The last year of Parley P. Pratt's life included a media-covered deadly hunt

On May 13, 1857, LDS Apostle Parley P. Pratt was murdered near Van Buren, Ark., released early in the day by a judge who feared Pratt would be lynched. About 12 miles from the jail, Pratt was caught by a small posse led by Hector Hugle McLean, the still legally-married husband of Pratt’s polygamous wife, Eleanor McComb McLean Pratt. McLean stabbed Pratt three times in the chest, then returned and shot him in the neck. Mortally wounded, Pratt was lucid for more than an hour. According to Zealey Winn, a blacksmith whose home was near where Pratt was slain, said the 50-year-old apostle bore his testimony of his faith in the LDS Church and Joseph Smith and proclaimed himself a “martyr to the faith."

To me, Parley P. Pratt is easily the most fascinating early LDS church leader. I’ve read the first scholarly biography of Pratt, “Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism,” Oxford University Press, 2011, by Terryl L. Givens and Matthew J. Grow, and reviewed it.

In this article, I want to focus on Pratt’s death. Not only was it a martyrdom (Pratt died for what he believed in) it was also largely a justifiable homicide in the mores of that time period. There was barely an effort to try McLean, and he was quickly exonerated. More so, many U.S. newspapers that covered Pratt’s murder lauded McLean for killing Pratt and one even suggested that President James Buchanan appoint McLean as territorial governor of Utah.

There’s no doubt that McLean was a brutal man. He was an alcoholic, a wife beater and falsely tried to have Eleanor committed to an insane asylum. But he was also a cuckold. Pratt had married his wife, Eleanor, after McLean — angry that his wife had been baptized LDS while Pratt was supervising the San Francisco missionary efforts — had taken the couple’s children and returned to New Orleans to his in-laws’ home. They were as angry at Eleanor’s conversion as her husband was.

Eleanor wasn’t the first plural wife Parley had married who wasn’t divorced from her husband, but she was the first whose husband — an immigrant from Scotland — was a believer in the extralegal tradition of a husband being allowed to kill his wife’s seducer. As the authors write, this “right” received sympathy all over the nation (even Utah had codified it as “mountain common law”) but it was especially strong in the southern United States. Passion, spur-of-the-moment murders by cuckolds were generally legal. Planned murders were considered crimes, but as Givens and Grow write, “...juries generally acquitted a husband even if he had obviously planned the killing.” And, “as a southerner, McLean was deeply influenced by notions of honor and manhood.”

Whether one agrees that Pratt had a right to marry Eleanor McLean, it’s clear that he made a serious error in judgment in taking on this wife. He had made an enemy who would take any opportunity to kill him. Had Pratt stayed in Utah, he likely would have been safe. But that was not Pratt’s style. He was a missionary, and in late 1856 he began a trek east on another LDS mission. Eleanor traveled part way with him, then detoured to New Orleans to her parents’ home. By design, she deceived them, claiming she was now a disbeliever in Mormonism. However, as soon as she was alone with the children, she took off for Utah without telling her family.

But more on that later: In December 1856, as Pratt was on his mission, the New Orleans Bulletin published a widely distributed feature article on the Pratt/McLean love triangle. Not surprisingly, Pratt was the villain. As Givens and Grow relate, the Bulletin wrote that “Eleanor intended to take her children to Utah, ‘to be thrust into the opening throat of the grim visaged and horrible monster, who sits midway upon the Rocky Mountains, lapping his repulsive jaws, and eager to devour new victims as they become entangled in his foul, his leprous coils.’” 

Whew! As the authors relate, there’s little doubt that such rhetoric encouraged McLean to begin a cross country manhunt of Pratt, ostensibly to take him back to Missouri, where he was still officially a fugitive from justice. 

By March 1857, Pratt was on the run, just avoiding being caught by McLean in St. Louis. However, by mid March, LDS leaders thought Pratt had escaped detection and assumed he would return to Utah. That was not Parley’s intention, though. Reckless, he decided to go south and try to help Eleanor — who was on the lam with her children — get to Utah with him. It was a fatal mistake. There was realistically little chance Eleanor could make it to Utah with her three children and Pratt, who was being hunted by McLean with the help of the feds and major newspapers, was a walking target the closer he got to McLean and the south. On May 6, McLean caught Eleanor, the children, and later Pratt, in Creek territory, west of Arkansas.

