Manuscript Found and the Moroni Myth

“Manuscript Found” and the Moroni Myth:
The Importance of Being Honest

A Reply to the Matthew Roper-BYU/FARMS review of
Who Really Wrote The Book of Mormon?—The Spalding Enigma

(St.Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2005)
by Wayne L. Cowdrey, Howard A. Davis and Arthur Vanick
in consultation with Dale R. Broadhurst
© 2006, 2007 by Spalding Research Associates. All rights reserved.
William Moore, Jr., Editor/Archivist.
I. Synopsis:
“The Spalding theory for The Book of Mormon’s authorship did not begin as a
conjectural hypothesis, but rather as the positive assertions of some of Solomon
Spalding’s old associates, who recognized that the Saints’ new scriptures resembled
some of Spalding’s unpublished fictional writings.... The Spalding Enigma is not a
religious book, it is a book about a religious book.”
On the night of the autumnal equinox in the year 1827, young Joseph Smith, Jr.
encountered an angel. According to Smith, this angel, whose name was Moroni, gave him
an ancient book written in strange hieroglyphics on sheets of gold. Later, after Smith had
translated these hieroglyphics by miraculous means, and after this translation had been
duly recorded by a carefully chosen scribe, the angel came again and took the original
back. Smith’s translation, which he called The Book of Mormon, was published in 1830
and shortly thereafter became the a cornerstone of a new religion. Today that religion is
known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons—and Joseph
Smith, Jr. is the man they revere as their prophet.
Did Joseph Smith really get The Book of Mormon from an angel, or did it perhaps have
some other, more mundane, origin? Could it, for example, have been painstakingly
adapted from an unpublished work of fiction called Manuscript Found, allegedly
composed by a down-and-out ex-minister named Solomon Spalding, between 1810 and
his death in 1816? Although Smith and Mormonism occupy an unquestionably prominent
place in American history, the nagging question of Who Really Wrote The Book of
Mormon? has never really been laid to rest except by those willing to accept Smith’s
personal version of events on strength of faith alone.
The Spalding theory (or the Spalding-Rigdon theory) for The Book of Mormon’s
authorship did not begin as a conjectural hypothesis, but rather as the positive assertions
of some of Solomon Spalding’s old associates, who recognized that the Saints’ new
scriptures resembled some of Spalding’s unpublished fictional writings. When, at the end
of 1833, Sidney Rigdon’s name was joined with those assertions as having been the
probable editor of Spalding’s writings, then and only then, was the “theory” born. It is
important that our readers keep this fact in mind, for the traditional Latter-day Saint
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arguments against a Spalding authorship for The Book of Mormon have always sought to
dismiss such claims as being founded upon mere speculation or malicious intention,
rather than upon the clear and simple assertions of people who knew Solomon Spalding
and were personally familiar with his fictional stories.
Our purpose in compiling Who Really Wrote The Book of Mormon: The Spalding Enigma
(hereinafter simply The Spalding Enigma) was threefold: to bring together in a single
volume pertinent information from many different historical sources; to introduce new
and compelling evidence to the controversy; and, as a result, to reopen the subject for
serious discussion among scholars and laypeople alike. Although it is inevitable that
some of the Mormon faithful will be inclined to see The Spalding Enigma as an anti-
Mormon book, its central theme will be better understood if readers consider that it is
actually written from a pro-Spalding point of view. If, in presenting its evidence from
that perspective, our volume still appears to be anti-Mormon, it is only because the facts
of history are what they are. Although our publisher, editors, and the writer of our book’s
Foreword represent a non-LDS religious community (The Lutheran Church-Missouri
Synod), they are not dedicated anti-Mormons. In the final analysis, The Spalding Enigma
is not a religious book, it is a book about a religious book.
In mid-2006, Brigham Young University historian Matthew Roper, writing for the
admittedly pro-Mormon BYU/FARMS organization, and at the behest of his editor,
Daniel C. Peterson, published a lengthy review of The Spalding Enigma in which he
dutifully reasserted all of the old Mormon arguments against the Spalding theory without
offering anything new.
Unfortunately, BYU Professor Dr. Daniel C. Peterson, the man who seems to have
inspired Mr. Roper to write his review, strikes us as more of a preacher of LDS
orthodoxy than a scholar of Mormon history. If we have assessed him correctly, from his
2004 editorial on the subject and from his subsequent remarks, he appears to be of the
rigid opinion that practically all non-Mormon response to The Book of Mormon has come
as a result of persecution from anti-Mormon ingrates and ex-Mormon apostates, who
have either manufactured or misused historical evidence in order to counter the Mormonestablishment
claims, and to defame Joseph Smith, Jr. Let us therefore state here and now
that we are neither ingrates, nor apostates; nor do we have any desire to defame Joseph
Smith, Jr., the man that Mormons refer to as their prophet. Rather, we are rational
students of history interested in uncovering the answer to a mystery which has vexed
Mormons and non-Mormons alike, ever since a man named D.P. Hurlbut began to make
his case against Joseph Smith, Jr. and the origin of his religion only a few years after it
was founded. Indeed, when it comes to the historical origins of Mormonism, if there are
major differences between us and Dr. Peterson, they stem from the reality that, even
though we freely admit he could be right on some points, he seems completely unwilling
to acknowledge that he could be wrong about anything. Such intransigence is not good
historical scholarship; it is a product of faith-based justifications and rationalizations.
History being what it is, a quest like ours must begin with open-mindedness—it must be
evidence-driven, and allowed to go where it will. We are not interested in flinging every
criticism made against the first Mormons upon a rhetorical wall to see what might stick
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and what might not; nor are we dismissive of the early pro-Mormon witnesses. We
simply see most of their testimony as having been self-serving, faith-based and untestable.
In our view, nothing much is gained by the apologists’ attempt to force square
pegs of selected evidence into round holes of historical events just to keep the sacred
cows of preconceived religious notions safe from disquieting, non-faith-promoting
explanations.
In any case, clinging to a position that faithful Mormons have espoused since the 1880s,
Roper/Peterson et al. (hereinafter, just Roper) construct their principal thesis around the
argument that a fictional text now generally referred to as Manuscript Story is the only
draft of the only novel Spalding ever wrote, and since it bears little overt resemblance to
The Book of Mormon, it naturally follows that Spalding cannot have been the author of
the latter. In addition, like others before them, they assert that much of the evidence
which seems to favor the Spalding theory is suspect, because it was gathered and
published by anti-Mormons, and because much of it was compiled and published too long
after the fact to be considered credible.
In our book, The Spalding Enigma, and again in this detailed reply to the lengthy
BYU/FARMS review to which Mr. Roper’s name is attached, we provide evidence
demonstrating that the standard arguments so-far offered in support of a Nephite origin
for The Book of Mormon are seriously flawed, at least when examined from an historical
rather than a religious perspective. In support of this, we not only introduce a large
amount of hitherto unexamined material, but we also advance the hypothesis that Smith
and Rigdon did not act alone to transform Solomon Spalding’s old manuscript into The
Book of Mormon, but rather that they acted in concert with one Oliver Cowdery, a cousin
of Joseph Smith and the man Mormons refer to as the “second elder” of Mormonism.
Although Cowdery’s name has long been associated with the origins of Mormonism, up
to now little has been said of his life prior to 1829, which is the year official versions of
LDS history claim that he and Smith first met. In our book, we present evidence to show
that these two men had actually known each other since 1822, and conclude that the
events of their alleged first meeting in 1829 were carefully orchestrated to impress
wealthy Martin Harris, and thus secure the financial support required to publish The Book
of Mormon.
II. Theory v/s Enigma:
“We... prefer the term Spalding enigma, because when more than one plausible theory
exists to explain something, the result is an enigma—a mystery.”
A theory, by definition, is an hypothesis that remains unfalsified—which means that even
though it might not be true, no proof has been brought forward to show that it isn’t.
Therefore, it is entirely correct to apply the term theory to the hypothesis that Solomon
Spalding was the creator and author-in-fact of an early 19th century literary production
called The Book of Mormon—a volume which is presently accepted as God-given
scripture by those who refer to themselves Latter-day Saints, but largely rejected as false
by the vast majority of other Christians, both Catholic and Protestant alike.
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Those who wish to go on calling these assertions the Spalding theory will see no censure
from us. We, however, prefer the term Spalding enigma, because when more than one
plausible theory exists to explain something, the result is an enigma—a mystery. At
present, there are several viable theories which seek to explain the obscure origins of The
Book of Mormon. The Spalding theory and the Latter-day Saints’ official version of their
own history are the two with which we are primarily concerned. In both cases, when the
available evidence is subjected to equally impartial consideration, neither side has yet
been able to produce the incontrovertible proof necessary to falsify the opposing view—
hence the matter has remained an enigma.
III. Evidence v/s Prejudice:
“[The] authors of The Spalding Enigma feel the publication of this research and
analysis fulfills a calling to present interested scholars with an up-to-date volume
containing as much evidence as we can reasonably bring together between two covers.”
In the early days of Mormonism, LDS Apostle Orson Pratt issued a challenge to gentiles
who harbored doubts about a divine authenticity for The Book of Mormon. “If, after a
rigid examination, [The Book of Mormon] be found an imposition,” Pratt thundered forth
in righteous indignation, “it should be extensively published to the world as such; the
evidences and arguments upon which the imposture was detected, should be clearly and
logically stated, that those who have been sincerely yet unfortunately deceived, may
perceive the nature of the deception, and be reclaimed, and that those who continue to
publish the delusion, may be exposed and silenced...” (Orson Pratt’s Works: Divine
Authenticity for The Book of Mormon, [Liverpool, England: 1851], 1-2.)
It is impossible to say whether Elder Pratt had the Spalding enigma in mind when he
wrote those words, but if he did, it would be interesting to know how he might reply,
were he alive today to ponder the quantity and quality of evidence presented in our book.
Would he encourage continuing efforts to uncover as many facts as possible about the
historical origins of The Book of Mormon, or would he, like virtually every faithful
Mormon writer since his day (and a few less faithful ones as well), attempt to discourage
objective research into this sensitive subject? For our part, our goal is to encourage
further research, not discourage it; and along those lines we believe we have offered a
reasonable, alternative viewpoint, based neither upon attack nor defense, nor upon any
particular religious belief-system, but upon valid historical evidence.
The sheer length of the Roper/FARMS review of our Spalding Enigma constitutes an
unsolicited compliment to the book and its authors, since it indicates that the old mystery
is not easily dismissed, even by one so eloquently erudite as Mr. Matthew Roper of
Brigham Young University.
