[ vii ]






Preface

[ 1 ]






Chapter I

The Gods Are Among the People

AN old New England gazatteer, singing the charms of Vermont's villages and the glories of her heroes, strikes a discordant note when it comes to Sharon: "This is the birthplace of that infamous impostor, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, a dubious honor Sharon would relinquish willingly to another town."

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Carried along in the migration had come the flotsam of the godly. There was Isaac Bullard, wearing nothing but a bearskin girdle and his beard, who gathered a following of "Pilgrims" in 1817 in Woodstock, Vermont, half a dozen hills away from the old [Joseph] Smith farm. Champion of free love and communism, he regarded eashing as a sin and boasted that he had not changed his clothes for seven years. Forsaking Vermont for the promised land, the Pilgrims crossed the mountains into New York, followed the same long road across the state as had Joseph Smith, and drifted down the Ohio into Missouri.

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[ 16 ]






Chapter II

Treasures in the Earth

THE road that led Joseph Smith into the career of "prophet, seer, and revelator" is overgrown with a tangle of legend and contradiction. xx x xxxxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx x xxxxxxx x xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxx xx xxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxx xxx xx xxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xx xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxx xx xxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxx xx xxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxx x xxxxxxx xx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx

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[ 34 ]





Chapter III

Red Sons of Israel

WESTERN New York regarded its Indian mounds with acuriosity that made an amateur antiquarian of almost everyone in the area. xx x xxxxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxx xx xx xxx x xxxxxxx x xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxx xx xxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xx xxxxxx xx x xxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxx xx xxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxx xx xxxx xx xxx xx xxxx x xxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx

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[ 50 ]






Chapter IV

A Marvelous Work and a Wonder

MARTIN HARRIS was a round-faced, slightly bearded man whose sad, empty eyes betrayed something of his credulous nature. xx x xxxxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx x xxxxxxx x xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxx xx xxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxx x xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx

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[ 67 ]






Chapter V

Witnesses for God

THE BOOK OF M ORMON was a mutation in the evolution of American literature, a curious sport, at once sterile and potent. Although it bred no imitators outside Mormonism and was ignored by literary critics, it brought several hundred thousand immigrants to America in the nineteenth century. The twentieth century sees the distribution of 35,000 copies a year. For more than a hundred years missionaries have heralded it throughout the world as religious history second only to the Bible.

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have been affected, especially by its contribution to opening up one of our great frontiers. *

Unwilling to credit Joseph Smith with either learning or talent, detractors of the Mormons within a few years declared that the Book of Mormon must have been written by someone else, and eventually laid the mantle of authorship upon one of Joseph's converts, Sidney Rigdon, a Campbellite preacher from Ohio. The theory ran as follows: The Book of Mormon was a plagiarism of an old manuscript by one Solomon Spaulding, which Sidney Rigdon had somehow secured from a printing house in Pittsburgh. After adding much religious matter to the story, Rigdon determined to publish it as a newly discovered history of the American Indian. Hearing of the young necromancer Joseph Smith, three hundred miles away in New York State, he visited him secretly and persuaded him to enact a fraudulent representation of its discovery. Then nine months after the book's publication Smith's missionaries went to Ohio and the pastor pretended to be converted to the new church. 

An apostate, Philastus Hurlbut, claimed to have uncovered this deceit in I833 when he heard old neighbors of Spaulding say that parts of the Book of Mormon were the same as the manuscript they had heard read to them twenty years before. But the only Spaulding manuscript Hurlbut could find was a fabulous Indian romance, stuffed with florid sentiment a world away from the simple, monotonous prose and forthright narrative of the Mormon Bible. 

Through the years the "Spaulding theory" collected supporting affidavits as a ship does barnacles, until it became so laden with evidence that the casual reader was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the accumulation. The theory requires a careful analysis because it has been so widely accepted. The documentary evidence on both sides is so burdensome, however, that I have relegated it to an appendix. †

Recent critics who insist that Joseph Smith suffered from delusions have ignored in the Book of Mormon contrary evidence difficult to override. Its very coherence belies their claims. Bernard DeVoto called the book "a yeasty fermentation, formless,

__________
* Address before the New York Times National Book Fair, New York Times, November 5, 1937.
† See Appendix B.

aimless, and inconceivably absurd -- at once a parody of all American religious thought and something more than a parody, a disintegration. The estrus of a paranoiac projected it into a new Bible." *