Eventually they were taken to Van Buren for trial. The cases against both Pratt and Eleanor were weak. They were charged with stealing Eleanor’s children’s clothes. In fact, although the crowds outside the courthouse at times advocated lynching Pratt and Eleanor, Judge John B. Ogden, after interviewing Eleanor, found himself more disgusted with McLean than the two defendants. Ogden believed Eleanor’s account that McLean’s drinking and wife-beating — not Mormonism — were responsible for his marital woes.

Later, in court, McLean drew his pistol and pointed it at Pratt. Bailiffs prevented him from shooting the LDS apostle. At this point, Ogden postponed court proceedings. Aware that Pratt could very well be lynched, Ogden dismissed charges and released Pratt in the pre-dawn hours, hoping he could escape. Pratt was offered a pistol and knife from Ogden but refused, saying, “Gentleman, I do not rely upon weapons of that kind. My trust is in my God.” A few hours later Parley P. Pratt was dead at the age of 50.

Givens and Grow write that Pratt had a foreboding he would never return alive from his last mission. He told his plural wife, Ann Agatha in August 1856, exactly that. Pratt and Eleanor, who traveled part way with him, certainly planned her attempt to get her children from Hector. Perhaps Pratt was thinking of how dangerous that attempt would be when he spoke with his wife. Pratt’s refusal to arm himself as he was released from Van Buren may indicate that he had already accepted his pending martyrdom. 

The LDS apostle was a man from Acts, ready to preach the Gospel to the most hostile crowds and be stoned as Stephen if the Lord saw fit to have it happen. It is ironic, though, that prior to his last mission, LDS Prophet Brigham Young promised Pratt “he would return to the Saints.” He never did. A monument marks the area where Pratt was murdered although his remains have not been recovered.

Notes: Eleanor McComb McLean Pratt returned to Utah and taught school until her death on Oct. 24, 1874. She remained a Latter-day Saint. In 1870, her youngest son joined her in Utah and taught at her school. I often wondered what happened to Hector McLean, who for a while boasted of his deeds in the press. I did a Google search of “Hector Hugle McLean” and within a few minutes I believe I tracked him down. By following a link — discovered at an anti-Mormon website — to the 1867 New Orleans parish death archives (http://files.usgwarchives.org/la/orleans/vitals/deaths/index/1867dimo.txt) it reveals that a Hector Hugle McLean died on (ironically) Oct. 24, 1867 in New Orleans. The archive lists McLean as being only 30 when he died, but that is certainly an archival error. It’s possible that the death notice mistook McLean’s entrance into the United States as his birth date. McLean was born in 1816. The fact that one McLean son decided to visit his mother a couple of years after his dad’s death also seems reasonable. I’m convinced this is McLean, whose death remains unreported by virtually all accounts of Pratt’s life and murder. Despite the notoriety and even adulation that Hector McLean received for killing Pratt, today he maintains small part in a much bigger figure’s life story. Pratt’s great-great grandson, by the way, is Republican presidential candidate and current Utah U.S. senator, Mitt Romney.

--- Doug Gibson

--- Originally published at StandardNET.

'American Crucifixion' a recap of murder of Joseph Smith

Alex Beam, Boston Globe columnist, has penned a new Mormon-themed history, “American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church,” 2014, PublicAffairs Books. This relatively slim volume, 334 pages, is not a scholarly book, and its exteriors -- including characterizations of major characters, including Smith and newspaper publisher Thomas Sharp -- lack depth. However, the events in Carthage, Illinois, where Joseph and Hyrum Smith were killed by a Warsaw, Ill. mob, goaded in part by Sharp and others, is covered well by the author. Also, the sham trial that exonerated “suspects” who were not among the chief murderers is also well-recapped by Beam.

Beam accurately describes how the enemies of the Mormon Church, once they had Hyrum and Joseph Smith in Carthage, deliberately and patiently lay in wait for the proper opportunity to strike. The courts were on their side; a faux charge was approved by a hostile judge to make sure the Smiths stayed in jail, avoiding a bond release. Thomas Ford, the weak, impotent, self-important governor of Illinois, accurately described by Beam as “pusillanimous,” was easily played by the mob. Ford, a truly ridiculous figure, was traveling to Nauvoo to make a pompous speech to the Latter-day Saints when the Smiths were murdered.