Historical evidence is a slippery commodity, however, and one in which the quality and
value of the merchandise are entirely dependent upon the seller and the buyer coming to a
mutually satisfactory agreement. Some scholars—those seeking to be as fair and unbiased
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as possible in their investigation of history—are pleased to accept evidence from all
sources; to carefully test its worth according to recognized academic standards held in
common by most reputable scholars; and to let the results lead where they will. Other
investigators, equally competent, perhaps, but being necessarily biased for reasons of
occupation or personal belief, are inclined to accept useful evidence from only some
sources. Having assured themselves that this carefully selected body of evidence is both
authentic and credible, these latter investigators declare in the end what they knew before
they began—that the case is proved in their favor, and that Providence is on their side.
For LDS academics and scholars, who generally must begin with an implicit (if not an
explicit) affirmation of The Book of Mormon’s authenticity, their conclusions regarding
the book and its origins must, of course, correspond with their initial prejudgments. We
understand that FARMS and its associate book reviewers operate under this restriction
and we do not fault Mr. Roper for his having to abide by FARMS limitations; we only
fault him for his not making this point in his clearly non-objective book review. This
having been said, we, Messrs. Cowdrey, Davis and Vanick, as authors of The Spalding
Enigma, feel the publication of this research and analysis fulfills a calling to present
interested scholars with an up-to-date volume containing as much evidence as we can
reasonably bring together between two covers. If, after reading The Spalding Enigma,
anyone still wishes to pursue the subject from a strictly Mormon point of view, or from
the parallel “Smith-alone” point of view, they should have no problem locating the
relevant information they might need. In any case, those who still harbor doubts about the
present status of “the Spalding theory” concerning the origin of The Book of Mormon
need only consider the authors’ use of the word enigma in our title; for an enigma it has
been, and an enigma it remains.
IV. The Importance of Being Honest:
“[I]t appears to us that Mr. Roper and most of his colleagues are in complete agreement
with... [the] philosophy that “Spiritual truths must be spiritually verified.” Such
statements, however, leave us wondering why any of them seek to discuss The Spalding
Enigma at all? Clearly they are already in possession of their own “truths” and therefore
have little to gain in an ongoing debate.”
Fortunately, Mr. Roper quickly admits where he stands when he says: “While faithful
Latter-day Saints have always defended the Book of Mormon and been critical of all
naturalistic theories, it has been critics of Mormonism who have been primarily
responsible for the acceptance (and then rejection) of the Spalding theory. The reason is
that Latter-day Saints already have an explanation for the Book of Mormon, and so the
quest for a plausible naturalistic alternative is an unbeliever’s affair.”
Here Mr. Roper is to be congratulated for candidly admitting that, when it comes to the
early history of his church, he and his Mormon colleagues would prefer not to be troubled
with alternative evidence because their minds, or at least their Saintly testimonies, are
already made-up. This monumental lack of objectivity, of course, constitutes the foremost
problem with faith-based “scholarship” as perceived by those conducting research and
reporting outside of a religious movement like Mormonism. With all due respect,
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Mormons who seek to defend their church by citing verses from Mormon scriptures and
expressing an inner confidence in Joseph Smith, Jr. are not a lot different from those
National Socialist sympathizers who expressed a similar faith in Adolph Hitler while
quoting passages from Mein Kampf. Although the basic philosophies behind the two
movements are very different, their similar unquestioning adherence to a charismatic
leader of controversial character and their elevation of that leader’s publications to a
super-human status, share much in common. When the objectivity, logic and common
sense necessary to meaningful scholarship become subservient to a system of belief and
practice which avoids rational consideration of adverse criticism, not only from the
outside but also from within its ranks, the result is predictably undesirable.
Hypothetically speaking, if Mr. Roper and his colleagues at FARMS were involved in a
serious legal case, how would they react if the judge informed them before the trial began
that the matter was already decided and therefore no evidence favorable to Mr. Roper’s
case could be seriously considered? Yet, when Mr. Roper writes that ”Latter-day Saints
already have an explanation for the Book of Mormon, and so the quest for a plausible
naturalistic alternative is an unbeliever’s affair,” he tacitly admits that this is precisely
the situation when it comes to Mormons and the Spalding enigma. Indeed, it appears to
us that Mr. Roper and most of his colleagues are in complete agreement with Richard L.
Anderson’s stated philosophy that “Spiritual truths must be spiritually verified.”
(Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses, [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company,
1981], 82.) Such statements, however, leave us wondering why any of them seek to
discuss The Spalding Enigma at all? Clearly they are already in possession of their own
“truths” and therefore have little to gain in an ongoing debate.
As we have previously stated, Mormon history as a scholarly discipline has been in the
process of a generally beneficial evolution for several years now. A number of historians
not officially connected to any of the several Mormon denominations have lately
produced a remarkable body of scholarship covering many aspects of the Mormon past.
To these scholars and academics, it may appear unfortunate that The Spalding Enigma
effectively removes the spotlight of history from the figure of Joseph Smith, Jr., and
refocuses attention upon other, less lionized early Mormons.
V. A Brief Summary of Events:
“[The] secret collusion between Smith and Cowdery became one of the best-kept secrets
of early Mormon history, and explains why the details of Oliver Cowdery’s early life are
only now beginning to emerge.”
Citing Ohio newspaper editor Eber D. Howe’s seminal book Mormonism Unvailed
(Painesville, OH: the author, 1834), Mr. Roper introduces his lengthy review of The
Spalding Enigma with this useful summary of the essential, and essentially undisputed,
facts:
“In 1834, relying on testimony gathered by one Doctor Philastus Hurlbut
(a former Mormon who had been excommunicated from the church for
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immoral behavior), [Painesville, Ohio newspaper editor] E[ber] D[udley]
Howe suggested that the Book of Mormon was based on an unpublished
novel called ‘Manuscript Found,’ written by a former minister named
Solomon Spalding. In statements collected by Hurlbut, eight former
neighbors of Spalding [sic; actually six former neighbors plus Spalding’s
brother John and his wife] said they remembered elements of his story that
resembled the historical portions of the Book of Mormon. Some said they
recalled names shared by Spalding’s earlier tale and the Book of Mormon.
Others claimed that the historical narrative of both stories was the same
with the exception of the religious material in the Book of Mormon. Howe
suggested that, by some means, Sidney Rigdon, a former Campbellite
[Baptist] preacher in Ohio and Pennsylvania who had joined the church
in November 1830, had obtained a copy of ‘Manuscript Found’ years
before and had used it as the basis for the Book of Mormon, to which he
also added religious material. Rigdon, Howe argued, must have conspired
with Joseph Smith to pass the Book of Mormon off as a divinely revealed
book of ancient American scripture as part of a moneymaking scheme.”
With the mid-2005, publication of The Spalding Enigma, we effectively revitalized the
old controversy by introducing a large amount of hitherto unexamined evidence, and by
proposing that Smith and Rigdon did not act alone to transform Solomon Spalding’s
manuscript into The Book of Mormon, but rather they were assisted by one Oliver
Cowdery. In support of this, we offered evidence that Smith and Cowdery were wellacquainted
since at least 1822, and ventured to conclude that the events of their alleged
first meeting in 1829 were part of a carefully orchestrated plan designed to impress
wealthy Martin Harris, and thus induce him to finance the printing of The Book of
Mormon. Because they could never reveal the full truth of their actions without
discrediting their goals and themselves in the process, we believe that this secret
collusion between Smith and Cowdery became one of the best-kept secrets of early
Mormon history, and that it helps explain why the details of Oliver Cowdery’s early life
are only now beginning to emerge. (See later in this rebuttal.)
VI. Standards and Explanations:
“[T]he fact that ‘disagreements among critics over naturalistic explanations of the Book
of Mormon are sometimes heated’ only serves to demonstrate how completely
unconvincing Mormon explanations for the origin of The Book of Mormon are to those
who hesitate to accept Joseph Smith’s claims of divine authenticity on strength of faith
alone. While we may argue among ourselves... there is at least no disagreement on that
point.”
According to Roper, the Spalding theory “was once the standard critic’s explanation of
the Book of Mormon,” but has since “fallen on hard times.” The two principal reasons
for this, he claims, were the rediscovery of a Spalding manuscript in 1884 which bore
little resemblance to The Book of Mormon, and the appearance of Fawn Brodie’s popular
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biography of Joseph Smith in 1945, in which she rejected the Spalding theory and
advanced one of her own.
The Spalding work rediscovered in 1884 and first published the following year, is an
amateurish, incomplete work of mock-epic fiction, which we believe was originally
called simply Manuscript Story, and which Mormons have consistently claimed was the
only such story Spalding ever wrote. Brodie’s conclusion was that Smith’s own vivid
imagination, coupled with sources and ideas popular at the time, were sufficient for him
to have created The Book of Mormon entirely on his own and without the need of any
assistance from either Solomon Spalding or Sidney Rigdon. However, whether or not
Joseph Smith incorporated pre-existing texts and contemporary ideas into his 1830 book
was never a matter of what he needed—it is a matter of what he actually did.
While discussions centering around Manuscript Story and its possible influences upon
The Book of Mormon are admittedly esoteric and little-known, Brodie’s dismissive
conclusions in this regard were largely a compilation of several earlier authors’
Smithcentric views, restated in easily digested prose by the (then) young Mormon writer.
Brodie’s 1945 book, No Man Knows My History, filled an obvious gap in Mormon
history when it first appeared, and it has subsequently enjoyed wide circulation. The
result, as Roper correctly informs us, is that most modern, non-LDS students and critics
of Mormonism have elected to adopt some variant of her synthesis of the Smith-alone
explanation.
According to the official LDS position, Brodie is an heretical, excommunicated ex-
Mormon whose opinions about Joseph Smith and the origin of The Book of Mormon are
not to be relied upon— UNLESS, of course, she offers something useful to the Mormon
side of the argument, such as her unfavorable opinions concerning the Spalding enigma,
in which case selectively quoting her has become perfectly acceptable among the modern
apologists. Note the double standard here, about which we shall have more to say later.
(For examples of prominent pro-Mormon writers quoting Brodie’s work when
convenient, see R.L. Anderson, “The Reliability of the Early History of Lucy and Joseph
Smith,” Dialogue IV:2,15-16; Lester E. Bush, Jr., “The Spalding Theory Then and Now,”
Dialogue, X:4,41; and R.L. Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Rolling Stone, [NY: Knopf,
2006]. For some examples of the Mormon take on Brodie in general, see Leonard J.
