It is believed that Elijah was the son of Jonas Jenkins and Mary "Jennie" Brickey. He married Mary Messer, daughter of George and Nancy Caldwell Messer and started a family. Henry Rathbone, Adjutant, Captain Julius Welch Camp #229, Sons of Confederate Veterans, is his great, great, great grandson, and he writes: "On August 17, 1861 Elijah Jenkins...left his family and Cove Creek farm and joined the Confederate Army. He enlisted in a company that was being raised in Haywood County, which became Company E of the 29th NC Infantry. He was 33 years old and had a wife and 3 living children (another one had died at a young age. His name was Dock)."

Rathbone says that after long and arduous service of four years, Elijah and the others in the 29th were captured and held at Meridian, MS. They were paroled on May 8, 1865. He adds, "After making their way home in late May, Elijah began to return to his peacetime occupation of farming. He was plowing his field one morning soon after his return, when a group of former Home Guards came to his farm. These men had been using their position of authority to steal, kill, and terrorize the people of the county for some time. In all probability, they had come there to do mischief without knowing that he had returned home. When they came upon him, they immediately 'requisitioned' his mule and accused him of desertion. Proclaiming a vested authority to execute deserters,they took him about five miles from his farm and killed him. Any authority that this band of renegades had formerly had was no longer viable due to the Confederacy's demise a few weeks before. The story of his killing has been passed down through the family by his son, nine years old at the time, who followed the men at a distance and saw what happened to his father who had only been home a few days...his body was left where he was killed, in the woods of the White Oak Community, until some friends of the family went and buried him. His remains lie in a solitary grave there on a hill..."