Hector McLean

Hector McLean is Eleanor McLean’s first husband and the man who pursued and killed the Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt. Blaming Pratt for the collapse of his marriage, McLean turned a domestic grievance into a calculated pursuit that ended in murder and intensified the Saints’ sense of persecution.

Marriage and grievance

McLean was a Gentile who disapproved of his wife Eleanor’s conversion to the Mormon faith and regularly beat her. After Parley P. Pratt helped Eleanor, she fell in love with him, left McLean, and traveled to Salt Lake City. Although she remained legally married to McLean, Brigham Young sealed her to Pratt for time and eternity, making her Pratt’s twelfth plural wife.

In 1856, while Pratt was doing missionary work in St. Louis, Eleanor returned to New Orleans and took her three children with her. McLean blamed Pratt for wrecking his marriage. He set out after the apostle and intercepted a letter in which Pratt described plans to meet Eleanor near the Arkansas River.

Pursuit and killing of Pratt

Using the information in the letter, McLean worked with a federal marshal who opposed Mormons to have Pratt arrested and jailed in Van Buren, Arkansas. The magistrate assigned to the case quickly judged the charges meritless. Fearing that Pratt might be lynched if left in custody, the magistrate secretly released him; jailhouse spies immediately informed McLean.

McLean and two accomplices followed Pratt and caught up with him twelve miles outside Van Buren, where they killed him and left him by the roadside. McLean later claimed that killing Pratt was the best act of his life. In western Arkansas, he was celebrated as a hero, and he was never arrested or charged with a crime.

Narrative significance

McLean’s actions connect the private conflict between him, Eleanor, and Pratt to the wider violence surrounding the Mormon emigrant wagon train from Arkansas. Eleanor eventually made her way back toward Utah and reported Pratt’s murder to church leaders, blaming Arkansas and urging the Saints to avenge his death. Her account helped make the killing part of the persecution narrative surrounding the arriving Fancher train. In this context, McLean’s impunity stands in sharp contrast to the church’s demand for retribution.