Arrington, “Scholarly Studies of Mormonism in the Twentieth Century,” Dialogue I:1,15;
Robert B. Flanders, “Reappraisals of Mormon History: Writing on the Mormon Past,”
Dialogue I:3,58-9; Hugh Nibley’s “No Ma’am, That’s Not History,” pamphlet, 1946;
F.L. Stewart’s Exploding the Myth About Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet, [New
York: House of Stewart Publications, 1967]; N.G. Bringhurst, Fawn McKay Brodie: A
Biographer’s Life, [Norman, OK: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1999], and Marvin S. Hill,
“Brodie Revisited: A Reappraisal,” Dialogue VII:4,72, in which Hill sums-up modern
perceptions very nicely when he writes that “There is evidence that [Brodie’s] book has
had strong negative impact on popular Mormon thought as well, since to this day in
certain circles in Utah to acknowledge that one has ‘read Fawn Brodie’ is to create
doubts as to one’s loyalty to the Church.”)
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In Mr. Roper’s words, “Though nominally a Latter-day Saint at the time she wrote her
book, Fawn Brodie had become an atheist several years before, it appeared. She was
excommunicated shortly after the publication of her book, and it can by no means be
described as ‘pro-Mormon.’ Such statements raise the question of how well Cowdrey,
Davis, and Vanick know the playing field.”
They also raise the question of how well Mr. Roper knows the playing field outside of his
own apparently limited circle. Perhaps present-day Saints do not necessarily view Brodie
as “pro-Mormon,” but this does not keep many non-Mormons from seeing her as such.
As to her excommunication, one problem here is that Roper seeks to transport Brodie’s
later atheism backwards in time to her research period. Indeed, he makes it sound as
though she were always an insincere Mormon sailing under false colors in the exclusive
society of elite LDS families. The fact is, Brodie went through a transition from being a
faithful Mormon, to being a questioning Mormon, to being something of a rational
Mormon. All through this transition, she remained a welcome patron of the LDS
historian’s archives, as well as an occasional visitor to the Reorganized LDS’ equivalent
historical collections. Mrs. Brodie was a product of her LDS upbringing within the center
of Mormon culture, and her 1946 excommunication came as a shock to her. She expected
to remain within the ranks, but her hoped-for rationalization of Mormon thought has been
a long time in coming. Roper slides past all of this far too easily.
As a practicing Latter-day Saint who is secure in his faith that Joseph Smith was a latterday
prophet, Roper seems to take comfort from the fact that critics of Mormonism are
unable to agree upon a single alternative explanation for the origin of The Book of
Mormon. For example, he quotes a comment made around 1840 by the Mormon Elder
John Taylor, who, upon reviewing two pamphlets containing contradicting accounts,
wrote “Which, then, of these accounts, I would ask, is true? ... both of them have got what
they call FACTS, diametrically opposed to each other as light is from darkness.”
We can only offer, as a much belated reply to Apostle Taylor, our view that there is more
potential for the discovery of facts among a set of diverse conclusions than there will ever
be among the artificially homogenous confessions of group-thinking partisans.
Roper next cites a second example, this one from the pen of Oliver Cowdery, who, in an
1835 editorial, takes Alexander Campbell and an anonymous critic called “a friend of
truth” to task for failing to agree whether Joseph Smith or Solomon Spalding wrote The
Book of Mormon.
“The... ‘friend of truth’ has certainly got ahead of Mr. Campbell: He
says that the ‘true origin’ of the writing composing the book of Mormon,
is from the pen of an eccentric Spaulding.... Mr. Campbell says, that
‘Smith is its real author, and as ignorant and impudent a knave as ever
wrote a book.’ Will these two gentlemen settle this dispute; for it truly
looks pitiful to see this wide disagreement....”
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Unfortunately, Roper fails to note that Alexander Campbell, at first a close colleague of
Sidney Rigdon and later his arch-nemesis, only professed that Smith had written The
Book of Mormon until he read Howe’s 1834 book. After that, his published conclusion
was that Spalding, in fact, was the true author of most of the Mormon book. Evidence
that Campbell did endorse both Howe’s work and the Spalding explanation once he
learned about them is provided by none other than Sidney Rigdon himself writing in the
January, 1836 issue of the LDS Messenger and Advocate, wherein he says (p.242):
“Witness Mr. Campbell’s recommendation of Howe’s book, while he knows, as well as
every person who reads it, that it is a batch of falsehoods.” (This, by the way, appears to be
Rigdon’s earliest published denial of the material in Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed, even
though that book had appeared fourteen months earlier.) Clearly, Rev. Campbell’s ideas in
this regard either evolved over time, or he at least became more comfortable during that
same period of time in voicing his views regarding Sidney Rigdon and Mormon origins.
In any case, Roper summarizes his position by correctly observing that, “The same lack
of agreement among those who reject Joseph Smith’s explanation of the Book of Mormon
vexes critics today.” No doubt the reason Mr. Roper has chosen to quote these two early
writers is to demonstrate that there was disagreement over the issue then just as there is
today. If that was his purpose, the point is happily conceded. However, the fact that
“disagreements among critics over naturalistic explanations of the Book of Mormon are
sometimes heated” only demonstrates how totally unconvincing Mormon explanations
for the origin of The Book of Mormon are to those who do not accept Joseph Smith’s
claims on strength of faith alone. While critics may argue among themselves, as is typical
in any free and unhampered exchange of information and ideas, there is at least no
disagreement on that central point. One notable difference between Mormon and non-
Mormon scholarship is that the non-Mormons are completely free to disagree with each
other without any fear of church disciplinary reactions.
With respect to faith, while Mr. Roper finds fault with “sentiments [which] reflect an
emotional investment in the Spalding theory by certain critics of the Book of Mormon”
(he names Broadhurst, Cowdrey, and Davis), he fails to recognize that faith, by its very
definition, is an existential or emotional investment in one’s personal beliefs. This leads
us to wonder whether Mr. Roper is trying to suggest that he and other proponents of The
Book of Mormon have no emotional investment in defending their faith, or whether
emotional and spiritual investment is only to be critically noticed when exhibited by
those who disagree with the Saints on the question of Mormon origins? Let us take this
opportunity to suggest that only when pro-Mormon writers begin subjecting their own
work to the same rigid standards that they expect of their critics, will they be able to
grasp the full truths of history. To a neutral observer with no emotional investment in
Mormonism, it must appear that Mormons would much rather present negative evidence
against their critics than offer positive proof that their prophet was what he claimed to be.
Or, moving one step beyond that, to demonstrate through words and deeds that their
religion has some intrinsic value regardless of whether the man behind it, or his book, are
what their ancestors thought them to be. What a sad state of affairs to live in a glass
house and be reduced to defending it by throwing rocks at one’s neighbors.
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At this point, let us reiterate: To those who will acknowledge that The Spalding Enigma
presents much new information, but does so with a distinctly anti-Mormon tone, we wish
to say that we are not anti-anything—we are pro-history. Our purpose is to stimulate
further inquiry into a subject that has long cried out for attention. As such, our work
should be considered a beginning, not an end to discussion on such an important topic;
and any person in search of historical truths, even devout Mormons, should welcome its
information.
With this is mind, readers are urged to test The Spalding Enigma not by applying each
and every standard that we, the authors, might suggest, but rather by applying their own,
and those of competent scholarship—only bearing in mind the essential caveat that once
these standards have been established, they must be applied fairly, equally and
impartially to both sides of the question. Do this, and a solution to the Spalding enigma
emerges on a level that is at least as viable, every bit as logical, and in many ways more
credible than any offered thus far by pro-Mormon writers in their efforts to support
Joseph Smith’s version of how The Book of Mormon came into being.
VII. Hurlbut and Howe:
“...Roper refuses to address the possibility that all of the statements collected by Hurlbut
could just as well represent accurate and truthful recollections of honest and sincere
people who, although they may not have been Mormons, had no particular reason to
color their statements with anti-Mormon duplicity.”
Although Roper dutifully trots out the old Mormon chestnut that Hurlbut was the
“legitimate” author of Mormonism Unvailed and Howe was its “illegitimate” author, he
then goes on to acknowledge that we “may be right” about Hurlbut being only
responsible for gathering most of the material which appears in the final 64 pages of that
work. The Mormon position on this matter, he writes, “appears to have been an
overstatement.” We are pleased to share this small patch of common ground with the
FARMS reviewer—for we believe that an impartial examination of that 1834 volume will
prove it to be largely a re-hash of reporting previously published by Howe in his
newspaper, compiled for republication by a local accountant named Esak Rosa, and
incorporating input from Hurlbut only in its sections devoted to the Smith family and the
Spalding authorship claims.
Next, Roper accurately reports that, “Leaders of the church... reacted to Mormonism
Unvailed [by first] publish[ing] in the Latter-day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate a
series of letters on the history of Joseph Smith and his early prophetic experiences. These
materials were intended as a rebuttal to the negative testimony published by Howe.”
Oliver Cowdery’s “Early Scenes and Incidents in the Church” is actually a series of
eight letters published serially in the Kirtland, OH, Messenger and Advocate beginning
with the issue for December, 1834 (I:3, 40). The Messenger and Advocate was, of course,
the official Mormon newspaper, and Smith’s cousin Oliver Cowdery was its editor at the
time. Since Howe and Hurlbut had sought to reveal one facet of Joseph Smith’s character, so Oliver Cowdery attempted to reveal another, although, significantly, without the
benefit of any supporting affidavits, and without providing any meaningful details of his
own secretive past. As pointed out in The Spalding Enigma, neither Oliver nor Joseph
could afford to admit they had known each other for some years prior to 1829 because
they had deftly conspired to convince wealthy Martin Harris, for purposes of securing his
continued financial support, that the first time they had ever met was in April of that year.
In the words of Rodger I. Anderson:
“Rather than a moral leper, Cowdery’s Joseph Smith was simply a man
like other men ‘and liable, without the assisting grace of the Savior, to
deviate from that perfect path in which all men are commanded to walk.’
Hurlbut’s witnesses remembered Smith as ‘entirely destitute of moral
character, and addicted to vicious habits.’ The only sins of Cowdery’s
Smith ‘were a light, and too often, vain mind, exhibiting a foolish and
trifling conversation.’ Hurlbut’s Smith was animated by no loftier
purpose than the love of money, but Cowdery’s Smith was in contrast
motivated by a sincere desire ‘to know for himself of the certainty and
reality of pure and holy religion.’ Hurlbut’s Smith was a money digger
who told marvelous tales of enchanted treasure and infernal spirits, but
Cowdery’s Smith had only ‘heard of the power of enchantment, and a
thousand like stories, which held the hidden treasures of the earth.’”
(R.I. Anderson, Joseph Smith’s New York Reputation Reexamined [Salt
Lake City: Signature Books, 1990], 3.)
Oliver Cowdery’s “History” was only the first of many similar attempts by Mormon
writers to disentangle their prophet from what were often derisively referred to as
“Hurlbut’s hurlings.”
