JEFFERSON OSBORN MIKESELL
written by daughter Betty Lou Mikesell Erlandson
Jeff, as he liked to be called, was born to Harriet Osborn and Andrew Jackson Mikesell December 30, 1887 in Park City, Summit County, Utah. His birth was registered in the Latter Day Saints (Mormon) church in nearby Kamas, Utah.
His mother's parents' names were Thomas Jefferson Osborn (called Jeff) and Elizabeth Standley. Sarah Elizabeth Skinner and John Cunningham Mikesell were his paternal grandparents. Jeff became a member of a strong Mormon family that would eventually include eleven children. An older brother, Ernest Jackson, (who lived to be over 101 years old) recalled that Jeff was a tease and a trickster as a child---a boy full of fun.
About the time he started attending school his long beautiful black curls were clipped short. He remembered that his mother cried during the haircut. In winter he and his brothers and sisters used to skate to school on the frozen creek.
According to what some of his children remember him saying, and also what two of his sisters remembered, he was in his early teens, probably thirteen or fourteen, When he fell ill with what may have been spinal meningitis. He had been sent to the nearby store for a few groceries and on the way home developed a severe headache. He said that he went to bed that fall day and woke up the following spring. He had been in a coma---very ill. From then on he was to have a problem with his spine, making him slightly stoop-shouldered and causing his feet, from then on, to be fitted with specially-made shoes.
Jeff often spoke sadly of his chance to take an offered scholarship to a "middle" school but was unable to go. Another unfulfilled dream was to some day be able to play the violin. He grew to be six feet tall with a beautiful smile, strong even features, tannish-brown skin, wavy black hair and bright blue eyes. His eyesight was excellent but in old age he developed farsightedness and needed glasses to read. All his life he enjoyed reading, especially western novels, and was part way through one when he died.
Jeff was quite a bit like his father who was also a kind gentleman and always put others first. His loving nature had a stubborn streak and he held fast to definite ideas and beliefs all his life. He was an honorable and honest man and was a good husband, father, and brother, and if anyone tried to speak ill or hurt any of his loved ones his temper would surface and "beware, the offender".
Jeff was 27 when World War I began. Because of his earlier illness, he was not able to serve in the armed forces. Two of his six brothers were wounded in overseas fighting. By then the family was broken up with some of them married and on their own. In birth date order Jeff and his brothers and sisters were: Charlie, Ern., Libby, Jeff, Henry, Frank, Willard, Walt, Esther, Mary (Mae), and Lucille. Esther also had meningitis and was to suffer brain seizures during her lifetime until she died at age 34 in 1932. Jeff loved his gentle sister very much and spoke about her with love and tenderness.
His family lived in Utah until Jeff was fourteen. When Charlie and Ernest were born they lived in Hyrum, Utah, a few miles south of Logan. Then before Libby was born in 1886 they moved to Lewiston, Utah near the Idaho border. Jeff was born in a different house in Park City, near Kamas. In 1901 the family moved from the Kamas area to the small town of Chapin near Victor, Idaho. Their moves were all by wagon and horses.
When Jeff was well enough he joined some of his brothers in hunting and trapping in the surrounding Teton mountains. Once, while one of his brothers and he were checking their traps, they were arrested and fined for trapping on government land without permission. They hadn't realized they were in National Park area. Some of the Mikesells learned to ski well on their home-made skis.
During one or more of the summers Jeff tended sheep. He told his children about watching, from a mountain above Jackson, Wyoming, the celebration on July 4th, and wishing he could be down there. He loved animals and nearly always had a dog.
For a time Jeff carried the U.S. mail, by wagon or horseback. The Snake River was his territory and one day, in spring he was about to cross the torrent near Swan Valley when a stranger asked if he could cross with him. Jeff agreed but said that if anything happened, the man would have to save himself. Jeff had never learned to swim. Mid-stream, the man fell into the river and yelled for help. Jeff swam after him and pulled him to the opposite shore, saving his life. He was always very modest about this incident and called it pure luck. Years later there was an article in a national magazine about a man who, years ago, carried mail across the Snake and Jeff exclaimed, "That old coward! I knew him and he would never cross it except when the water was low. I always had to do it."
The last move the family made while Jeff was living at home was to a dry-farm near Dubois, Idaho. Not very far away lived another Mormon family named Allen. The Mikesells became well acquainted with them, and Jeff was especially fond of the oldest girl, Florence Vivien. She was growing tall and slender with beautiful red hair and flashing brown eyes. A tomboy, she loved to gallop her horse with her long hair streaming in the wind. Her brothers loved to tease her to see her quick temper flare.
