In the library

Parley P. Pratt

The most effective writer the early church produced — a missionary book that converted thousands, the newspaper that ran for sixty-five years, and a death in an Arkansas field that arrived at the worst possible moment in Utah.

If you joined the church in Britain in the 1840s, you almost certainly read Parley P. Pratt before you met a missionary. He was an apostle from 1835, and the church's first genuinely popular author. Both of the things he built are indexed in this library, and so is the record of how he died.

A Voice of Warning

Pratt published his first book in New York in 1837, seven years after the church was organized. The church's own history describes what it became:

In 1837 he wrote A Voice of Warning, one of the most popular missionary books of the 19th century.

Parley P. Pratt, Church History Topics

It laid out the Latter-day Saint claim in ordinary language — prophecy, apostasy, restoration, gathering — and it stayed in print for a century. For two generations of converts it was the argument that persuaded them, and it is the reason the church grew as fast as it did in Britain.

A gifted writer, Pratt wrote books, pamphlets, newspaper articles, poetry, and hymns to explain and defend his faith.

Parley P. Pratt, Church History Topics

The Millennial Star

Sent to England in 1840, Pratt started a newspaper:

While in England, he founded and edited a newspaper titled the Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star.

Parley P. Pratt, Church History Topics

The Millennial Star ran until 1970 — one hundred and thirty years, the longest-running publication in the church's history. This library holds 2,861 sources from it, covering 1840 to 1905, which makes it one of the fullest continuous records of what the church was saying to its members in the nineteenth century. Pratt started it with a borrowed press.

In 1855 he published Key to the Science of Theology, described by the church as an explanation of Church doctrine and theology. Along with A Voice of Warning it shaped how Latter-day Saints explained themselves for the rest of the century.

May 1857

Pratt's death came out of a plural marriage. Eleanor McLean, separated from an abusive husband in California, joined the church and was sealed to Pratt as a plural wife. Her husband, Hector McLean, pursued them. The church's account is brief:

Her father alerted her estranged husband of her attempt, and he convinced an Arkansas marshal to arrest Pratt in May 1857.

Parley P. Pratt, Church History Topics

A court released Pratt. McLean did not accept it.

McLean followed Pratt and killed him. The Latter-day Saints deeply mourned his loss.

Parley P. Pratt, Church History Topics

He was stabbed and shot near Van Buren, Arkansas, on May 13, 1857, and died a few hours later. McLean was never tried.

The timing

The date matters for reasons beyond Pratt. News of an apostle murdered in Arkansas reached Utah in the early summer of 1857, into a territory already braced for a federal army and in the aftermath of the Reformation. Twelve weeks later, a wagon train from Arkansas was destroyed at Mountain Meadows.

Historians differ on how much weight to give the connection, and no responsible account treats Pratt's murder as a sufficient explanation for what happened in September. But the sequence is not disputed, and the sermons of that year are in this library for anyone who wants to read the atmosphere rather than be told about it.

What he left

Fifteen of Pratt's sermons appear in the Journal of Discourses, which is a small number for an apostle — he was killed the year the series began publishing. His real record is the books and the newspaper. His Autobiography, finished by his son and published in 1874, is still the most readable first-person account of the church's first twenty-five years.