In his efforts to dismiss these “hurlings,” Roper refuses to address the possibility that all
of the statements collected by Hurlbut could just as well represent accurate and truthful
recollections of honest and sincere people who, although they may not have been
Mormons, had no particular reason to color their statements with anti-Mormon duplicity.
In other words, all things considered, it is far easier to ask a neutral observer to accept
that these people were being truthful than it is to argue endlessly that their statements
cannot be accepted at face value because Hurlbut must have put words into their mouths,
or because they must have had personal axes to grind, or because they were simple dupes
who relished the publicity. A careful inquiry into the lives of these early witnesses will
show them to have been decent citizens with good reputations, and not a mob of
Missouri-style persecutors. After a while, it must become obvious that most pro-Mormon
apologists simply cannot accept any, much less all, of these witnesses’ first-hand
testimony at face value, because to do so would require the admission that something was
seriously wrong with Joseph Smith’s account of how he obtained The Book of Mormon.
Rather than consider such a possibility, the predictable Saintly reaction has almost
invariably been to shoot the messenger out of dislike for the message, and then to throw
up a justifying smoke screen in an effort to confuse the issue. A far better reaction would
be for them to pause a moment and consider that a clear rendering of the actual facts of
Mormon history might eventually prove beneficial to everyone.
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It is not our goal to present Doctor Philastus Hurlbut as a sterling fellow who is to be
accepted, without critical review, in all his words and actions. But when the evidence he
presents (or causes to be presented) forms a pattern consistent with known historical
events and reasonable reconstructions of the probable past, we ask people to take that
offered information seriously and judge its validity on its own merits.
In his efforts to disparage Hurlbut, Roper candidly informs us that, “In an editorial,
Oliver Cowdery warned readers that Hurlbut had been exploiting his given name
“Doctor” in an effort to give his actions an air of authority.” Yet this allegation is
simply not supported by the available evidence.
Oliver Cowdery never accused Hurlbut of exploiting his own name, but rather Cowdery’s
editorial states very clearly that his purpose in noticing Hurlbut at all was “to undeceive
those at a distance who are unacquainted with him and may be deceived in consequence
of the above title, of Doctor.” (“Considerable Excitement,” LDS Evening and Morning
Star, II:19 [April 1834], 149.) In other words, Cowdery was simply alerting readers who
did not reside in the Kirtland area, and were therefore unacquainted with Hurlbut, not to
automatically presume that “Doctor” was Hurlbut’s title when in fact it was his real
name.
The truth is, there is no known documentation that Hurlbut ever exploited his given
name. In all his known communications, legal documents, correspondence, postal letter
lists, etc., he is listed as “D.P. Hurlbut.” Since he reportedly tried to set up a “root
doctor” practice in Mormon Kirtland, it is possible that he played upon his first name in
some limited ways which have never been documented. A certain unidentified “Doctor
Hurlbut” is known to have been advertising patent medicine in newspapers published
near D.P.’s boyhood home in Yates county, NY. Possibly those ads are traceable to D.P.
himself, but since there were plenty of Hurlbuts living around that area, they are just as
likely from some other person. Late in life D.P. operated as some sort of non-standard
“Doctor” in the Midwest, though the details of his practice are very sketchy and may
have entailed nothing more than his selling herbal medicine. At any rate, it is unfair to the
man to accuse him of something that cannot be documented, based solely upon hostile
testimony from early Mormons. Can we trust those same Mormons when they spoke of
there being no polygamy in their church, or on a dozen different matters where Mormons
are known to have been economical with the truth? Probably not.
If this were the only instance of Roper’s fanciful embellishment of the facts in his review
of The Spalding Enigma, we might be inclined to overlook it. Unfortunately, it is not the
only such example of what we fear may be a pattern of deliberate prevarication.
A similar example can be found in the following paragraph, wherein Mr. Roper attempts
to paint Howe as something of a cheat in his own right, and then seeks to boast a bit
about copies of The Book of Mormon bringing a higher price than Howe’s book:
“By some means, Howe had obtained Hurlbut’s list of subscriptions for
the book, which Howe immediately filled. When Hurlbut received his
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own allotted copies, he found that few wanted an additional copy. This
forced him to sell his copies at a much reduced price. Orson Hyde noted
with some amusement that investigators were still willing to pay more
than full price for the Book of Mormon and playfully suggested, ‘Tell
every body to buy and read “Mormonism Unveiled” if they wish, for we
are convinced of Paul’s statement, where he says, “Ye can do nothing
against the truth but for the truth.”’”
Needless to say, it was common practice at the time for editors to publish books “by
subscription,” which enabled them to be reasonably sure of sufficient sales to defray the
cost of printing. Since Howe had already been at work on Mormonism Unvailed well
before making a deal with Hurlbut (c.January, 1834) to acquire his material, and since
Hurlbut’s original plan seems to have been to publish his own book, perhaps Howe
sincerely and innocently believed that his deal included whatever additional subscribers
Hurlbut had managed to gather in the process. Moreover, Mr. Roper fails to note that
there is no evidence Hurlbut himself ever made such an allegation against Howe, and that
the only known source for this information is a statement Hurlbut’s widow Maria, made
to A.B. Deming in April of 1885, nearly two years after her husband’s death.
All of this, of course, is reasonably straight-forward. It is in Roper’s boastful allusion to
an incident he claims was recounted by Orson Hyde in which we once again we detect
the hint of intellectual economy. First, Roper informs us that, due to Howe’s alleged
perfidy, Hurlbut was forced to sell his copies “at a much reduced price.” Then he tells
us, “Orson Hyde noted with some amusement that investigators were still willing to pay
more than full price for the Book of Mormon... etc.” As his authority for all this, Roper
cites an 1835 communication from Orson Hyde and William E. McLellin in LDS
Messenger and Advocate, I:8,116. To the casual reader, the implication here is that the
statement originated only with Orson Hyde, that it made some reference to the price of
Howe’s book having been reduced, and that the “investigators” (note the plural) willing
to pay more than full price for The Book of Mormon were people who were critical of
Mormonism. Yet in comparing Roper’s assertions with the original source, we find that
while Hyde/McLellin do mention the selling price of Howe’s book, they say nothing
about the price having been reduced, nor does the word “investigators” appear anywhere
in their communication, which in fact refers only to one person friendly to Mormonism
and not several who were critical of it. The original text, this portion of which may have
been written by McLellin and not Hyde since it makes reference to Mr. Hyde in the third
person, reads as follows:
“...one man came to us and said he could not rest nor be satisfied,
until he had obeyed the everlasting Gospel. The church was called
together soon and we prayed unto the Lord our Heavenly Father....
Elder O. Hyde administered baptism unto him and confirmed him by the
water’s edge....
“One little circumstance we will briefly notice: We were told Messrs.
How, Hulbert & Co’s. [sic] Mormonism Unveiled [sic] sold for eighteen
and three quarter cents, while the Book of Mormon sold for two dollars.
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It is true that two dollars is above the selling price of the Book of
Mormon, but the anxiety of the gentleman to purchase it, and the owner
having but one, and not wishing to part with it, is an explanation of this
matter. Tell every body to buy and read ‘Mormonism Unveiled’ if they
wish, for we are convinced of Paul’s statement, where he says, ‘Ye can
do nothing against the truth but for the truth.’”
As to why Mr. Roper has chosen to miscast the words of his own witnesses in this matter,
we cannot say.
Undaunted however, Roper’s next point of attack is to raise the question of whether
Howe might actually have suppressed some of the evidence he had at one time in his
hands. “Was Howe afraid that Manuscript Story would undermine the argument for a
possible second Spalding manuscript on ancient America? The fact that the borrowed
manuscript was never returned to Spalding’s widow, was never published by Howe, and
was subsequently ‘lost’ by him seems a little too convenient to be mere coincidence,” he
writes.
Were we to dig very deeply into E.D. Howe’s family life, we might find that there was
pressure exerted upon him to suppress some of the anti-Mormon aspects of his book.
Indeed, according to A.B. Deming, Howe admitted that W.W. Phelps came to him trying
to get him to do just that (Deming re Spalding, Howe, Hurlbut, etc., 10 Jan. 1888, in
Naked Truths 1). Perhaps Howe’s sudden retirement from a productive lifetime in the
journalism business had more reasons behind it than are evident at first glance. It
certainly seems strange to us, that some months after Howe’s book was printed and he
had retired from his career in journalism, Joseph Smith himself tells (in his Journal, as
recorded by Oliver Cowdery) of traveling to the Howe household in Painesville, and then
of leaving his wife and family there to visit while he and his “scribe” (Cowdery?) rode
into town to call “on br. H. Kingsbury, at the bank, and at various other places,”—after
which he returned again to the Howe’s. It is equally curious that the man Smith went to
see was Horace Kingsbury (1798-1853), a prosperous Painesville silversmith, variety
store owner and mapmaker, who served at various times as justice of the peace, mayor,
and postmaster of that city, and who, although apparently a non-Mormon, appears to have
been one of Smith’s financial advisors. Could it be that the Mormons themselves
purchased and destroyed the better part of Mr. Howe’s limited edition publication?
Certainly the book quickly became a very scarce commodity and most citations of its
contents by 19th century writers come from its 1840 republication by Howe’s successors
in his printing and publishing business.
Mr. R. E. Woodbury of Kingsville, Ashtabula Co., Ohio, wrote to President James H.
Fairchild of Oberlin College on Jan. 28. 1886, to inform Fairchild that, “There were only
about Sixty copies printed—the Mormons became so indignant and boisterous,
threatening the said Hurlbut and the printers with assassination to such an extent that the
type were thrown up and the same was never again set up.” How much credibility such
an old family tradition can be given, we cannot say: all we know is that is it comes from
one of the Woodburys (Maria Hurlbut was a Woodbury) and that it is true Mr. Howe
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never republished his book nor subsequently had much to say about the Mormons. If
Howe suppressed anything, it was material even more harmful to Smith. Ninety percent
of his 1834 book is merely a rehash of old stuff he had already published in his
newspaper, coupled with other contemporary reporting. Howe reserved the really
damning material for the add-on chapter at the end of his book. Why did Howe not
follow up on potential contacts with Isaac Hale, the Palmyra residents, the Spalding
family, people in and around Pittsburgh, at Amity, etc.—and from such additional
research not produce a truly new book in 1834? A few dozen paragraphs of
supplementary reporting might have given Howe’s book the documented confirmation
which Mormon writers have so often complained is lacking in its pages. Rather than
compile and publish that sort of detailed new reporting, Eber D. Howe cashed in his
business and went into the manufacture of woolen goods—a strange end to the
journalistic career of one of Ohio’s foremost champions of Temperance, Anti-Masonry
and Anti-Mormonism. Why did Howe end that notable career within a few weeks after
publishing Mormonism Unvailed?
