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Show Page 225 over & our personal history in this world will naturally come to the word: - Finis." 36 The shocks of 1857 were to prove him wrenchingly prophetic. On a June morning, Orson fumbled through the mass of correspondence that settled over the Liverpool office every week to find a letter from Eleanor Pratt, whom he had met in Salt Lake only the year before, and who was the latest plural wife of his brother. She explained that Parley was dead, murdered in Arkansas by her own former husband. Hector McLean had pursued Parley in insane anger, stabbed him twice and shot him in the neck near the town of Van Buren - reportedly, he had lain dying in the road for some diffident locals came upon him. Pleading for water, he paused, and in a weak voice, offered a dying testimony: "I die a firm believer in the Gospel of Jesus Christ as revealed through the Prophet Joseph Smith... I am dying a martyr to the faith." 37 From Brigham Young came a melancholy letter to Orson. "May God comfort and 38 strengthen you in your afflictions, brother Orson." He had little time for sorrowing. The news from the States echoed ominous rumors that Washington had determined to crush Mormonism and the rule of the priesthood in Utah. Nothing definite was known until Orson received a dispatch, grave, almost frantic in tone, instructing him that it was time to decamp. All American elders were to return to the valleys immediately, and Orson was specifically ordered to dismantle the Mormon trail - to see that all roadside notices were taken down and all Mormon stations between the Missouri and Utah were broken up. For the United States was at war with the Saints. It was Orson's ninth wedding day - to Eliza Crooks - when Mormon Utah discovered that an army had been sent 39 against them. Brigham Young's letter of August 12, 1857, informed Orson that two thousand, five hundred federal troops were even then on the plains and about |