Jeff began working on the Union Pacific Railroad Ranch nearby. One of his jobs was to work with the Harriman boys, riding fence mostly. They were sons of the railroad magnate millionaire and he wanted them to learn to work with their hands.
Jeff was thirty-one years old when Florence became eighteen and he talked her into accepting his proposal of marriage. Her mother had died several years before and she was mothering her six younger brothers and sisters. When she finally said yes to Jeff he hurried home and asked his sister Mary [Mae] to iron a white shirt for him. She agreed to, but asked why. He replied, "I'm going to get married tomorrow." She was astonished and asked him whom he was going to marry. He said, "Florence Allen." Everyone in the family was surprised, as Jeff was a private man and had let no one know how he had felt about Florence for so long. They had accepted the fact that he was to be a bachelor all of his life. The two were married the next day, May 31, 1919 and were faithful to each other all their married lives. They were never married in the temple, but by a local justice of the peace at Dubois, Idaho. As a wedding present, Jeff gave Florence a large bunch of ripe bananas. She had never tasted a banana before, and had always wanted to. As a result, she ate the whole bunch and was sick to her stomach on her wedding night.
They rented a tiny tenant house at the Ranch where Jeff worked, and Florence helped with the cooking. she spent as much time as she could back at her old home, and quite often brought her two youngest sisters, Grace and Nettie, back to stay for awhile. Jeff loved them as he did his own sisters, and was kind and gentle with them.
On April 5, 1922 their first son, Ernest Osborn was born in Victor, Idaho where Jeff was working for a cattleman. Florence's sisters lived with them. Grace remembered the house as a "poor little house but clean and warm". By this time, Florence had cut her hair, to Jeff's consternation, because it was so heavy she had bad headaches.
The winter of 1922-23 found Florence and Jeff, with Florence's brother Clide, on top of Teton Pass above Jackson, Wyoming. Jeff drove a stage every day from Victor to Jackson and back again the next day. Florence cooked for the passengers at noon. This was a hard cold job for Jeff, who had to fight deep snowdrifts. The snow was so deep on top of the pass where they lived that the barn was two stories high so that the driver could use the lower story in the summer and the top story in the winter. They would come out right onto the deep snow.
That spring there, Jeff was driving a wagon with another man along when the road side caved in and the horses started down the side of the steep mountain. The other man jumped off but Jeff stayed with the team and kept the frightened horses from catastrophe. It was a terribly jolting trip and the man thought for sure that Jeff had been killed. One winter at that place was enough, and they moved before another one came along.
In 1923-24 Jeff worked in Fairfield, Idaho. It was then that their second child was born. He was named Jefferson and died at birth. Florence had had her appendix out in an emergency while she was pregnant and little Jeff was too weak to live. It was winter and he could not be buried, so he was placed carefully up high under the barn rafters until spring came and Jeff took his dead baby, in its box that he had so sorrowfully made, to Hagerman Valley for burial. A little wooden slab had his name written on it but, as they had no money to buy a permanent stone, it was gone in a few years. Now no one but God knows the spot where he is buried.
On [private] 1925, Betty Lou, their first daughter, was born, fat and healthy, at the Black Bear Coal Mine Camp near Driggs, Idaho. Jeff was working as a coal miner, for his brother Henry and Edna, Henry's wife. James Allen was born in the same cabin on November 4, 1927 but by now the camp had a post office and was called Sam.
For several years, after they were married, Jeff would "batch" while Florence would go off and on to Tuttle, Idaho, about 11 miles west of Gooding, to help her brothers and sisters. Most of the time one or more of them would live for a while with the young couple. Nettie, Grace, and brother George all stayed for a while at the coal camp.
When Betty was three years old, in 1928, Jeff moved his family to Pocatello, Idaho. He rented a small house and went to work for the Union Pacific Railroad in the big tie plant there. A few months later they moved down the street a block to another small house. These were located in the suburb of Alameda. The third house was their last in Pocatello. They bought the one at 290 Park Avenue and settled down. It was only a block or two away from the two previous homes.
At the tie plant Jeff worked hard and when it was time for him to come home Ernie and Betty and then later Jimmie would run two or three blocks to meet him and walk home with him. It was at that plant that he lost a little finger in an accident.
In 1929 the stock market crashed and caused layoffs all over the country. Jeff was laid off his job frequently and it was a hard time for his family. Florence sold insurance and was once presented an award by Idaho's governor for being the best saleswoman of the year in Idaho. When laid off, with Florence working, Jeff took care of his children and cooked and cleaned the house. In winter, sometimes he and others would be sent to clear the U. P. tracks of snow drifts wherever they were---Montana, Idaho, Utah. It was a miserably coldjob but it helped feed the family. Della Ann was born July 21, 1931 and Thelma on [private] 1934.
