♂Christian Lauritz Jensen

Christian Lauritz Jensen (23 February 1855 – 14 January 1930) was a Danish-born stage-line operator and telephone pioneer in the Black Hills of South Dakota. By 1876 he was running a stage service out of Deadwood, then a gold-rush camp in Dakota Territory. He had first tried to reach the gold fields a year earlier with a party of squatters, and was turned back by the United States Army. He later founded the telephone company at Hot Springs, and his son Leslie Jensen was governor of South Dakota from 1937 to 1939. He was the younger brother of Bothilda Catharina Jensen (1851–1925), the great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007).

Early life

He was born on 23 February 1855 at Jejsing, in Hostrup parish near Tønder, in the Duchy of Schleswig. He was the second of the six children of Peter Nikolai Jensen (1819–1894) and Christine Marie Bossen (1829–1911), and was baptized at Hostrup on 21 March 1855. The first of his three godparents, Peter Christian Nissen of Jejsing, later gave his whole name to Christian’s younger brother, born in 1860. The Danish census of February 1860 lists Christian, aged five, in his parents’ household at Jejsing. Schleswig passed from Denmark to Prussia in 1864, when he was nine.

Emigration and the Black Hills

According to his daughter Maud’s sworn passport application of 1924, he emigrated from the port of Hamburg on or about 15 January 1870, a month before his fifteenth birthday. He was the first of his family to leave. Five of the six children eventually settled in America, and his sister Bothilda followed in 1872.

A nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, prepared in 1987, records that he first came to the Black Hills in 1875 “as a member of a squatters’ party attempting to enter the gold fields illegally”, and was turned back by the Army. The Black Hills had been reserved to the Lakota by the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, and in 1875 the Army was still removing the miners who entered them. He returned in 1876, “after White settlement in the area was legalized”, in the nomination’s words, and set up a stage service in Deadwood, where he did business for several years. A history of the state’s governors, also published in 1987, adds that by 1878 he owned a stage that made a daily round trip between Rapid City and Rockerville, a mining camp to the south-west. The Deadwood Pioneer credited him with “a reputation for natural shrewdness and wit that anyone might envy”. Local newspapers of 1887 to 1889 report his stage and mail contracts around the Hills.

Two of his brothers followed him to the Hills. Peter Christian Nissen Jensen settled in Pennington County and died at Keystone in 1914. The youngest, Hans Christian Anton Jensen (1869–1893), joined Christian and died at Hot Springs in 1893. A family history written in 1994 adds that his brother-in-law Anders Hansen Thomsen was often called out from Chicago to help with the stagecoach line out of Deadwood.

Marriage and family

On 10 May 1887 he married Lillie May Haxby (1864–1926), whose marriage the Custer Chronicle reported that week. She had been born at Kirksville, Missouri, to an English-born father and a Kentucky-born mother, and had come to Dakota Territory in 1883. The couple lived at first at Rapid City. They had four children, born between 1889 and 1894: a daughter, Maud, and three sons. The first son died at Rapid City in July 1891, aged ten months, and the mortuary register records him only as the infant son of Chris L. Jensen. Another son, Herbert, died in 1913 at nineteen. Maud became a teacher at Summit School in St. Paul, Minnesota, and never married. The second son, Christian Leslie Jensen (1892–1964), went on to become the governor.

Hot Springs

In the early 1890s the family moved south to Hot Springs, a growing spa town, where Leslie was born in September 1892. There Jensen ran a stage concern like the one at Deadwood. The governors’ history tells how Fred T. Evans, a freighter who had made his fortune with bull trains and set out to make Hot Springs “the wonder city of the west”, wanted to choke off the new town of Cascade Springs, twelve miles to the south-west. He offered Jensen $250 a month not to run his stage there. Jensen then persuaded the Petty Brothers, his rivals on the same run, to pay him a further $300 a month to leave the trade to them, and so gave up the Cascade run $550 a month the richer. The same history suggests that the money may have gone into the telephone business he started in 1895, the People’s Telephone and Telegraph Company, which remained in the Jensen family for three generations.

In 1899 he built a brick cottage in the Queen Anne style, with a carriage house, at 309 South Fifth Street. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987 as the Governor Leslie Jensen House. The censuses of 1900 and 1910 find the family in Hot Springs and give his birthplace as Germany, while Maud’s passport application gives Denmark. Both are true: Jejsing was Danish when he was born and Prussian when he left. The same application states that he was naturalized at Hot Springs, on a date Maud did not know. By 1920 he and Lillie, with Leslie still at home, were living in a rural township of Fall River County.

Death

Lillie died on 27 February 1926. Christian died on 14 January 1930 at Aberdeen, in the north-east of the state, where Leslie was then Collector of Internal Revenue. The family record of his obituary says he was visiting Leslie and died at Leslie’s home. His body was carried back across the state to Hot Springs, and he was buried in Evergreen Cemetery there.

Notes

The governors’ history gives his birth year as 1854. A Schleswig census and the Hostrup baptism register both give 23 February 1855. The 1900 census gives his year of immigration as 1869, his daughter’s passport application gives January 1870, and the 1920 census appears to give a year in the early 1870s. The family record long gave his death as 12 January 1930, but the South Dakota state death index and his grave record both give the 14th. A bar-association memorial of Leslie says the telephone company was founded by his parents, while the governors’ history credits Christian alone. His birthplace also appears in records as Jeisig.