It is also curious no evidence exists to indicate that either Howe or Hurlbut ever
attempted to visit Amity, PA, the place where Spalding had lived from 1814 until his
death; nor does it appear that either of them made much more than a passing attempt to
uncover the facts at Pittsburgh either. Clearly something occurred which discouraged
Howe from making further inquiries during the months before his book was published,
but we are without sufficient evidence to say what it might have been.
When it comes to matters that he did investigate however, clearly Howe made a
significant effort to be both thorough and accurate, as is exemplified in Howe’s letter to
Joseph Smith’s father-in-law, Isaac Hale—an extremely telling document which we
reproduce in The Spalding Enigma (pp.73-4), but which Mr. Roper fails to reference in
his efforts to discredit Howe. For those not familiar with it, here is the text of that letter:
“Painesville, Ohio, Feb. 4, 1834. Mr. Isaac Hale, -- Dear Sir, -- I
have a letter with your signature, postmarked Dec. 22, 1833 -- addressed
to D. P. Hurlbut, on the subject of Mormonism. I have taken all the
letters and documents from Mr. Hurlbut, with a view to their publication.
An astonishing mass has been collected by him and others, who have
determined to lay open the imposition to the world. And as the design is
to present facts, and these well authenticated, and beyond dispute, it is
very desirable that your testimony, whatever it may be, should come
authenticated before a magistrate.
“Your [previous] letter has already been pronounced a forgery by the
Mormons, who say you are blind and cannot write, even your name. I
hope no one has attempted to deceive us; deception and falsehood in this
business will do no good in the end, but will help build up the monstrous
delusion. We look upon your connexion with Smith, and your knowledge
of facts, as very important, in the chain of events, -- and if it be your
desire to contribute what facts you have, in so desirable an undertaking,
I hope you will, without delay, have drawn up a full narrative of every
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transaction wherein Smith, jun’r. is concerned and attest them before a
magistrate -- This is our plan.
E. D. Howe”
Even a cursory reading makes it clear why pro-Mormon writers have carefully avoided
this item. Those who would question Howe’s desire to report his facts accurately need
only look to this letter to assure themselves that his effort was sincere. Yet if this is an
indication of Howe’s thoroughness, why did he terminate his investigation when he was
so close to solving the mystery?
At least one man who knew Howe saw him as the type of person who might have
accepted a bribe from Joseph Smith to suppress evidence. Judge John C. Dowen of
Kirtland once told A.B. Deming that it would not have surprised him to learn that Howe
had sold Spalding’s Manuscript Found to the Mormons. According to Dowen, “There
was all kinds of iniquity practiced at that time.” (Dowen to Deming, Jan. 20, 1885, in
Naked Truths II.) Whether Howe possessed Manuscript Found is not at issue here. What
is important is Judge Dowen’s assessment of Howe as the kind of man who could be
bought.
When Howe left the newspaper business early in 1835, he could not immediately find a
buyer for his publishing enterprise, and so he sold controlling interest in the operation to
his brother, Asahel, for six-hundred dollars. He remained part-owner, at least on paper,
until 1839, when he finally sold-out to L.L. Rice and Philander Winchester. In the
meanwhile he was making large financial investments in woolen mills with a relative.
Where did Howe get that investment money, considering that he had not yet sold all of
his interest in the printing business and his brother was taking a cut of the proceeds for
his own salary? According to Dale R. Broadhurst,
“I doubt the two investors could have even purchased the necessary land
for that small a sum—businesses are typically not profitable right away:
they require a cash flow of wages, purchases, transport costs, etc. If Smith
did tender a bribe, perhaps it came in the form of an offer to buy-up most
of Howe’s first printing, which would explain why copies of that edition
are so rare. Of course, Howe did have friends, and in the absence of a
bribe from Smith (which could have been brokered by Howe’s Mormon
wife), he simply might have borrowed the necessary cash elsewhere.”
With respect to Mormonism Unvailed, Howe advertised his new book only three times in
his Painesville Telegraph—on Nov. 28, Dec. 5 and Dec. 12, 1834, each time only in the
form of a small ad placed on the back page. Moreover, he failed to mention this ad, or its
contents, anywhere else in his newspaper; and as far as can be determined, his entire sales
promotion program for Mormonism Unvailed appears to have been limited to this small
announcement. How can it be that the leading anti-Mormon in Ohio (and probably in the
world, at that time) failed to place so much as a single editorial paragraph about his new
book in the November-December, 1834 issues of his newspaper? Surely one would
expect a publisher to express more than passing interest in promoting his own book; yet Howe did not even bother to bind up all the sheets for the book he had printed—the
unbound sheets passed into the ownership of Rice and Winchester, who re-issued the
discarded sheets with a new title-page, as a reprint book in 1840. Let Brother Roper
explain these strange incongruities, if he will.
As to Roper’s argument that “Howe’s faulty 1834 description and subsequent
suppression of Manuscript Story prevented early investigators from comparing the only
evidence of Spalding’s much vaunted literary skill and the manuscript’s style with the
Book of Mormon,” it seems more reasonable to presume that Howe’s reason for not
rushing to publish Manuscript Story in 1834 had more to do with economics than
suppression. Certainly, if he had truly intended to suppress the fact that this work existed,
he would not have mentioned it at all.
Roper takes Howe to task again for reporting that when Hurlbut showed Manuscript
Story to some of Spalding’s former neighbors, they claimed it bore no resemblance to
Manuscript Found. “A comparison between their statements and Manuscript Story...
shows otherwise,” he argues. The point he misses here is that if Manuscript Found was
derived from Manuscript Story, or written as its more saleable replacement, one would
expect there to be at least a few perceptible thematic and linguistic similarities between
the Oberlin Spalding holograph and parts of The Book of Mormon. Indeed, a distinct lack
of resemblance would make Mr. Roper’s case much stronger. As it is, he is left to dismiss
these well documented literary similarities by arguing that the witnesses’ statements must
have been derived from defective memories or from unconscious projections.
The December 31, 1833 Aron Wright draft letter helps us to understand the chronology
of Solomon Spalding’s fictional writing projects, but Roper pays little attention to this
pre-Howe clarification of things. Such first-hand documents generally supply a better
window upon the past than does the hearsay of a book publisher like Howe, who was
summarizing the opinions of a number of the Conneaut witnesses in a single, generalized
sentence. Mr. Roper would have done well to have kept such an elementary thought in
mind when offering his opinion that none of the Conneaut people recognized nor reported
any resemblance whatever between the two Spalding productions. Indeed, he seems more
interested in discrediting these early witnesses’ memories. Once again, he is constrained
to force square pegs into round holes by those who engaged him to write his review.
This sort of approach to history can create many problems. For example, in attempting to
convince his readers that testimony “unmolded by Hurlbut might show [that] Manuscript
Story and Manuscript Found were in fact identical,” he quotes the following from an
1841 document by Orson Hyde:
“In the spring of 1832 I preached in New Salem, Ohio, the place where
Rev. Mr. Spaulding resided at the time he wrote his romance. I raised up
a branch of the church at that place, and baptized many of Mr.
Spaulding’s old neighbors, but they never intimated to me that there was
any similarity between the Book of Mormon and Mr. Spaulding’s
romance; neither did I hear such an intimation from any quarter, until
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the immoral Hurlbert, a long time after . . . brought forth the idea. I then
went to these neighbors of Mr. Spaulding, and enquired of them if they
knew any thing about his writing a romance; and if so, whether the
romance was any thing like the Book of Mormon. They said that Mr.
Spaulding wrote a book, and that they frequently heard him read the
manuscript: but that any one should say that it was like the Book of
Mormon, was most surprising, and must be the last pitiful resort that the
devil had.”
Having quoted this passage, Roper boldly asserts that Hyde’s statement must be credible
because, as he says, there is simply “no compelling reason” to assume Elder Hyde might
have been “fabricating evidence.”
No compelling reason, except, of course, that when Orson Hyde wrote this in 1841, he
was hardly a neutral observer, but rather one of the highest-ranking members of the
Mormon hierarchy. Six years earlier, in 1835, Hyde had been called by the Three
Witnesses (Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer and Martin Harris) to be a member of the
first Quorum of the Twelve, and he had also served as a member of the first high council
and of Zion’s Camp, thus giving him every reason to want to protect not only his church
but also the exalted position he held therein—a position similar in rank to that held by a
Roman Catholic Cardinal. If on the one hand we are to accept the argument that Hurlbut
was not above fabrication and embellishment because he was zealously anti-Mormon,
then by the same logic one must also accept the proposition that Orson Hyde’s pro-
Mormon zeal coupled with the high position he held in his church rendered him equally
biased and thus equally capable of fabrication and embellishment in support of his cause.
All of these Mormon attacks on Hurlbut’s and Howe’s character and credibility fall under
the category of “shooting the messenger out of dislike for the message.” Hurlbut and
Howe may have been something less than perfect characters—but no matter whether that
conclusion be true or false, the evidence they compiled speaks for itself. If Smith and the
rest of the Mormon leadership could have effectively refuted it in 1834-35, they would
have done just that. Orson Hyde says that he went to the Conneaut area at that time and
interviewed people about the Spalding authorship claims, and he offers a single lame
sentence to report that he found nothing to report. Had Hyde been able to uncover any
really useful “dirt” on Spalding, Hurlbut, Howe, or the good people of Conneaut, we can
be sure that he would have published it to the world. If the Mormons of those days had
had any real intention of clearing the names of Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon, they
would have published their own interviews with witnesses in Palmyra, Conneaut, Amity,
and Pittsburgh. Rather than doing such a useful thing however, they have ever since
concentrated on personal demonization of the Spalding claims advocates. This is a
criminal’s defense—or worse, a politician’s defense. Mr. Roper has done better than
many of his predecessors in avoiding this sort of demonization—but he seems unable to
resist the old Saintly habit of portraying Hurlbut and Howe as the scum of the earth.
Roper would have been better advised by his editors to have taken the high road of book
reviewing, and thus to have avoided these distracting sloshings though the journalistic
mud.
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VIII. Those Troublesome Allegations of Impropriety:
“[M]uch of what now passes for early Mormon history not only came from the pens of
Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith themselves, but was largely created by them in
measured response to the devastating material published in Howe’s Mormonism
Unvailed, and in any case was not published until 1835 or later.”
Before undertaking further discussion of D.P. Hurlbut’s character, we should like to
thank Mr. Roper for correcting us on a minor point. In The Spalding Enigma at page 436,
note 49, we say that “The earliest claim that Hurlbut ‘was excluded from the Church for
adultery’ seems to have originated with none other than Smith and Rigdon themselves in
a statement that appeared in The Elders’ Journal I,4, (August 1838):59-60.” We also
reference two similar, but less specific allegations which were published in 1835.