Far from being the fruit of an obsession, the Book of Mormon is a useful key to Joseph's complex and frequently baffling character. For it clearly reveals in him what both orthodox Mormon histories and unfriendly testimony deny him: a measure of learning and a fecund imagination. The Mormon Church has exaggerated the ignorance of its prophet, since the more meager his learning, the more divine must be his book. Non-Mormons attempting psychiatric analyses have been content to pin a label upon the youth and have ignored his greatest creative achievement because they found it dull. Dull it is, in truth, but not formless, aimless, or absurd. Its structure shows elaborate design, its narrative is spun coherently, and it demonstrates throughout a unity of purpose. Its matter is drawn directly from the American frontier, from the impassioned revivalist sermons, the popular fallacies about Indian origin, and the current political crusades.  

Any theory of the origin of the Book of Mormon that spotlights the prophet and blacks out the stage on which he performed is certain to be a distortion. For the book can best be explained, not by Joseph's ignorance nor by his delusions, but by his responsiveness to the provincial opinions of his time. He had neither the diligence nor the constancy to master reality. but his mind was open to all intellectual influences, from whatever province they might blow. If his book is monotonous today, it is because the frontier fires are long since dead and the burning questions that the book answered are ashes.  

This is particularly true of the religious matter. In the speeches of the Nephite prophets one may find the religious conflicts that were splitting the churches in the 1820's. Alexander Campbell, founder of the Disciples of Christ, wrote in the first able review of the Book of Mormon: "This prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi, in his Book of Mormon, every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last ten years. He decided all the great controversies: -- infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration,

__________
* "The Centennial of Mormonism," American Mercury, Vol. XIX (1930), p. 5.

[ 83 ]






Chapter VI

The Prophet of Palmyra

THE BOOK OF M ORMON was the catapult that flung Joseph Smith to a place in the sun. But it could not be responsible for his survival there. The book lives today because of the prophet, not he because of the book. For Joseph, writing was always the means to an end, never the end in itself, and the moment he had felt the brief warm glow of satisfaction at seeing his words in print, he turned to the serious business of organizing his church.

In the beginning the book was clearly the moving power. It was not only a magnet attracting followers, but also a significant force in Joseph's own behavior. What had been originally conceived as a mere money-making history of the Indians had been transformed at some point early in the writing, or possibly even before the book was begun, into a religious saga. The end result was a document of quasi-Biblical authority. It was something that he could offer to his followers as sober proof of the authenticity of his own prophetic mission.

While rival prophets like Isaac Bullard, Jemima Wilkinson, and Joseph Sylks suffered from no compulsion whatever to prove their pretensions, Joseph Smith, whether for lack of self-confidence or the greater reasonableness of his nature, seems to have felt urgently the need for preparation and for confirming testimony. The Book of Mormon itself was not enough; he needed first three, then eight witnesses to its authenticity, and in later years he continued to exploit facts or legends that would tend to support the book's historical accuracy.

An apocryphal story about Jemima Wilkinson relates that one day she led her colony to the shore of Seneca Lake and told them that she was about to walk upon the water. First, however, she tried the surface gingerly, and when her toes broke through she returned back unabashed to shore, saying cooly that her followers' faith was already of such prodigious strength that no miracle was necessary.

There is a similar, and equally apocryphal story about Joseph Smith, which holds that he too boasted he would walk upon the water, but that he secretly built a plank bridge underneath the surface of the pond. The public demonstration was a notworthy success until he reached the middle, when, thanks to mischievous boys, instead of planks he trod on water and barely escaped drowning. Baseless though this story may be, it is none the less symbolic.

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identity. The promise of a white skin to the convert did not seem a genetic absurdity to a people who were being told in sober history books that the pigment of the red man in New England who had adopted the white man's way of life had actually become lighter than that of his savage brothers.*

Three men were appointed to accompany Cowdery on his Indian mission. One was impetuous twenty-three-year-old Parley Pratt, who had been a convert only three weeks. He was a former Campbellite who had come from Ohio to New York State to preach to his relatives and had fallen under the persuasive influence of Hyrum Smith. Impatient now to convert his Campbellite friends, he steered the party to Mentor, Ohio, where lived the preacher who had converted Pratt to Campbellism. 

This was Sidney Rigdon, a dignified and rather handsome man, who welcomed them cordially, examined the Book of Mormon with interest but some suspicion, and promised to read it. Rigdon was a close associate of Alexander Campbell and one of the most famous orators in northern Ohio.

