Only tough souls make it through Chicago winters. The only thing you can really count on is the true unpredictability of the season. Regardless of the temperatures, snowfall and storms there’s a beauty to this icy, brutal season.

In the Chicago History Museum archives we found a handful of images, most of them taken by Chicago Daily News photographers, that show a milkman making deliveries by horse and sled, old-fashioned snow plow trucks and even a group of camels in a snow-covered downtown alleyway. Even back then through all the snow and ice, life moved on.

Most of the photos were taken in 1929, when the city saw a snowfall of 58 inches, according to the National Weather Service Chicago records. The city’s snowiest winter was 1978 to 1979 when there was almost 90 inches of snow. Our least snowy season was 1920 to 1921. Just 9.8 inches all winter.