Little is known of John Delaney's life prior to and after the brief period covered by the present collection of letters. Despite the Irish surname, the 1900 Federal census indicates that both he and his parents were born in Germany. He emigrated to the United States in 1867, when he was around eleven years of age. In 1888 he married the woman to whom most of the letters are addressed, Caroline D. Delaney (1864-1943), a native of Sweden who had come to America in 1872. In 1898 the Delaneys were living in Salt Lake City, Utah when John left to prospect for gold in the watershed of the Yukon River. After traveling north via Portland, Seattle, and Victoria to Fort Wrangell in southern Alaska, Delaney made three separate trips into the interior over the next 19 months. In the spring of 1898 he journeyed on foot from Fort Wrangell to Lake Teslin and thence to the headwaters of the Big Salmon River in southeast Yukon Territory, ultimately returning for lack of food. In July 1898 he again journeyed to the Big Salmon, and continued down the Yukon River by steamer, across Alaska to Cape Nome on the Bering Sea (where placer depoits of gold were discovered that very summer). After wintering at Fort Wrangell, Delaney made a third trip to the Big Salmon, and again passed down the Yukon, working for wages and prospecting around Circle City in Alaska in the summer of 1899. He then continued on to Cape Nome, working and prospecting there. By September 1899 Delaney was in Seattle, and by December, at Salt Lake, planning a new prospecting venture to Cape Nome. Delaney seems to have been tougher and more knowledgeable than most, but ultimately lacked the capital, and material resources, to make his various claims pay (at least on this trip). Initially optimistic of his prospects for making good money, he came to believe that "the stories of so much Gold Coming out is a Lie got up by Railroads and steamboat Lines." By the time of the 1900 census Delaney had moved his family to Seattle, and was presumably back in Alaska. In later life Delaney settled in Blyn, Clallam County, Washington, where by 1920 he was running a grocery store. He died before 1930.