Mr. Roper corrects us by quoting a comment Joseph Smith made in a letter to W.W.
Phelps dated August 18, 1833, wherein Smith wrote: “We are suffering great persicution
[sic] on account of one man by the name of Docter Hurlburt [sic] who has been expeled
[sic] from the chirch [sic] for lude [sic] and adulterous conduct.”
Regrettably, in researching this matter, we surveyed only published material, and were
unaware of Smith’s communication until Roper cited it in his review. For the record,
although the letter in question was written in 1833, it does not seem to have been
published until 1984 (D.C. Jessee, ed., The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, [SLC:
Deseret, 1984], 287). Perhaps most important here, however, is that both the early date of
this letter and the fact that Joseph Smith wrote it, strongly reinforce our stated position on
this matter, which is that “The earliest claim that Hurlbut ‘was excluded from the Church
for adultery’ seems to have originated with none other than Smith and Rigdon
themselves.” We are, therefore, grateful to Mr. Roper for having disabused us of the
error and illuminated our point at the same time.
In his effort to provide support for Smith’s anti-Hurlbut allegations, Roper cites a number
of other Mormon witnesses (Pratt, Hyde, Winchester, George Smith, etc.), all of whom
are on record as having faithfully echoed their prophet’s claim that Hurlbut was expelled
from the Church for lewd conduct and adultery. Roper then informs us that “Joseph
Smith’s [1833] description is consistent with the later recollection of anti-Mormon S. F.
Whitney, who stated in 1885 that, in Hurlbut’s 1834 trial, Joseph Smith said that Hurlbut
had been ‘expelled for base conduct with lude [sic] women.’”
Unfortunately, Roper gets himself into a bit of trouble when he cites Whitney out of
context on this matter. Although Whitney does confirm he was present at Hurlbut’s 1834
trial, and says that he heard Joseph Smith testify to Hurlbut’s having been “expelled for
base conduct with lude [sic] women,” later in this same statement Whitney goes on to
describe how he personally knew that Smith’s testimony was false! The salient portion of
Whitney’s statement, in its proper context, is as follows:
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“D.P. Hurlbut had been a Mormon and was expelled.... Jo testified in
court that Hurlbut was expelled for base conduct with lude [sic] women, but
had been restored again before Jo knew the charges, which were afterwards
received from New York State.... The day after Hurlbut’s trial in Chardon,
while in my brother’s store, Jo Smith and many of his followers came in; Jo
began to abuse me for testifying as I did. He ask me the reasons why I
would not believe him under oath. I replied that he lied so like all
possessed.... I told him he lied about the charges against Hurlbut, for Orson
Hyde came into the store right after excluding Hurlbut and accidently[sic]
dropped the charges on the floor, and I picked them up and had them, and
they were not as he testified....” (Deming, Naked Truths I:1,3)
As to why Mr. Roper quotes only part of S.F. Whitney’s very important testimony on this
matter, we cannot say. However, since Roper is happy to accept Whitney as a credible
and accurate witness with respect to one portion of his statement, he can hardly reverse
himself and claim that Whitney is being any less credible or accurate in the rest of what
he says. Therefore, by accepting Whitney as a truthful witness, Mr. Roper at once
impeaches the testimony of his own witnesses and thus effectively stalemates his own
argument.
Naturally it would have been useful if Whitney had provided us with more details (why
didn’t Deming ask him about this?), but even so, Whitney’s fascinating revelation is
sufficient to cast serious doubt upon all of the other statements Roper cites with respect to
this matter, since all of them were made by Mormons who would have dutifully repeated
what Smith was actively promoting as “the party line” as far as Hurlbut was concerned
(witness his 1833 letter to Phelps). This explains why all of these witnesses, in Roper’s
words, “give a generally consistent picture of Hurlbut’s moral problem.” Had it not been
for Whitney’s enlightening revelation, and Roper’s tacit endorsement of him as a credible
witness, the truth of the matter might never have been known.
Whitney’s details of the trial at Chardon are consistent with other more contemporary
accounts. Proof that Whitney was personally involved in the Hurlbut affair and thus knew
whereof he spoke can be found in the fact that his name appears in the court dockets as
one of those called to testify in the case. A.B. Deming spent two full days and evenings
with Whitney, a Methodist minister, asking questions and writing out his lengthy
statement.
In the final analysis, even though Whitney does not state precisely what the real charges
against Hurlbut were, he makes it eminently clear that Smith had lied about this matter
while on the witness stand, and that the charges against Hurlbut were not what Smith said
they were.
In support of Whitney’s assertion that Smith had lied in court about Hurlbut, there is the
strange matter of the Kirtland Council Minute Book, which Mr. Roper cites no less than
three times in relation to Hurlbut (see his notes #138, 141 & 142). With respect to this
handwritten volume, we find it extremely curious that the entries for June of 1833
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covering the period of the Hurlbut controversy are not in their proper chronological
order, that several pages which should contain material about key dates and events have
been torn out and are missing entirely, and that the record gives every appearance of
having been deliberately tampered with and/or altered at some later date! Given the
subsequent court case mounted by Joseph Smith against Hurlbut, and S.F. Whitney’s
allegation that Smith had perjured himself when testifying, serious consideration must be
given to the probability that Smith or one of his close associates (possibly Frederick
Granger Williams) hastily and deliberately undertook to alter the record, lest it be
subpoenaed and used as evidence.
IX. Murderers Most Foul?
“[N]o one really disputes that D.P. Hurlbut was something of a scoundrel, and there is
even general agreement that... [he] could have been involved in the alleged murder of
one Garrit Brass of Mentor, Ohio.... [I]n June of 1837, just five months before the Brass
affair, Joseph Smith himself was hailed into court on a charge of conspiracy to commit
murder.”
With respect to Hurlbut’s later difficulties with the United Brethren denomination in the
early 1850s, Roper cites an 1884 statement made by one Hiram Rathbun, and then takes
The Spalding Enigma (p.450,n.42) to task for allegedly “discount[ing] this evidence as
coming from pro-Mormon sources.” He misrepresents his case, however, because our
endnote reads, “Sometime around 1840, Hurlbut is reported to have become a United
Brethren minister, but again, mostly according to pro-Mormon sources, allegations of
intemperance, lying, and improprieties with women continued to surround him, until he
was finally excommunicated in the fall of 1852.” Either Mr. Roper has misread our text
or he has deliberately sought to recast its meaning to suit his own purposes. In either case,
it is something of a stretch to find derogatory intent in the words “mostly according to
pro-Mormon sources,” when in fact the phrase is simply intended to indicate that most of
the discussion around this material comes from writers who are pro-Mormon. The words
“but again” refer to the allegations of intemperance, etc., and not to the pro-Mormon
sources.
That having been said, no one really disputes that D.P. Hurlbut was something of a
scoundrel, and there is even general agreement that, as Roper suggests, Hurlbut could
have been involved in the alleged murder of one Garrit Brass of Mentor, Ohio, in
November of 1837.
Recognizing that even allegations of murder can tarnish a person’s reputation for life, it
seems only fair to note that in June of 1837, just five months before the Brass affair,
Joseph Smith himself was hailed into court on a charge of conspiracy to commit murder.
In this case, about which both his personal diary and his official church history are
strangely silent, Smith stood accused of conspiring to kill a prominent Kirtland anti-
Mormon named Grandison Newell. His silence about the matter may have had to do with
the fact that two of his supporting witnesses, both high-ranking Mormon apostles,
admitted under oath that the prophet had indeed discussed with them the possibility of
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killing Newell. According to apostle Orson Hyde, “Smith seemed much excited and
declared that Newell should be put out of the way, or where the crows could not find him;
he said destroying Newell would be justifiable in the sight of God, that it was the will of
God, &c.” Similarly, apostle Luke Johnson testified that Smith had told him “if Newell
or any other man should head a mob against him, they ought to be put out of the way,
and it would be our duty to do so.” (Painesville Telegraph, 9 June 1837; Geauga County
Court of Common Pleas, Book T, 52-3 [5 June 1837], Geauga Co. Court House,
Chardon, OH; Edwin B. Firmage and Richard C. Mangrum, Zion in the Courts: A legal
History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900 [Urbana, IL: Univ.
of Illinois Press, 1988], 55-6, 38n17; and History of the Church I: 405.)
In the end, just as with Hurlbut, the allegations against Smith were never proved. The
point to be made here, however, is that if bad character and poor reputation constitute
sufficient grounds for dismissing Hurlbut’s evidence that The Book of Mormon was
derived from a work of fiction written by Solomon Spalding, then by the same logic one
must also dismiss Joseph Smith’s claims concerning the divine origin of that very same
book.
Perhaps the real reason Mr. Roper has devoted so much space to denigrating Hurlbut is
that he sought to create a straw man which he could then easily attack and demolish.
Executing the messenger out of dislike for the message is an old ploy and is often used in
cases where one seeks to divert attention away from matters one would rather not discuss.
Granted that in some cases Hurlbut appears to have been a less than commendable
character. He seems to have had no sense of duty in making sure that the pages he took
from the trunk in Hartwick were ever properly returned to the Spalding family, and he
may have played fast and loose with the truth—especially in his interactions with various
young ladies in the churches he joined. That much admitted, why do the Mormons
themselves trust him so much that they make very selective use of a few things he said?
Fawn Brodie, for example, throws out the Conneaut witnesses’ statements but relies upon
the Palmyra area statements as though they were gospel truth. Another example may be
had in Mormon selective reliance upon what Hurlbut and Howe reported regarding the
contents of the infamous trunk in Hartwick. Typical—sadly typical. The point to be made
here is that Hurlbut’s character, however shady it may have been, cannot be interpreted to
mean that all the witnesses he interviewed must have deliberately told him only what he
wanted to hear. As in any court of law, those judging the case should not automatically
presume all the witnesses are lying just because the lawyer is a disreputable scallywag.
