David P. Jenkins (August 25, 1823 – March 30, 1915), was an American attorney, soldier, businessman and philanthropist who homesteaded Spokane, Washington.
Biography
Jenkins was born on a farm near Mount Pleasant, Ohio, to orthodox Quaker parents. He was educated at the local Quaker seminary and in the high school in Mount Pleasant. He studied law in Cincinnati, Ohio, and passed his bar exam. He moved to LaSalle, Illinois, where he established a prosperous legal practice. He was an acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln (both men were lawyers for the Illinois Circuit Courts).
During the American Civil War, Jenkins served in the Union Army under Generals Grant, Pope, Sherman and Burnside in the Western Theater. Initially, he was the major of the 1st Illinois Cavalry. Jenkins saw his first combat action in two engagements near Lexington, Missouri, and helped negotiate the surrender of Federal forces in that vicinity to the Confederates in September 1861, becoming a prisoner of war.
He was exchanged that November and returned to the ranks, commanding two companies of the cavalry at Bird's Point, Missouri, from December until the spring of 1862, when he was assigned command of a battalion of the 1st Illinois Cavalry in southern Missouri, where his men protected supply lines to the army of General Samuel Curtis operating in Arkansas. In mid-1863, Jenkins became the lieutenant colonel and later the colonel of the 14th Illinois Cavalry, a regiment which he helped recruit and train.
thumb|left|Jenkins in 1890
Following the war he moved to the Washington Territory, establishing a law firm in Seattle in 1874 and serving as Seattle's city attorney in 1876. In 1879 he settled in Spokane, where he became a friend to Chief Spokane Garry and Chief Joseph the Younger, whom he admired for their honesty and integrity. Jenkins kept a photograph of Chief Joseph on his mantle.