In April, 1938 the family moved to a rented farm on Mt. Kit Carson near Spokane, Washington. Jeff had had lung trouble for several years but he worked for the federal Works Progress Administration helping build roads, including the one to Mt. Spokane. He would walk several miles to where he would get a ride to the job site and after work he would be dropped off, then walk back home.
He planted a garden every spring. He and his brother-in-law Gilbert Dean would get in winter wood for both families. Gilbert was married to Jeff's sister Mary, and the Dean family had lived near Jeff and Florence when Ernie was small. Now they lived a few miles up the road. Before long Florence's brother Carlos and his family would move to a "homestead" a few miles away.
Florence was pregnant with Leslie when they moved from Pocatello. Jeff went early to visit Mary and Gilbert and find a place to live. The terrain must havereminded him of the days spent in the Teton area.
Poor Florence, pregnant and recovering from train sickness, must have felt her heart sink when she saw her new home. But she and Jeff and children immediately began making the home livable and for three years and eight months they struggled to survive. The last child, Leslie Arlene, was born [private] 1938 at a hospital in Spokane, Washington. Now, the man who had been thought to be a confirmed bachelor by his family twenty years before, had six children. By the end of 1938 he turned 51 years old and he had not been well for several years.
1942 found the Mikesells living in Spokane. Jeff entered the Edgecliff Tuberculosis sanitarium. Florence and the children began life in the big city. When Jeff recovered enough to join the family he was never well enough to work steady on a physically hard job again. When living on Mt. Kit Carson the family (the ones who were old enough.) had joined the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Jeff remained loyal to that church the rest of his life. A branch was located only a few blocks away from thehome, as the Mormon Latter Day Saint church 4th Ward had been in Pocatello, and the family began the Sunday habit of walking to and from church. All were eventually baptized.
The family was beginning to break up. World War II took the two sons away to serve. Florence worked hard at the Galena Air Depot near Spokane until the war ended. Leslie was the only child left at home. Jeff and Florence began managing the Bluebird Motel. They were there for several years.
They were now grandparents. "Grandpa" would keep up the repairs at the motel. His generation had always had to be "do it yourselves" in life and Jeff had become good at repairing items. He was talented at doing many things. His older children remember him resoling shoes, nursing a sick calf, building a chicken coop, shooting hawks that threatened his chickens, playing with the babies as they came along, and solving sibling rivalries. He was gentle but firm with them, rarely using his razor strap, and always being just in his punishment. He was a good Cook but the kind that got the fire hot and cooked everything as fast as possible. As a result, Florence kept heavy cast iron kettles available forhim to use. They remember him, during the depression eating very little at mealtimes, so that his children would have enough. Later in life, he developed the habit of having graham crackers and milk at bedtime. He was always a meat and potatoes man but Florence slowly taught him to enjoy vegetable salads. He had despised garlic flavor since he was a boy and the cows got into a field where garlic was growing.
His daughter, Betty, remembers how he always covered his black wavy hair with a brimmed felt hat and sometimes would forget to remove it indoors. A new hat was a rarity and one time the two were downtown waiting for a bus, when a pigeon dirtied his best hat. His temper really flew that day.
For several years before they moved to the Bluebird Motel he sold Watkins Products, pulling his supplies in a small wagon, covering the neighborhood. His customers became good friends. From the Bluebird (sold to a new owner) Jeff and Florence moved into a tiny cottage on Rockwell Avenue in Spokane. This was their last home together. All their children were married by now and on their own. They bought this house and lived there just a few years until Jeff became very ill.
Jeff's lungs finally began to give out on him. His childhood illness, his coal mining days and working in the tie plant with creosote causedcontinuing lung problems. It was his fighting spirit that kept him going until he was 74 years old. That early spring of l962 he was unable to fight any longer and died in the Edgecliff TB Sanitarium in Spokane, Washington. Betty was with him and just as the sun rose he asked her to pull back the drapes so he could see the morning. It was the 30th of March and a bright sunny day with the birds singing outside. He could hear them and smiled. A few moments later he couldn't seem to breathe. He struggled hard but, even with the nurse working with him, he lost consciousness. He regained it later for a few minutes and asked for administration. His son, Elder Ernest Mikesell, and his son-in-law Wayne Winters laid their hands upon his head and asked God to release him. Before they removed their hands he relaxed and passed quietly away. His family was with him at the last. He is buried in Spokane next to his dear wife.
