to fall back under the thumb of powerful businessmen by the turn of the century. If a WWU operative had been in town in 1901, she would have been in serious danger.

Dit called a friend at the local historical commission, hoping for more context. Within a week, Clara and Mark were speaking with Bill Harmon, a retired archivist who had once studied union activity in the Southern Rockies.

Harmon was skeptical at first, but as soon as he saw the enhanced image, he frowned. “I’ve seen that pin before,” he said, leaning in. “Not in a photo, though—in an incident report.” He pulled a box from his storage cabinet and sifted through a set of carbon-copied documents dating to 1902.

There was a woman they questioned around that time—never officially arrested, but her name kept coming up during interviews with local barkeeps and miners. Most knew her only as Lily or “Lacy Lily,” probably because of how she dressed.

The document mentioned a woman fitting the description in the photo: dark hair, olive-toned skin, refined speech, and, most intriguingly, a habit of frequenting establishments where company men gathered. There was no record of a birth name, no known address, and no family listed. But one line stood out. In the margin of a sheriff’s memo, someone had handwritten: “Suspected informant tied to lady agitators from East.”

Clara and Mark stared at the note in silence. Lily had to be the woman in the photograph. What if the woman in the saloon wasn’t there to entertain or gamble? What if she was there to observe, to gather information, maybe even to report back to women organizing from the shadows of a hostile system?

It wasn’t unheard of. By the early 1900s, several proto-groups had begun forming underground networks. Some used domestic staff, others leveraged women who had access to places men didn’t pay close attention to—boarding houses, kitchens, sewing circles, and yes, saloons. The theory was speculative, but not far-fetched.

Harmon agreed: “If she really was part of something, she had guts. That saloon”—he pointed to the wall in the background of the photo—“was owned by Joseph Carowway, one of the more ruthless mine investors. Men who spoke against him disappeared. A woman hanging around his place with that pin on her chest… she wouldn’t have lasted long if anyone knew what it meant.”

Lily had put herself at risk. But why? Clara couldn’t stop staring at the woman’s expression. There was something in her gaze—not fear, not defiance, but a kind of quiet calculation, as if she knew exactly where she was and what she was risking. The pose, the boot, the tilt of her chin—it all felt rehearsed, intentional.

They dug deeper. Local newspapers from 1901 were spotty, but one article in the Creek Times mentioned a fire that destroyed several buildings on Main Street, including a backroom ladies’ quarters above the saloon in the photo. No one died, but two women were hospitalized afterward—one with a fractured ankle, the other with burns to her hands. The names weren’t printed, just a short blur about “unidentified saloon girls taken to Mercy Hospital.”

That detail sparked another line of inquiry. Clara reached out to the records division at Mercy Hospital, now long since absorbed into the state medical archives. After weeks of waiting, she received a fragile page from an admissions log dated July 2, 1901. Two female patients—one listed as “Lillian, surname unknown, leg injury.” The other: “Rose Daily, minor burns, released the same day.” Lillian could quite easily be shortened to Lily. There was no discharge date next to Lillian’s name, just a diagonal note in red ink: “Transferred, destination unrecorded.”

It was the last trace of her. No gravestone, no obituary, no census entry. It was as if she’d simply vanished. But she hadn’t. She was right there in the center of that photo, caught in a single moment where the facade nearly broke.

Clara drafted a report for the museum’s upcoming exhibit, framing the story as a mystery rather than a solved case. After all, they couldn’t prove the pin was truly a WWU badge. They couldn’t confirm Lily’s role or her affiliations, but the clues all led to Lily being an early organizer of women’s labor movements. And being in that saloon, she had risked everything.

The Wild West photo had left all of the experts stunned. Now they had enough to raise new questions about women’s roles in labor history, about silent acts of courage, and about how easily those acts were erased.

The museum exhibit opened three months later under the title Unknown Faces of the Frontier. The photo was given a place of prominence, blown up to nearly four feet across, its details restored and crisp. Visitors gathered around it daily, often pausing longest in front of the woman with her leg on the chair. Some simply admired the boldness of her pose. At first glance, it looked like a bunch of people enjoying their downtime in the Wild West. Others read the accompanying plaque and leaned in, trying to spot the small pin themselves.

