Life Sketch
Daniel A. Miller and Clarissa Pond, parents of Jane Clarissa Miller, joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints before Jane Clarissa was born on August 1, 1841 or 1842 in Adams, Hancock, Illinois. The Miller family then moved to Kanesville, Iowa where Daniel served as Bishop for one year after anti-Mormon mobs drove them from their home in 1846. Kanesville was a crude, temporary settlement for the Mormon refugees. Jane Clarissa was five or six years old when her mother died in Kanesville, Iowa in 1847. Daniel Miller subsequently married Lovina Monrose, who became Jane’s new mother.
Like many other pioneers, Jane knew about long days of wagon rides, sleeping under the stars at night, and eating at campfires day after day. The trek westward wasn’t all drudgery. There was time for romping and running, and fun games at night before bedtime on the plains. She learned the pioneer songs and listened to long sermons on Sundays with the sky for a ceiling and the sod for the floor of this outdoor chapel.
Upon the family’s arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, they rested for a night in the Great Salt Lake settlement before driving north again the next day to help settle Farmington, Utah. They followed the shore of the Great Salt Lake, where only the trail of Indians had been before. The other adventurous families that accompanied Millers were Thomas Grover, Joseph Secrist, William O. Smith, Allen Burk, and Captain Davis. Jane’s father and brother tried a little fall plowing in the cement-like ground the next morning. All they could see was the glimmering waters of the Great Salt Lake to the west of them, while all around the landscape was marred by deep gullies from endless run-offs in the spring when melting snows run wild toward the lake. That fall, Jane and the other children played in the deep gullies and hid in the tall sagebrush, which the men cut down to burn that winter.
Daniel Miller built a two-story adobe house for the family on 4th North n Farmington. Her first schoolhouse was a one-room cabin of logs near Ezra T. Clark’s place. There she learned to read and write, but more importantly, she learned to be helpful and thrifty and wise in taking responsibilities. By the time she was sixteen, Jane had enjoyed wool picking bees, corn husking parties, and wild berry picking, as well as how to dry fruit, make soap, spin, weave, knit, and sew. At the wool picking bees, boys and girls made the most of it, and mothers cooked fine pioneer feeds for everyone. Pioneer dances and surprise parties were the life of the youth. Jane had her eyes on a brown-eyed youth who moved to North Ogden and thereafter, his visits became less frequent, much to her dismay.
The pioneers learned of a large army headed for Utah with unknown intentions. The Church leaders feared trouble and hostility from the Army, so they ordered a general evacuation of the Salt Lake Valley. The Miller family headed south, where they waited for the trouble to blow over. Soon after they returned home Jane married Oscar North Rice on April 25, 1859. She was seventeen or eighteen years old at the time and they settled in what is now Providence, Utah. She had many experiences with the dangers from frost, bears, wolves, Indians. She knew what it was like to leave a good home and her family and start a new family in a crude log cabin with willows and sod for a roof and a dirt floor in place of boards. She also knew the joys of serving God and was blessed with six daughters and one son. Death called her home at the age of fifty-four on February 15, 1896. May God own and bless her.
