(Editors note: This story was compiled by sourcing several online sources including the “Historical and Cultural Encyclopedia of Arkansas”, a biography written by his son Parley Prattt Jr. and “Eleanor McLean and the Murder of Parley Pratt”, a research work commissioned by the LDS church in 1975.)
By Dennis McCaslin
Mayhem, murder, marital discourse and a mystery that remains unsolved to this day are all a part of the Parley Pratt story.
It started with connections in California and ended up with the the death of one of he original member of The Quorum of Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints on a spring morning in 1857 near present-day Alma in Crawford County.
Parley Parker Pratt was one of the key figures in the early LDS Church leadership, and was called “a man of note among the Mormons” by a local newspaper that reported on his death two days earlier on May 15, 1857.
Pratt’s writings, which include pamphlets, hymns, and an entertaining autobiography, helped define early Mormon theology, and his hymns are still widely sung in congregations today.
Born in Burlington, New York, in 1807, he preached to the Creek and Cherokee nations as a young missionary, as well as to congregations in Canada, England, California, and the Pacific, and he was the first Latter-day Saint missionary to serve in Chile in South America.
Scarcely known in Arkansas during his lifetime, Pratt was murdered on May 13, 1857, in Crawford County by Hector McLean, the estranged husband of Eleanor McComb McLean, who had become Pratt’s twelfth plural wife.
The murder shocked the Latter-day Saint community and became front-page news throughout the nation.
Eleanor McLean portrayed Pratt as a martyr who had rescued her from her alcoholic, abusive husband; however, national accounts, unfavorable to the Mormons’ practice of polygamy (discontinued in 1890), reported that Pratt had seduced Eleanor away from her husband.
Eleanor embraced Mormon principles and was baptized into the Church with her husband’s consent. In 1855, following a domestic dispute, Hector McLean secretly sent their children from San Francisco to New Orleans, Louisiana, to live with their maternal grandparents, whereupon Eleanor determined to leave him.
She then traveled to New Orleans to get her children.
Pratt and Eleanor McLean had met three years earlier while Pratt was living in San Francisco, California, and presiding over the Church’s Pacific mission.
Little is known of the relationship between Eleanor and Parley during 1854-55 in San Francisco period other than that he tried to help her solve her domestic difficulties and she assisted the Pratt’s with gifts of food and clothes.
After she had left for New Orleans in 1855, Parley wrote his wife Belinda that he had met a worthy soul who then was in deep tribulation, who, he hoped, could make her way to Zion.
After Parley’s death in 1857, Eleanor wrote that she had “often sought his society” at the home “he kept with his wife, Elizabeth, in San Francisco.”
Whatever their feelings, Eleanor remained with her husband until she went to New Orleans to get her children back, however estranged they had become.
When she left San Francisco she left Hector, and later she was to state in a court of law that she had left him as a wife the night he drove her from their home. Whatever the legal situation, she thought of herself as an unmarried woman
Eleanor and Pratt had decided to meet at Fort Smith and travel back to Utah together. Hector McLean heard of their intended rendezvous and beat them to Arkansas, where he filed charges against them and got warrants for their arrests.
Hector caught up with Eleanor and Pratt in Indian Territory and again took the children away. Hours later, a state marshal arrested Eleanor on a charge of stealing children’s clothing, while a military escort apprehended Pratt.
They both were first taken to Fort Gibson and then back to Van Buren. There, Eleanor was brought before Judge John Ogden, who released her without further charges.
At Pratt’s trial McLean was allowed to read the charges and to state all his grievances against Pratt, successfully stirring up the crowd of five hundred spectators against the defendant.
When Pratt stood to answer the charges, McLean pulled out his pistol and aimed it at Parley’s head. The court officers stopped him from firing, and the judge postponed the trial till later that afternoon.
Pratt was locked in jail for his own protection, and the angry crowd returned to the courthouse well before the appointed time of four o’clock. The judge postponed the trial again, this time until the next morning.
This second postponement was only an effort to deceive McLean. The judge had already decided to acquit Pratt and to release him as soon as it was safe to do so.
Very early the next morning, Wednesday, May 13, Parley was released:
McLean learned of Pratt’s release and caught up with Pratt on the Zealey Wynn property in Fine Springs, some twelve miles northwest of Van Buren, where he shot and stabbed Pratt.
As he lay dying, Pratt requested that his remains be interred with his family in Utah. For many years, family and descendants attempted to locate and remove his remains from the Wynn Cemetery in Fine Springs-north of Alma-to the space reserved for him in the family plot in Salt Lake City, Utah.
In 2008, the most sophisticated scientific tools available , including ground-penetrating radar, were used to ascertain the location of Pratt’s remains.
Despite evidence of a burial, no human remains were found. It has been speculated over the years that in the intervening years that members of the LDS church had somehow removed his remains from the gravesite and returned them to Utah, although no one in the church will confirm-or deny-this rumors.
Another rumor that persisted for year us that a massacre that happened later that same year at Mountain Meadows Utah, in which a large number of individuals from Arkansas of a wagon train traveling west were ambush and killed, has mostly disproven as historians have come up with alternate suggestions as to one triggered the attack.
History doesn’t record a trial or conviction for McClain in the death of Pratt. Eleanor eventually returned to Salt Lake City and became a teacher for the children of the Elders of the church, including those of Brigham Young.
During his lietime, Pratt had a total of 30 children, and his living descendants in 2011 were estimated to number 30,000 to 50,000.
He was the great-great-grandfather of Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate for President of the United States and the great-great-great-grandfather of Jon Huntsman Jr., a one-time governor of Utah and American diplomat.
Curious history buffs can visit Pratt’s “grave site” to this day. Travel north from Alma on Interstate 49 and take a right at the Rudy. If you make a left at the first road, you’ll find the Pratt monument in the small Wynn Cemetery.
The site is open to the public and is marked by a large granite monument upon which is engraved one of Pratt’s most well-known hymns, “The Morning Breaks.”
