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991 West Jackson street, now Centre Avenue Chicago, January 23d? 1879

My dear daughter Your letter of January 4th I received this morning at my office where I had had to wade my way through heavy drifts of snow and whence I returned this evening wet up to the knees and steaming? from perspiration?. For this, really, is the most trying winter season I have yet gone through out West here. And, unclear, we are comparatively lucky in a large city where even the heaviest snowfall cannot, for longer than a day, withstand the head of hundreds of thousands of feet. Terrible, beyond all power of imagination, have been the sufferings of the poor settlers upon the bleak parries of Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. Entire families have been destroyed there by the intensely cold weather; hundreds of people, having been caught in the snowstorms