John Hawes
A hundred year life, John Hawes
10/14/20263 min read
Above, John Hawes left, Christine Hawes center.
Sterling and Springfield's notorious (unbeknownst to the local citizenry) Dr. Mote died in February 1919, but his wife was advertising for business in Blackfoot less than a year later, in December, a degree in medicine at the time apparently not yet wholly essential. Mrs. Mote, who (according to at least one present-day account) had some nurse's training, either acquiring it in Utah or from working alongside her charlatan husband from the time of their marriage in 1891 to his death eighteen years later.
Mrs. Mote, born Jensine Christine Jorgensen, came to Utah from Denmark in 1882 at the age of eleven, the family of six children having been converted to Mormonism before their voyage. "Jessie," as she would be known, married John Otterbine Mote in 1891. Mote was galavanting through the West, arrested first for fraudulently practicing medicine in Oregon and then for assault shortly after that arrest. But before that he ws facing charges in Salt Lake City for passing counterfeit two-bit coins and being inadequately schooled at medicine—it was alleged his 'degree' came from an 'Asiatic' college, which he denied. Mote had had several ealier run-ins in the Midwest for fraud and practicing without a license.
Shortly before the couple went to Oregon, chased out of SLC, Mote and his wife were disparaged by the local paper as another example of a 'smart man...(ruined) by bad whisky and licentiousness,' she 'the legitimate fruit of the Mormon social doctrine and practice.'
Mote would come into Utah trouble again, in 1899, caught with a woman he admitted wasn't his wife in several inns, all of which he failed to pay. In that decade, Jessie Mote, if not her husband, likely visited her family in Oxford, Idaho, where her father worked on a ranch until he died in 1900. On her visits she would likely run into an area ranching family, the Hawes, and her acquaintance would rekindle after Dr. Mote's death. John Hawes, Sr. and Jessie would wed in 1920.
Hawes, at 51, was two years older than Jessie. His first wife had died in 1901. Hawes had come to Swan Lake in 1890 at age twenty-one, when his stepfather Joseph Vannesse, who had been a bachelor all his life, married and acquired a homestead there. Vannesse had ranched near Lemhi, where Hawes was born in 1869, the son of George Hawes and an unnamed Shoshoni woman. His mother died when he was five and his father absconded near that time, and Vannesse asked Chief Tendoy's permission to take young John into his care. Tendoy consented.
Vannesse raised John at his cattle ranch for ten years, where they lived in a 16' X 18' log cabin, then sold his operation and took Hawes to Challis to attend school and live with a couple he knew. It was the first school John ever attended.
In later reminiscences, John Hawes would claim to have witnessed Sacajawea's drawn out death, filled with suffering, and the Native burial services for her. His account defies historians' view, which claims her 1812 death from typhus in South Dakota, but agrees with oral tradition of the tribes, which say her death occurred in 1884 at the age of 96 on the Wind River Reservation. Hawes remembered seeing Indian burials in which the deceased's horse would be killed and left covering the grave.
Hawes married, joined the LDS Church, fathered four children in nine years before his first wife's death. As Dr. Mote and his wife moved about from Salt Lake to Nevada to Oregon to Chesterfield, he must have run into Jessie Mote from time to time at funerals or the store. After he married her, he carpentered and sheared sheep while Jessie doctored, the couple living first in the Springfield-Aberdeen area and later in Idaho Falls. She attended childbirths, fixed deep cuts, burns and broken bones and administered tinctures, apparently achieving enough faith to continue her practice for nearly two decades. After she died in 1948, Hawes would marry again. He and his new wife, Marty Helmandollar, lived in Downey until she died in 1961, and he would spend his last years at Lava Hot Springs, until his death, at age 102, in 1971.