Clearly the issue here has far less to do with the character and reputation of the players
involved than it does with the quality of evidence they present in support of their
individual causes. Unfortunately, it is precisely upon this point that faith-based
scholarship founders every time; for while many pro-Mormon writers, such as Roper, are
perfectly willing on the one hand to dismiss The Spalding Enigma on grounds that the
evidence lacks sufficient credibility to prove the case, they refuse to recognize that
applying the same critical standards to Joseph Smith and his claims produces an even
weaker case for Smith that it does for Spalding. Confront such writers with this paradox
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however, and rather than concede the point, they immediately seek to inject faith into the
equation, thus abandoning all pretense of meaningful, academic discussion, and at once
changing the nature of the dispute from scholarly to religious. Unfortunately, under such
circumstances, true scholarship, logical thought processes and meaningful discussion
simply are not possible. We therefore admit that our intended audience is not the Latterday
Saint faithful, but rather, the readership we seek are people who have not already
made-up their minds beyond all possibility of change. It is not our purpose to talk
followers of Joseph Smith out of their church of choice, and so we do not argue along
those lines. If readers in our intended audience disagree with some, or all, of our
conclusions, we thank them for at least taking the trouble to read what we have to say,
and we invite them to share with us their differing viewpoints.
X. Fact v/s Circumstance:
“If Hurlbut, a man of admittedly dubious character, cannot be relied upon to produce
credible evidence in a matter of such paramount importance as the origin of a major
religious movement, then how credible can any religious movement be which must trace
its origins back to a man of equally dubious character?”
With respect to logical thought processes, it is important to remember that for those who
study history, there are two kinds of proof—that which uses beyond reasonable doubt as
its standard (as in a criminal trial), and that which considers a matter proved based upon a
preponderance of evidence (as in a civil case). While historical researchers naturally
prefer the first standard, most of us accept that it is the second which often prevails in
deciding what ultimately become the accepted facts of history.
And so it is with the Spalding enigma. If one employs the beyond reasonable doubt
standard as a filter, and applies it equally to the historical evidence offered by both sides
of the debate—pro-Mormon and pro-Spalding—all that emerges from the filter are names
and places. Otherwise, NOTHING is beyond reasonable doubt—neither Joseph Smith’s
religious claims, nor “Hurlbut’s hurlings,” nor anything else having to do with the The
Book of Mormon’s origin. Either one reverts to preponderance of evidence in order to
sort out what probably happened, or one adopts a purely faith-based standard and refuses
to accept any evidence which is not faith-promoting, or one is faced with a hopeless
conundrum—in other words, an enigma.
The issue here is not the writers, nor is it the many millions of good, industrious, and
productive people for whom faith in Joseph Smith and his church is an ongoing way of
life. We are dealing with history here, not religion. Our concern is not dogma, but rather
about stitching together past events, and in so doing, making a scholarly effort to place
them into a reasonable perspective so they may be better understood by those of us whose
lives are several generations removed from the events themselves. Under the best
circumstances, reconstructing history is not easy. It becomes vastly more difficult when
those who played key roles in important events have actively conspired to conceal the
truth from posterity.To those who will say that The Spalding Enigma is nothing more than an effort to link a
series of coincidences, we are moved to ask how many coincidences are required to make
a fact? To critics who will argue that much of the evidence we present was gathered too
long after the original events to be meaningful, we would point out that if one chooses a
cut-off date of, say, the end of November 1834, which is when Eber Howe’s book was
published, it quickly becomes apparent that there is a far larger volume of evidence on
record suggesting that Solomon Spalding was the real author of The Book of Mormon,
and testifying to Joseph Smith’s bad character, poor reputation and disgraceful conduct
with women, than anything pro-Mormon writers have thus far been able to produce from
the same time frame in support of their own version of history. Moreover, in our opinion,
much of this early material is of better quality, because most of the statements gathered
by Hurlbut and other investigators of early Mormonism were published shortly after they
were obtained, and in a number of cases these were the sworn and notarized affidavits of
living witnesses, available for cross-examination. As for anything pro-Mormon historians
might offer, even the most loyal and gifted of them must admit that much of what now
passes for early Mormon history not only came from the pens of Oliver Cowdery and
Joseph Smith themselves, but was largely created by them in measured response to the
devastating material published in Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed, and in any case was not
published until 1835 or later.
Although the methods of collecting information and the standards for reporting it were
considerably more primitive in Hurlbut’s day, placing words in people’s mouths and
getting away with it was still something to be done with considerable caution. Nineteenth
century editors even had a word for it—animadvert—which meant to publish deliberate
falsehoods about or against someone. The principal problem facing the old Mormon
argument that “Hurlbut put thoughts into the minds of his respondents, and words into
their mouths” is the same as it has always been; which is to say that although the people
of northwestern Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio had ready access to a variety of
newspapers from 1830 onwards, not one single individual of the upwards of 200 who
were interviewed by Hurlbut, or later by Turner, or Deming, or Dickinson, or Braden—
either on the subject of Solomon Spalding’s writings or about Joseph Smith’s character—
not one of them is known to have ever come forward to publicly claim they were
misquoted or misrepresented in any way. Not one! Nor has any relative, friend or
neighbor of any of these people ever come forward to claim that so-and-so had told them
privately that Hurlbut or one of the others had misrepresented their testimony. Nor was
any documented evidence against these old witnesses ever brought forth against them
while they yet lived. That is a remarkable record, and clearly it speaks for itself. The best
that Smith and Rigdon were able to come-up with, after tracing Hurlbut’s steps at least as
far as Buffalo, and interviewing Mormons along the way, was the allegation that D.P.
Hurlbut had a womanizing problem. Of course, one could seek to explain all of this by
imagining some vast anti-Mormon conspiracy at work here—one such as Mr. Roper
deftly hints at when he suggests that Hurlbut’s witnesses stood to “gain a certain amount
of notoriety by having their statements and opinions published in a book exposing what
they already considered to be a delusion”—but in the end it is far more reasonable to
accept the likelihood that these people were simply telling the truth as they knew it to be,
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and, for lack of evidence to the contrary, that they and those who knew them best must
have considered Hurlbut’s reporting of their testimony to have been reasonably accurate.
As to Roper’s stated conclusion that “The evidence... suggests that Philastus Hurlbut, a
man of dubious character, whose passionate hostility to Joseph Smith and Mormonism is
beyond dispute, was intimately involved with both the selection of the Spalding
testimonials that we have today and the language in which they were formulated,” once
again his double standard is showing. If Hurlbut, a man of admittedly dubious character,
cannot be relied upon to produce credible evidence in a matter of such paramount
importance as the origin of a major religious movement, then how credible can any
religious movement be which must trace its origins back to a man of equally dubious
character?
The matter does not rest with the purported bad character of Smith or Hurlbut. As we’ve
said, it is not our purpose to defame Smith nor to discredit his religion. What we do wish
to establish is the general credibility of the Conneaut witnesses. Therefore, if anyone can
show us a single falsehood in their published statements, or a single contemporary
instance of any accusations of their being false or misled witnesses, we wish to see and
study such evidence. Unfortunately, Mr. Roper has not supplied us with any such thing.
XI. How Many Manuscripts?
“I was soon introduced to the manuscripts of Spalding and perused them as often as I
had leisure. He had written two or three books or pamphlets on different subjects; but
that which more particularly drew my attention was one which he called the Manuscript
Found...” John N. Miller to D.P. Hurlbut, September 1833.
Although Mormons have circulated a variety of arguments in their effort to dismiss the
Spalding enigma, the one which seems to be the current favorite holds that it is utterly
impossible for Solomon Spalding to have written more than one fictional story—that one
being the holograph which bore the title Manuscript Story—Conneaut Creek on its
wrapper when it was rediscovered in 1884. Therefore, since the text of this manuscript
bears only occasional and limited resemblance to The Book of Mormon, it naturally must
follow that the events of Solomon Spalding’s life, and the various statements about him
made by family, friends, and neighbors after his death, have no relevance whatsoever to
the origin of the literary production now known as The Book of Mormon. As Roper points
out, even some “secular critics” of Mormonism such as Dan Vogel favor this Spaldingonly-
ever-wrote-one-story view.
As authors of The Spalding Enigma, we believe this particular argument to be seriously
flawed. Moreover, after reading Roper’s review of our book, we find ourselves
wondering whether those who attempt to defend such a position aren’t more interested in
promoting convenient fantasy than they are in promoting meaningful debate. Rather than
seeking to impose our views upon the reader however, we ask only that our evidence be
given a fair hearing.
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In support of his assertion that Spalding produced only one fictional manuscript, Roper
tells us that after Hurlbut had collected the statements of the Conneaut witnesses,
“...an attempt was made to locate the ‘Manuscript Found.’ According to
Howe, ‘a messenger’ (Hurlbut) was sent to Massachusetts, where
Spalding’s widow then lived. Although she reportedly had ‘no distinct
knowledge’ of the contents of ‘Manuscript Found,’ she gave permission
for this messenger to retrieve the manuscript from a trunk at her former
place of residence in New York.”
He then proceeds to quote Howe’s account of the circumstances which followed:
“The trunk referred to by the widow, was subsequently examined, and
found to contain only a single M.S. book, in Spalding’s hand-writing,
containing about one quire of paper. This is a romance, purporting to
have been translated from the Latin, found on 24 rolls of parchment in a
cave, on the banks of Conneaut Creek, but written in a modern style, and
giving a fabulous account of a ship’s being driven upon the American
coast, while proceeding from Rome to Britain, a short time previous to
the Christian era, this country then being inhabited by the Indians. This
old M.S. has been shown to several of the foregoing witnesses, who
recognise it as Spalding’s, he having told them that he had altered his
first plan of writing, by going farther back with dates, and writing in the
old scripture style, in order that it might appear more ancient. They say
that it bears no resemblance to the ‘Manuscript Found.’” (Howe,
Mormonism Unvailed, 287–88.)
Having cited Howe, Roper then continues with his own assessment:
“It is now generally acknowledged that, in the passage above, E.D.
Howe described the document recovered by Lewis L. Rice in Hawaii in
1884 and now known as ‘Manuscript Story.’ Faced with the facts...,
Howe was forced to insist that the Book of Mormon’s historical
narrative was derived from a supposed second Spalding manuscript on
ancient America known as ‘Manuscript Found.’ It was this second
document, he claimed, rather than the one retrieved by Hurlbut, that his
witnesses had described in their statements. However, critics of the
Spalding theory... have been understandably suspicious of this claim,
suspecting that either Howe, Hurlbut, or former Spalding neighbors
simply invented the theory of a second manuscript after finding that the
actual Spalding manuscript did not match the neighbors’ descriptions.”
Unfortunately, Roper’s argument is supported by little more than hollow conjecture, for
there are no known sources which unequivocally attest to that supposition. On the other
hand, in The Spalding Enigma we present nearly seventy pages (pp.29-98) of evidence
which strongly suggests that precisely the opposite has to be true—i.e. that Solomon
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Spalding must have written at least two fictional manuscripts, and that one of them was
evidently called Manuscript Found. So that the reader may be fully informed, we recite
the most significant of this evidence in the remainder of this section:
- Aron Wright to Hurlbut, August,1833: “Spalding had many other manuscripts”
[Howe,284]; and Aron Wright again on December 31, 1833: “Hurlbut is now at my
store. I have examined the writings which he has obtained from [said] Spalding’s
widowe[.] I recognize them to be the writings handwriting of [said] Spalding but not
the Manuscript I had reference to in my statement before alluded to as he informed
me he wrote in the first place he wrote for his own amusement and then altered his
plan and commenced writing a history of the first Settlement of America the
particulars you will find in my testimony dated Sept 18 August 1833....”