Although Pratt did not know it, his coming could not have been more opportune. For several years past, Rigdon had been the most successful revivalist on the Western Reserve. He was "gifted with very fine powers of mind," wrote a fellow preacher, "an imagination at once fertile, glowing and wild to extravagance, with temperament tinged with sadness and bordering on credulity." He was emotional and humorless, and subject to fits of melancholy and "nervous spasms and swoonings" that he attributed to the Holy Ghost. 

Three months before Pratt's coming he had quarreled with Campbell over the question of re-establishing the ancient communism of the primitive Christian church. Clearly the most fanatical and literal-minded of the Disciples of Christ, Rigdon had so zealously espoused the principle of holding things in common that he had set up a small communistic colony in Kirtland, a thriving town next door to Cleveland. But Campbell had fought Rigdon bitterly on the subject. After an open break in the conference of August I830, Rigdon left "chafed

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*See Samuel Williams: "A Dissertation on the Colors of Men, Particularly on That of the Indians of America," Natural and Civil History of Vermont (Burlington, 1809), Vol. I, p. 502.

and chagrined" and never met with the Disciples in a general meeting afterward.

Rigdon was nursing his grievance when the Mormon missionaries arrived. For years he had believed fervently in the gathering of Israel and the imminence of the millennium, and he saw in the Book of Mormon concrete evidence that the gathering was about to begin, that a new prophet had arisen who was really rebuilding the primitive church of Jesus. Campbell later wrote that Rigdon fasted and prayed for days, until when "one of his fits of swooning and sighing came upon him, he saw an angel and was converted."* 

In less than three weeks after the Mormons arrived not only Rigdon but the whole of his communistic colony in Kirtland had been baptized. Rigdon set forth at once for New York State taking with him the prosperous Kirtland hatter Edward Partridge. Joseph Smith was not quite twenty-five years old Rigdon was thirty-seven. But Joseph quickly took the measure of the older man. To the pious, sweet-tempered Partridge he gave only the brief revelation bestowed like a prayer upon most newcomers, but for Rigdon he prepared a glowing welcome: "Behold verily, verily I say unto my servant Sidney, I have looked upon thee and thy works. I have heard thy prayers, and prepared thee for a greater work. Thou art blessed, for thou shalt do great things...."

"Brother Joseph rejoiced," David Whitmer later wrote "believing that the Lord had sent to him this great and mighty man, Sidney Rigdon, to help him in the work." Joseph apparently was overwhelmed that a learned and influential man had come to him, in faith and without greed. Though conscious of his lack of schooling, and fearful lest his ignorance lose him the man, Joseph made no attempt to hide his small learning and explained in the revelation that the Lord preferred "the weak things of the world, those who are unlearned and despised, to thrash the nations." 

It was inevitable that Rigdon should hear snatches of gossip about the young prophet's colorful past, and Joseph boldly suggested that he go south to interview the magistrates at Colesville

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* Millennial Harbinger, Vol. II (1831, p. 100. For a first-hand account of Rigdon's character and his quarrel with Campbell see A. S. Hayden: Early History of the Disciples in the Western Reserve (1876), pp. 191-2, 209, 299.

and South Bainbridge who had recently acquitted him. When Rigdon returned with a transcript from the dockets of the two judges affirming his innocence, Joseph had a new revelation awaiting him.

Some months earlier he had experimented with the idea of "revealing" a lost book of the Bible and had dictated to Cowdery a fragment said to have come from a parchment buried by St. John. Then without benefit of either plates or parchment he had revealed a conversation between God and Moses that, he said, had been omitted from the Old Testament because of the wickedness of the Hebrews. Now he revealed a third lost book, the history of Enoch, whom according to the Bible God had "translated" into heaven without his ever having died.*  

Elaborating upon the brief Biblical reference, Joseph wrote one of the longest and most remarkable revelations of his career. Enoch, he said, had founded Zion, the City of Holiness, which was such a model of civic goodness that the Lord had transported it intact to heaven to be his personal dwelling-place forever. And now in the last days, after the Lord had sent truth forth "out of the earth" (a deft reference to the Book of Mormon), He would gather His elect to build the New Jerusalem, to which the city of Enoch would one day descend from heaven in millennial greeting. 