The museum never made any definitive claims, but the wording invited curiosity. The plaque read: “This unidentified woman was photographed in Creek, Colorado in 1901. A magnified section reveals what may be an early labor union insignia, years before such organizations were officially present in the region. Her identity and her purpose in the saloon that day remain unknown.”

The ambiguity worked. School groups, amateur historians, even local miners’ union members stopped by to see the image and speculate. A few elderly visitors said they remembered hearing stories of women who helped organize food drives or gather intelligence during the strikes, though none had ever heard of a Lily or a “Lacy Lily.”

But the most surprising breakthrough came not from a historian, but from a retired librarian named Ruth Halverson, who saw a newspaper clipping about the exhibit while visiting family in Colorado Springs. She recognized the image immediately. Ruth had inherited a box of old family papers decades earlier, belonging to her great-aunt Esther, a quiet, unmarried woman who had lived most of her adult life in San Diego.

The box had included letters, receipts, some jewelry, and a few faded photographs. One of them showed a group of women standing in front of a plain wooden building marked Ladies Relief Cooperative, San Diego Branch. The woman on the far left, in slightly more formal dress than the others, bore a striking resemblance to the woman from the Creek Saloon.

Ruth, unsure at first, reached out to the museum through its public contact form and eventually connected with Clara. After a video call and some exchanged images, Clara felt her pulse quicken. The resemblance wasn’t just strong—it was uncanny: the hairline, the eyebrows, the shape of the mouth. And in the new photo, the same small pin could be seen faintly at the woman’s collar.

Ruth dug deeper into her aunt’s papers and discovered a pair of letters signed only with the letter “L.” One was dated September 1901 and postmarked from Denver. It was brief, but made an impact: simply stating that the person writing the letter had “made it out” and to keep quiet because “they couldn’t afford the noise.”

The second letter, written nearly 20 years later, referenced “the girls from the old days and the work they had done back when we weren’t even supposed to be in the room, let alone taking notes.” It closed with, “Still not bad for a saloon girl with a broken ankle.”

It was enough. Clara flew out to San Diego to examine the original materials. Working with a forensic archivist, they verified the handwriting in both letters matched a small set of known documents from early labor organizers working in Colorado and California between 1899 and 1915. Several of those women had operated under aliases, many leaving behind little to no trace.

But now, Clara had enough to make a formal connection. The woman in the Creek saloon photo was likely the same woman who helped establish the Ladies Relief Cooperative in San Diego in 1907. She had lived under the name Lilian Roth after that, appearing in a 1910 census as a seamstress and later as a school secretary. She never married and died in 1941. Her death certificate listed no children and no next of kin.

The revelation wasn’t explosive. It didn’t rewrite textbooks, but it filled in a quiet gap—a woman who had once walked into a hostile saloon wearing a pin she knew could get her hurt or worse had survived, relocated, and gone on to help women and families in another city during another chapter of America’s growing labor movement.

Clara updated the museum display. A second photo was added next to the first, this one showing the Ladies Relief Cooperative, with a caption identifying the woman as “presumed to be Lillian Roth, early organizer and community advocate.” The pin was now no longer a mystery.

It had been confirmed as a rare, pre-standardized emblem used briefly by the Women’s Workers Union in small, unrecognized circles. Only a few examples had ever been recovered, usually without documentation. The one in the photo became a visual symbol of quiet defiance—easily overlooked, easily dismissed, yet now a part of the public record.

When the updated exhibit reopened, attendance surged. Clara gave local talks at schools and community centers, explaining not just the discovery, but the process of it. She emphasized that history wasn’t always made in loud, obvious ways. Sometimes it was hidden in a photo, in a pin, in the margins of a letter.

She told students how history’s biggest gaps were often in the stories of women, especially working-class women who’d been left out of newspapers and family trees. Women like Lillian, who never wrote memoirs or gave speeches, but who had changed the lives of the people around them quietly and deliberately.

In the museum guest book next to the display, someone left a simple comment: “She was never just in the background.” And now, thanks to one photo, neither was her story.