New Orleans is the pivotal setting in the account of Eleanor McLean’s flight from her husband and her return for her children. Her journey back to the city in 1856 triggered Hector McLean’s pursuit of Parley Pratt and helped turn a disrupted marriage into a fatal conflict.

Eleanor McLean and New Orleans

The account identifies Eleanor McLean as a recent convert from New Orleans, married to Hector McLean, a Gentile who opposed her conversion and regularly beat her. After Parley Pratt gave her aid, Eleanor fell in love with him, left her husband, and traveled to Salt Lake City with a party of Mormon emigrants, working as their cook. She left her three children in her mother’s care. Though still legally married to Hector, she was sealed to Pratt in Deseret as his plural wife.

The return and its consequences

In 1856, while Pratt was in St. Louis on missionary work, Eleanor returned to New Orleans and left with her children. Hector blamed Pratt for the breakdown of his marriage. He pursued the apostle, intercepted a letter describing plans to meet Eleanor by the Arkansas River, and used that information to track him down. Pratt was arrested in Van Buren, Arkansas, then secretly released by a magistrate who feared he would be lynched. Hector and two accomplices later found and killed him outside the town.

Narrative significance

New Orleans appears not simply as Eleanor’s place of return but as a turning point in the chain of events leading to Pratt’s death. The children’s removal renewed Hector’s anger and gave his pursuit an immediate focus; the intercepted letter then connected that family conflict to Pratt’s movements. The book thus links a private rupture associated with New Orleans to the broader violence and calls for vengeance that followed Pratt’s murder.