Eleanor McLean

Eleanor McLean’s story moves from a troubled marriage and conversion to a plural marriage with Parley Pratt, then to Pratt’s killing and her return to Utah with an appeal for vengeance. The narrative gives her a consequential role in the chain of events surrounding Pratt’s death: her departure from her first husband helped provoke his pursuit of Pratt, and her later account placed that killing before church leaders as a crime requiring redress.

Marriage, Conversion, and Departure

A recent convert to the faith, Eleanor was married to Hector McLean, a non-Mormon whom the account describes as a heavy drinker and an opponent of her conversion. It reports that he regularly beat her. The conflict thus began within a marriage in which Eleanor’s religious commitment met her husband’s hostility. The text does not elaborate on her life before this marriage or describe the circumstances of her conversion beyond identifying it as recent.

Moved by Parley Pratt’s kindness, Eleanor fell in love with him and left Hector. She left her three children in the care of her mother and found passage to Salt Lake City by working as a cook for a party of Mormon emigrants. Her departure linked personal escape and religious community: she traveled west with emigrants while supporting herself through the work that secured her place in their party.

Although she remained legally married to Hector, Brigham Young sealed her to Pratt in Deseret for time and eternity. She became Pratt’s twelfth plural wife. The contrast between her continuing legal marriage and her new religious marriage is central to the account: the relationship was recognized within the Mormon community even as her first husband regarded Pratt as responsible for the loss of his marriage.

Return to New Orleans and Pratt’s Pursuit

In 1856, while Pratt was in St. Louis doing missionary work, Eleanor returned to New Orleans and took her three children with her. The account presents this return and the children’s departure with her as the immediate circumstance that intensified Hector’s anger. He blamed Pratt for wrecking his marriage, turning a dispute over Eleanor’s choices and religious affiliation into a pursuit of the apostle.

Hector intercepted a letter from Pratt to Eleanor that described Pratt’s plan to meet her on the Arkansas River. With that information, and working with a federal marshal who hated Mormons, Hector had Pratt arrested and jailed in Van Buren, Arkansas. Eleanor’s correspondence was therefore pivotal to the pursuit: the letter disclosed where Pratt intended to go, and Hector used it to locate him.

The non-Mormon magistrate who heard the case quickly concluded that the charges against Pratt lacked merit. Fearing that vigilantes would lynch Pratt if he remained in custody, the magistrate released him secretly. Jailhouse spies immediately informed Hector. The account does not say that Eleanor was present at the arrest or release; her part in this episode is established through the letter and the conflict that had brought Hector after Pratt.

Pratt’s Death and Eleanor’s Account

Hector and two accomplices tracked Pratt to a point twelve miles outside Van Buren and killed him. Hector later boasted of the killing and was celebrated as a hero across western Arkansas, yet he was never arrested or charged. The contrast between the magistrate’s attempt to protect Pratt and the absence of legal consequences for his killers marks the failure of ordinary law to deliver justice in the episode.

After Pratt’s death, Eleanor gradually made her way back toward Utah, destitute and dispirited. Near Fort Laramie, she encountered Porter Rockwell, who gave her a ride to Salt Lake City as he hurried to tell Brigham Young about the invading army. Around the time the Fancher wagon train crossed into Utah Territory, Eleanor gave church leaders a detailed account of Pratt’s murder. She blamed the state of Arkansas as a whole and urged the Saints to avenge what she presented as Pratt’s innocent blood.

Narrative Role and Consequences

Eleanor’s account arrives amid an already sharpened mood of persecution and retaliation. The narrative says the Saints wanted payback for the assassinations of Joseph and Hyrum Smith; Pratt’s killing supplied another grievance. Her report connected a personal tragedy to that wider communal grievance by assigning responsibility beyond the individual attackers and calling for vengeance. The book places this appeal in the same summer that the Fancher party traveled toward Utah, making the timing significant without claiming that Eleanor’s report alone determined what followed.

Her arc is marked by repeated movement between family, religious community, and legal orders that did not align. She left Hector while remaining legally married to him, entered a plural marriage recognized by Brigham Young, returned east for her children, and then traveled back west after Pratt’s death. The account does not provide her later life or describe what became of her children. It ends her presence in the narrative with her testimony to church leaders: Eleanor returns not as a resolution to the conflict, but as the bearer of a killing recast as a collective call for redress.