When Rigdon read the Book of Enoch, the scholar in him fled and the evangelist stepped into the place of second in command of the millennial church. He could not rest until he had persuaded Joseph to accompany him to Ohio, and within a fortnight the prophet announced a new revelation which ordered the uprooting of the whole church: "And again, a commandment I give unto the church, that it is expedient in me that they should assemble together at the Ohio, until the time that my servant Oliver Cowdery shall return unto them." †  

This terse edict roused a storm. Many converts felt that the Ohio preacher was leading their seer around by the nose. David Whitmer wrote that Rigdon "soon worked himself deep into Brother Joseph's affections, and had more influence over him

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*The parchment of John at first consisted of only three verses published as Section 6 in the Book of Commandments. It was considerably elaborated in the revised Doctrine and Covenants, as Section 7. The Book of Moses and the Book of Enoch were published separately in 1851 in a pamphlet called The Pearl of Great Price.
† Doctrine and Covenants, Section 37.

than any other man living. He was Brother Joseph's private counsellor and his most intimate friend and brother for some time after they met."

For several weeks Joseph patiently argued with his sixty followers, telling them that Kirtland was the eastern boundary of the promised land, which extended from there to the Pacific Ocean.* Finally, sensing a coming crisis, he gave forth as a revelation a skillful political document: "But the day soon cometh that ye shall see me.... the angels are waiting the great command to reap down the earth, to gather the tares that they may be burned...." There followed an enticing picture of the promised land, "a land flowing with milk and honey, upon which there shall be no curse when the Lord cometh. And I will give it unto you for the land of your inheritance, if you seek it with all your hearts." Then, as if in afterthought: "And they that have farms that cannot be sold, let them be left or rented as seemeth them good." † 

John Whitmer wrote that when the revelation was read in a general conference, "the solemnities of eternity rested on the congregation," but added shortly that some fought it, believing "that Joseph had invented it himself to deceive the people that in the end he might get gain." ‡

But once the majority had accepted it, Joseph prepared to move. With him went Emma, tight-lipped and weary, but more hopeful than she had been for many weeks. In four years of marriage she had lived in seven different towns, usually upon the charity of friends. She had buried her first child; she had seen her family estranged and bitter, her father-in-law in jail, and her husband twice on trial.  Now she was pregnant again, and the promise of a ready-made church in Ohio, almost three hundred miles west of the scenes of her sorrows and humiliations, must have seemed to her heaven-sent. In January 1831 they set forth in a sleigh with Rigdon and Edward Partridge, to carry the gospel to the West.

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* Letter from Joseph Smith to the Kirtland converts, carried by John Whitmer, and quoted in Howe: Mormonism Unvailed, p. 111.
† Doctrine and Covenants, Section 38.
‡ John Whitmer: "History of the Church," MS., Chapter i. The manuscript of this history is in the library of the Reorganized Church. When it was published in the Journal of History, Vol. I, the significant last portion -- part of Chapter xix and all of Chapters xx and xxi -- written after Whitmer had left the church, was omitted.

[ 98 ]





Chapter VII

The Perfect Society and the Promised Land

OHIO had seen prophets before. In 1812 Abel Sargent, who talked with angels and received revelation, toured the state with his twelve women apostles pretending to raise the dead and preaching the odd doctrine that if one were sufficiently holy one could live without food.

Of fresher memory was Joseph Dylks, who announced in Salesville in 1828 that he was the true Messiah come to usher in the millennium in 1832. The whole community went over to him. "I am God," he cried, "and there is none else! In me Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are met. All who put their trust in me shall never taste death!" To which his followers shouted: "We shall never die!" and groveled at his feet crying: "Behold our God!" According to a historian of the time, about thirty of his disciples near Bakerfield "assembled on the Sabbath and rolled naked on the floor, men and women together, as part of their worship, and committed sins too revolting to mention."

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Then he coined the word "telestial" for a third kingdom, whose glory was that of the stars, to be peopled with those who had refused the law of God.

This trinity of kingdoms comprised a very different resurrection scene from the one he had described in the Book of Mormon, where the "lake of fire and brimstone" figured prominently in the sermons of the Indian prophets. Joseph had taken a long step toward Universalism, for even the "liars, sorcerers, adulterers, and whoremongers" were guaranteed telestial glory, and only a handful of unregenerates called the Sons of Perdition were to be eternally damned.

The Evening and Morning Star published the long revelation describing this vision in December 1833, and added that when the two men emerged from the office "one of the brethren reported that Joseph appeared as strong as a lion but Sidney seemed weak as water; and Joseph, noticing his partner's condition, smiled and said, 'Brother Sidney is not as used to it as I am!'"

