Dear Mother, Sister and all.--Well I will write again, although I never expect you will get this letter, for if the mail going out to the coast from Dawson is a slow as the mail coming in it will never reach Skagway. I am well, healthy and fat, hoping this will find you all the same.

I have written several letters to you since I got the last one. The last one I got was one Elva wrote and sent her picture some time in August.

The mail service here is rotten and so are the laws and the people that make them, and rotten in the lowest degree of rottenness is the whole condemnable government that England holds sway over. No government on God's green earth has ever deprived its people of the rights that should exist in a mining country as the corruptible Canadian government has here. I will not try to tell you of the wrong that is being done here, for it would take sheets of paper to do it properly.

We have had some pretty cold weather here but I am used to it now and don't mind it much. Thirty and forty degrees below zero is nice weather to work in and when the thermometer goes up to zero it is just nice to work. I am keeping a log of the weather this winter. I have a good thermometer, one that registers eighty below zero and in the spring when the river opens up and there is more certainty of a letter going out, I will send it. There was no time in November that the thermometer went above zero and the coldest it has been here so far was Nov 17th when it was 47 below, the 18th it was 50 below; this was at Last Chance. In Dawson it was 62 below, and the same day it was 70 below on the dome between the head of Hunker and the head of Dominion creeks. That cold weather there were five men froze to death in this country; two were frozen on the Dome, one was sitting on his sledge with his pipe in one hand and a match in the other. He no doubt felt sleepy and thought he would take a smoke.

The sun has not shone here at my cabin since the 24th of November, but we are looking for it in about a week or so. There is about two feet of snow here now. There is lots of work going on here this winter; the average wages they are paying now is $7.50 a day, but I think next winter wages will be down to $5 a day. The best claim on Eldorado and Bonanza will be pretty well worked out this winter. Hunker Creek is proving up to be nearly as good as Bonanza. On a pup that comes into Bonanza they have a pay streak two feet thick that goes $25 to the pan. The name of this pup is Victoria Gulch. This winter they have got as high as $100 to the pan on Hunker Creek. Last summer in one day one man worked out 127 counces of gold on French Hill.

There are three sawmills here and two steamboats that are tied up to the docks. They had quite a fire in Dawson last fall. It burned quite a scope out of the heart of town but it is pretty well built up now.

The Spanish-American war didn't amount to much, did it? There are rumors here in Dawson now but I don't know how true it is that there is war between England, France, Russia, Germany and the United States. They may be fighting now for all we know here, but I hope they are not. The Northwest mounted police are supposed to be carrying the mail from Dawson to Skagway, but there has been no mail in since last September. We heard once here that the police dumped the U.S. mail out in Lake LaBarge and I guess it was so, for no one puts it past them to do the like of that. I know you have written letters to me and I wish I could get them. I would like awful well to hear from the outside world. It is almost like living in the pen, or I judge so, for we can get no news. There are no newspapers come in here nor anything else. All we have to do is to melt snow for water, chop wood, cook, eat, sleep and work a little. The days here are seven hours long of daylight and a fellow gets all the sleep he wants.

The aurora borealis shows up very nice here some nights, but it is too grand for me to try to describe it. It is nothing here for it to snow at 20 and 30 below zero, but the snow is an light as a feather. Well I will send this letter to Dawson in a day or two, but God only knows when it will start from there, but hoping in the meantime it will reach its destination, I remain, your son and brother,

C.O. Heninger