Death
On a preaching mission in the southern United States in 1857, Pratt was being tracked by Hector McLean, who was upset with Pratt for marrying his legal wife Eleanor McLean. Pratt had met Eleanor a few years earlier in San Francisco, California, and she later left Hector and moved to Utah where she married Pratt.[2] Though for religious reasons she considered herself “unmarried”, Eleanor was not legally divorced from Hector at the time of her Celestial marriage to Pratt.[3]
McLean pressed criminal charges, accusing Pratt of coming between him and his legal wife. Pratt managed to evade him and the legal charges, but was finally arrested in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). He was tried before Judge John B Ogden, but was only charged with stealing children’s clothes. He had helped his wife Eleanor retrieve her children who had been taken from her by McLean. Judge Ogden acquitted Pratt of the charges against him and released him. However, shortly afterward, on 13 May 1857, he was killed by Hector McLean on a farm northeast of Van Buren, Arkansas. Pratt was buried near Alma, Arkansas.
Mormons viewed Pratt’s death as a martyrdom, a view first expressed in Pratt’s own dying words.[4] Brigham Young compared his death with those of Joseph and Hyrum Smith,[5], and many Mormons blamed the death on the state of Arkansas, or its people.[6] Due to his personal popularity and his position in the Council of the Twelve, Pratt’s murder in Arkansas was a significant blow to the Latter-day Saint community in the Rocky Mountains, when they began hearing about it in June 1857.[7] The violent death may also have played a part in events leading up to the Mountain Meadows massacre five months later.[8] This massacre resulted in the deaths of the majority of the Baker-Fancher Party travelling to Southern California along the Mormon Road (a portion of the Old Spanish Trail). After the massacre, some Mormons claimed that rumors had circulated throughout the southern Utah Territory that one or more members of the party had murdered Pratt,[9] poisoned creek water which subsequently sickened Paiute children,[10] and allowed their cattle to graze on private property.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parley_P._Pratt