The Carthage Greys, a militia hostile to Mormons, were “guarding” the Carthage jail. One June 27, 1844, the Greys were uncharacteristically slow to defend an attack on the jail by two Warsaw militias. As Beam recounts, the Smith brothers were not in a secure cell, but in a guest room. While companions John Taylor and Willard Richards helped try to keep the mob out, Hyrum Smith was killed by shots through the door. Joseph Smith, who had a small firearm, wounded some of the attackers but was overwhelmed and shot by attackers in the jail and outside firing through a window. Smith, mortally wounded, fell from a second-floor window and was later riddled with bullets. Taylor was badly wounded but survived; Richards suffered only a scratch.

As Beam notes, the murders occurred in minutes, and Carthage was soon emptied of mob participants, now worried that thousands of Mormons would hunt them to avenge the Smiths’ deaths. However, church members were in shock after the violent deaths, and exhortations from Richards not to avenge the murders were overwhelmingly accepted. The Mormons instead focused on a long series of discussions and disputes over who would succeed Smith as church leader. After the murder trial which exonerated Sharp and other Mormon-haters, the anti-Mormon persecution resumed until the majority of Mormons left Nauvoo to go west with Brigham Young.

I have problems with Beam’s portrayal of Joseph Smith and the Mormons of Nauvoo. I’m not looking for a hagiography, and I’m as tired as anyone of the Mormon-themed films that portray Smith as if he has a halo. But Beam casts Joseph Smith as an extreme narcissist, a one-dimensional mixture of lechery, deceit and megalomania. I’m sure many see him that way but one should be allowed a better depiction of an historical figure as complex and gifted as the Mormon Church’s founder. To Beam, Smith appears no better than scoundrels such as Dr. John Bennett, or ill-fated “successor” James J. Strang. They are appropriately historical footnotes, Smith’s legacy includes a church of 14 million.

Smith had faults, and he merits a complex overview. The man who created a city of 10,000 and a church of 20,000, and whose death did not destroy his church, or heartfelt devotion among members to the controversial doctrine of polygamy, needs a deeper study than Beam allows. One tactic used by the author is the “freak show” depiction, in which visitors to Nauvoo who were repelled by Smith are provided as sources; one is a future mayor of Boston, one the son of a U.S. president. This tactic was used often against Utah Mormons in the 19th century, with condescending visitors to Salt Lake City later trashing Young, Parley P. Pratt, or others in articles or books.

Beam does a good explaining the destruction of an anti-Mormon newspaper, started by Mormon leader turned dissident William Law. Smith’s approval of this unwise act served as the prelude to the murders. Nevertheless, the term “rabid anti-Mormons” is not enough to wonder why the antipathy was so deadly. Much of the blame falls to the yellow journalist Sharp, but his character is never explored in sufficient detail. Beam, in an effort to set the scenario prior to the deaths, includes Nauvoo-strife anecdotes, but they are curiously lifeless, with the characters seeming to play roles rather than acting spontaneously.

Despite my concerns, I recommend “American Crucifixion” to readers. Like the Joseph Smith biography, “Rough Stone Rolling,” it does in part convey the isolation of Illinois, as well as the savage bloodlust that was allowed to flourish. The recap of the murders are terrifying. It captures the deliberate killings, as well as the temporary satiation of deadly impulses that the deaths accomplished.

Beam has included a couple of odd footnotes. On page 98, the author claims that Mormon apologists hid polygamy for decades after Nauvoo. But if the author had merely read easily accessible church publications, he would learn that the Mormons were advocating polygamy openly by 1852. Beam’s source for this claim is from “Elder” Ebenezer Robinson, long after Nauvoo. But he was no longer a Utah Mormon. In short, this source is in no position to support Beam’s claim of a long polygamy cover up.

Also, a key source of Beam’s, one Isaac Scott, is listed as a Mormon missionary in 1844 Nauvoo. Besides other quotes, Scott is used by the author to refute historical accounts that Joseph Smith thought he would not survive his jailing in Carthage. Smith is reputed by stronger sources than Scott as believing both he and Hyrum would be murdered. Also, Scott was a critic of Mormonism by early 1844 and subsequently emerged as an enemy as harsh of Smith as Law or Francis Higbee, former members turned apostates. Scott, who eventually became a follower of Strang, seems a poor choice to comment on Smith’s emotions as his death neared. He would not have had access to such information.

Nevertheless, as mentioned, the book’s account of the murders and the ensuing trial makes it worth a read.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published at StandardNet