Top part of this page has not been transcribed.
From this moment Joseph began to efface the communistic rubric in his young theology. Since most copies of the Book of Commandments had been burned by this point, it was easy for Joseph to drastically revise the revelation on the United Order when it was republished in the enlarged Doctrine and Covenants in 1835. The Lord no longer demanded total consecration of property, but only that members donate the surplus over and above living expenses. In reprinting the first 12 issues of the Evening and Morning Star, Joseph revised most of the descriptions of the original Order and commanded his missionaries to destroy the notion abroad that the church had ever been a common-stock concern.

[ 143 ]





Chapter X

The Army of the Lord

THE past that Joseph had hoped to bury in New York now returned to plague him. He had made a vindictive enemy of Philastus Hurlbut, a handsome, ambitious convert whom he had excommunicated in June 1833 for "unchristian conduct with the ladies." In vengeful mood, Hurlbut began an investigation of the beginnings of the Mormon Church.

In Conneaut, about fifty miles east of Kirtland, he heard a rumor that one John Spaulding had seen a resemblance between Joseph's Book of Mormon and an old manuscript written many years earlier by his brother, Solomon Spaulding. Electrified by the idea that the Book of Mormon might be proved a forgery, Hurlbut ransacked Conneaut for evidence. Solomon had died seventeen years before, and his wife had remarried and moved away; but John Spaulding and his wife Martha, together with several neighbors, remembered dimly that Solomon's old historical novel had been about a lost people who were ancestors of the Indians. That it was not a religious history they were all agreed; but under Hurlbut's excited proding they managed to recall an astonishing number of details that coincided exactly with those in the Book of Mormon -- astonishing because it had been twenty years since the single occasion on which they had heard Solomon read his manuscript aloud.

Hurlbut wrote down their affidavits, collected their signatures, and went off triumphantly to Palmyra, where he expected to find additional evidence. Though he discovered there nothing to bolster his theory, he ran headlong into the whole folklore of Joseph's money-digging. He spent to months in Palmyra in the autumn of 1833, assiduously collecting affidavits from more than a hundred of Joseph's acquaintances. The substance of their stories was devastating, and he knew it.

Only one thing remained to complete his case: rediscovery of Solomon Spaulding's manuscript. After finding Spaulding's

widow in Massachusetts, he was directed by her back to eastern New York, where he located the manuscript in a trunk in the attic of an old farmhouse. Now to his bitter chagrin he found that the long chase had been vain; for while the romance did concern the ancestor of the Indians, its resemblance to the Book of Mormon ended there. None of the names found in one could be identified in the other; the many battles which each described showed not the slightest similarity with those of the other, and Spaulding's prose style, which aped the eighteenth-century British sentimental novelists, differed from the style of the Mormon Bible as much as Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded differed from the New Testament. *

Hurlbut knew, however, that he had a keg of powder even without the manuscript. He boldly exhibited his affidavits in Kirtland, lectured in the surrounding towns, and arranged to publish the documents in book form with the assistance of Eber D. Howe. The lectures caused a furor. Orson Hyde wrote to Missouri that they had "fired the minds of the people with much indignation against Joseph and the Churchm" and Heber Kimball reported in his journal that enemies "were raging and threatening destruction upon us, and we had to guard ourselves night after night, and for weeks were not permitted to take off our clothes." †

But what Joseph dreaded more than gentile savagery was the effect of Hurlbut's lectures on his own people. Apprehensive converts were were besieging Oliver Cowdery and Martin Harris with questions about the golden plates and Harris was expanding an already Hydra-headed legend. He was indiscreet enough to tell a friend confidentially that the prophet had drunk too much liquor while translating the Book of Mormon. Brought to trial by the High Council for his heresy, he amended the statement to say that the drunkenness had occurred previous to the translation. ‡

Realizing that the unchecked rumor-mongering might destroy him, Joseph began an immediate counter offensive. He

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* The manuscript Hurlbut found was published first by the Reorganized Church in Lamoni, Iowa, in 1885 under the title The Manuscript Found, or the Manuscript Story of the late Rev. Solomon Spaulding. For a detailed discussion of the Spaulding theory see Appendix B.
† History of the Church, Vol. I, p. 475, and Times and Seasons, Vol. VI, p. 771.
‡ Times and Seasons, Vol. VI, p. 992.

... [Hurlbut] sold his manuscript for five hundred dollars to Howe, who printed the book Mormonism Unvailed under his own name...

This chapter has not been further transcribed
due to copyright restrictions on the text.  

THE EARLIEST and most important account of Joseph Smith's money-digging is in the following court record, first unearthed in southern New York by Daniel S. Tuttle, Eposcopal Bishop of Salt Lake City, and published in the article on "Mormonism" in the New Schaff-Herzog Encylopedia of Religious Knowledge. * The trial was held before a justice of the peace in Bainbridge, Chenango County, New York, March 20, 1826:

People of State of New York vs. Joseph Smith. Warrant issued upon oath of Peter G. Bridgman, who informed that one Joseph Smith of Bainbridge was a disorderly person and an impostor. Prisoner brought into court March 20 (1826). Prisoner examined. Says that he came from town of Palmyra, and had been at the house of Josiah Stowel in Bainbridge most of time since; had small part of time been employed in looking for mines, but the major part had been employed by said Stowel on his farm, and going to school; that he had a certain stone, which he had occasionally looked at to determine where hidden treasures in the bowels of the earth were; that he professed to tell in this manner where gold-mines were a distance under ground, and had looked for Mr. Stowel several times, and informed him where he could find those treasures, and Mr. Stowel had been engaged in digging for them; that at Palmyra he pretended to tell, by looking at this stone, where coined money was buried in Pennsylvania, and while at Palmyra he had frequently ascertained in that way where lost property was, of various kinds; that he had occasionally been in the habit of looking through this stone to find lost property for three years, but of late had pretty much given it up on account its injuring his health, especially his eyes -- made them sore; that he did not solicit business of this kind, and had always rather declined having any thing to do with this business."

Josiah Stowel sworn. Says that prisoner had been at his house something like five months. Had been employed by him to work on farm part of time; that he pretended to have skill of telling where hidden treasures in the earth were, by means of looking through a

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* (New York, 1883). Vol. II, p. 1576 [rev. ed. 1910-14]

certain stone; that prisoner had looked for him sometimes, -- once to tell him about money buried on Bend Mountain in Pennsylvania, once for gold on Monument Hill, and once for a salt-spring, -- and that he positively knew that the prisoner could tell, and professed the art of seeing those valuable treasures through the medium of said stone: that he found the digging part at Bend and Monument Hill as prisoner represented it; that prisoner had looked through said stone for Deacon Attelon, for a mine -- did not exactly find it, but got a piece of ore, which resembled gold, he thinks; that prisoner had told by means of this stone where a Mr. Bacon had buried money; that he and prisoner had been in search of it; that prisoner said that it was in a certain root of a stump five feet from surface of the earth, and with it would be found a tail-feather; that said Stowel and prisoner thereupon commenced digging, found a tail-feather, but money was gone; that he supposed that money moved down; that prisoner did offer his services; that he never deceived him; that prisoner looked through stone, and described Josiah Stowel's house and out-houses while at Palmyra, at Simpson Stowel's, correctly; that he had told about a painted tree with a man's hand painted upon it, by means of said stone; that he had been in company with prisoner digging for gold, and had the most implicit faith in prisoner's skill.

Horace Stowel sworn. Says he see prisoner look into hat through stone, pretending to tell where a chest of dollars were buried in Windsor, a number of miles distant; marked out size of chest in leaves on ground.

Arad Stowel sworn. Says that he went to see whether prisoner could convince him that he possessed the skill that he professed to have, upon which prisoner laid a book open upon a white cloth, and proposed looking through another stone which was white and transparent; hold the stone to the candle, turn his back to book, and read. The deception appeared so palpable, that went off disgusted.

McMaster sworn. Says he went with Arad Stowel to be convinced of prisoner's skill, and likewise came away disgusted, finding the deception so palpable. Prisoner pretended to him that he could discern objects at a distance by holding this white stone to the sun or candle; that prisoner rather declined looking into a hat at his dark-colored stone, as he said that it hurt his eyes.

Jonathan Thompson says that prisoner was requested to look Yeomans for chest of money; did look, and pretended to know where it was, and that prisoner, Thompson, and Yeomans went in search of it; that Smith arrived at spot first (was in night); that Smith looked in hat while there, and when very dark, and told how the chest was situated. After digging several feet, struck upon something sounding

THE SPAULDING-RIGDON theory of the authorship of the Book of Mormon is based on a heterogeneous assortment of letters and affidavits collected between 1833 and 1900. When heaped together without regard to chronology, as in Charles A. Shook's True Origin of the Book of Mormon, and without any consideration of the