We shall have more to say about Aron Wright’s testimony later in this section.
- John N. Miller to Hurlbut, September 1833: “I was soon introduced to the
manuscripts of Spalding and perused them as often as I had leisure. He had written
two or three books or pamphlets on different subjects; but that which more
particularly drew my attention was one which he called the Manuscript Found...”
[Howe, 282-3].
Note here that Miller not only says Spalding had written “two or three books,” but he
specifically identifies the one in question as Manuscript Found, and not Manuscript
Story. Should there be any doubt however, Miller’s description of the contents of the
work he refers to as Manuscript Found makes it eminently clear that he is recalling
something distinctly different from Manuscript Story. Yet Roper persists with his
argument that there can only have been one Spalding manuscript, and then attempts to
convince us that Miller and his neighbors, in conspiracy with Hurlbut and Howe, and out
of dislike for Mormon missionary activity in the area, could have “simply invented the
theory of a second manuscript after finding that the actual Spalding manuscript did not
match the neighbors’ descriptions.” Having fielded that one, Roper himself then
proceeds to admit, in what may be an inadvertent contradiction, that when “Miller
mentions several ‘books or pamphlets on different subjects,’ he seems to draw a
distinction in his statement between ‘Manuscript Found’ and Spalding’s other writings.”
This, of course, is precisely our point; even though Roper’s unintentional confirmation
comes during the course of trying to place words in Miller’s mouth which would limit
Spalding’s other writings to sermons, similar papers, and a humorous poem called The
Frogs of Wyndham. All things considered, surely it is more reasonable to accept that
Miller was making a sincere effort to be truthful in his recollection, than to cast aspersion
upon this man’s character and attempt to force words into his mouth as Brother Roper
seeks to do. But let us continue:
- Mrs. Matilda Spalding-Davison, November, 1833: According to Howe’s report, the
widow Spalding informed Hurlbut that her late husband “had a great variety of
manuscripts,” and recalled “that one was entitled the Manuscript Found....” [Howe,
287-8]
Are we to presume here, as Roper does, that Hurlbut/Howe successfully placed words in
this stern old widow’s mouth—words which, by the way, neither she nor her daughter
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ever repudiated although they had plenty of opportunity—or is it again more reasonable
to accept that she was speaking truth to the best of her knowledge and belief?
One of the opportunities where Mrs. Spalding-Davison could have repudiated what
Hurlbut/Howe had written about her came after a more detailed statement relating her
memories was published in 1839. Shortly after that statement appeared in various
newspapers, she received a visit from a Mormon named Jesse Haven, who seems to have
asked her point-blank whether the information given in her published statement was
true—to which she replied without hesitation, “In the main, it is.” (Quincy [IL] Whig, 16
November 1839; and Times & Seasons I:3 [Jan.1840], 46-47. Note: Due to a
typographical error, The Spalding Enigma, p.467,n.64, incorrectly gives the date of the
Whig as 1849 and the pages for Times & Seasons as 45-46.) Roper cites the Haven
interview in his review, but chooses to dwell upon less-important ambiguities rather than
mention this part of it.
Moreover, it is not fair for Mr. Roper to hold against the widow Spalding the fact that she
chose not to reveal all she knew about this matter the first time she was asked about it (by
Hurlbut, in 1833). First of all, it is human nature that old memories often do not come
back to mind all at once, but rather resurface in bits and pieces over a period of time.
Secondly, Hurlbut was a complete stranger to the widow, and, according to the
Spaldings’ adopted daughter who was present, the old lady was suspicious of the man
and did not trust him. In her own words: “My mother was careful to have me with her in
all the conversations she had with Hurlburt (sic), who spent a day at my house. She did not
like his appearance and mis-trusted his motives.” (E.E. Dickinson, “The Book of
Mormon,” Scribner’s Monthly, [August, 1880]: 616ff.) Under such circumstances, it is
hardly surprising that Hurlbut came away with more generalities than specifics. In
addition, the fact that Howe reports only these generalities without attempting to
embellish them tells us something about his reliability as a reporter.
- Robert Patterson, Sr., in a written, signed statement for Samuel Williams, dated April
2, 1842, stated that Silas Engles, the “foreman printer and general superintendent of
the printing business” for the R & J Patterson establishment, had informed him “that
a gentleman, from the East originally, had put into his [Engles’] hands a manuscript
of a singular work, chiefly in the style of our English translation of the Bible.”
According to Patterson, he, personally, had “read only a few pages” of this work, and
having found nothing objectionable therein, told Engles he “might publish it, if the
author furnished the funds or good security.” (Williams, Mormonism Exposed,
Pittsburgh: 1842, p.16.)
While Patterson’s statement is, unfortunately, sparse on details, his recollection that the
manuscript he had seen was written in Biblical style, would seem to negate any argument
that the work in question was the one we now know as Manuscript Story. In addition, the
fact that Robert Patterson had such limited knowledge of either Spalding or his manuscript,
reinforces our assertion, as set forth in The Spalding Enigma, that the Patterson brother
with whom Spalding was dealing was in fact Joseph and not Robert. (See later in this paper
for additional discussion.)
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- Samuel Williams, for whom Robert Patterson had written and signed the above
statement, introduces it in his 1842 booklet with the remark that “Mr. Patterson firmly
believes also, from what he has heard of the Mormon Bible, that it is the same thing
he examined at that time.”
Although Robert Patterson was alive and doing business in Pittsburgh at the time Williams
published his statement, there is no record of him ever having complained about being
misquoted.
- Matilda Spalding McKinstry, April 3, 1880: “My father was in business there [at
Conneaut], and I remember his iron foundry and the men he had at work, but that he
remained at home most of the time and was reading and writing a great deal. He
frequently wrote little stories, which he read to me.... In 1816 my father died at Amity,
Pennsylvania, and directly after his death my mother and myself went to... Onondaga
County, New York.... We carried all our personal effects with us, and one of these was
an old trunk, in which my mother had placed all my father’s writings which had been
preserved.” [Statement given at Washington, DC, April 3, 1880]. Also, Matilda
Spalding McKinstry again, this time to A.B. Deming on November 2, 1886: “I have
read much of the Manuscript Story Conneaut Creek which you sent me. I know that it
is not the Manuscript Found which contained the words ‘Nephi, Mormon, Maroni,
and Laminites.’ Do the Mormons expect to deceive the public by leaving off the title
page—Conneaut Creek and calling it Manuscript Found and Manuscript Story[?]”
Although only a young girl at the time her step-father died, Mrs. McKinstry seems very
positive about her childhood memories.
- Rachel Derby, daughter of John N. Miller, December 9, 1884: “Father told him
[Hurlbut] that the Manuscript Found was not near all of Spalding’s writings....”
(Deming, Naked Truths I:1, col.7)
The fact that Miller’s daughter makes this statement strongly suggests that Miller went to
his grave without disputing what Hurlbut and Howe had originally reported him to have
said on this subject back in 1834.
- L.L. Rice, May 30,1885: “there is no outcome of the quarrel, as the story is evidently
unfinished, and stops abruptly.” (Rice to James Fairchild, May 30, 1885)
This in itself indicates the manuscript Hurlbut found in the widow’s trunk cannot have
been a copy of the manuscript that Spalding had prepared for the Pattersons, because that
work was said to have been complete except for a preface and title page.
- E. D. Howe to Elder T. W. Smith, July 26, 1881: “The manuscript you refer to was
not marked on the outside or inside Manuscript Found . . . it was not the original
Manuscript Found.” (C. Shook, The Real Origin of the Book of Mormon [Cincinnati:
Standard, 1914], 75-76).
Although Howe made this statement three years before L.L. Rice’s rediscovery of
Manuscript Found, his recollection proved correct. The manuscript which Rice recovered
was marked Manuscript Story—Conneaut Creek, not Manuscript Found.
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Discerning readers will note that three of the statements quoted above precede Hurlbut’s
retrieval of Manuscript Story from the widow’s trunk, thus negating Roper’s assertion
that “either Howe, Hurlbut, or former Spalding neighbors simply invented the theory of a
second manuscript after finding that the actual Spalding manuscript did not match the
neighbors’ descriptions.”
In addition to the case presented by these witnesses, there is some supporting evidence
which can be deduced from the physical appearance of the holograph entitled Manuscript
Story presently housed at Oberlin College.
An example of this appears on page 132 of that manuscript in the form of an unfinished
personal letter which some unknown individual began to compose and then abruptly
broke-off in mid page. What is important here is that the text of this letter begins with the
words, “I have received 2 letters this jan 1812,” thus fixing that particular page, at least,
in time. Since this item turns up on page 132 in a manuscript of only 171 pages, we are
left to conclude that Spalding added fewer than 40 new pages to this work between the
time our unknown writer penned this fragment, and Spalding’s death at Amity, PA more
than four and one-half years later. (See The Spalding Enigma, pp.92-96 for a more
complete discussion.) Faced with this, we must either believe Roper’s thesis that this
poorly constructed and incomplete text, including the interpolated “letter” on page 132,
is the same manuscript which Spalding submitted to the Pattersons in Pittsburgh—or we
must accept that after writing less than 40 new pages, Spalding laid Manuscript Story
aside and began work on an entirely different piece of pseudo-historical fiction. For those
of us who prefer the second premise over the first, and based upon what the various
witnesses tell us about Spalding’s manuscript-writing activities both at Conneaut and
later at Pittsburgh and Amity, it is entirely reasonable to presume that Spalding laid
Manuscript Story aside soon after January of 1812, probably during the spring or early
summer.
With respect to the time frame, we know that Solomon Spalding’s brother Josiah visited
him in Ohio in the summer of 1812, and from his testimony we can deduce that he saw
either this draft of the unfinished story, or a predecessor. Moreover, it seems reasonable
to conclude that there was a predecessor draft based upon the orthographic artifacts
visible on the pages of the Manuscript Story holograph now at Oberlin—dittography, text
crossed-out on pages not in proper sequence, combinations of a “calm” legible copyist’s
hand interspersed with hurried, imperfect insertions, etc. In addition, there is evidence
that Spalding had a long-standing fascination with the notion that the American Indians
were descended from ancient Israelites, and that he had already made considerable
progress on a second manuscript devoted to this special theme prior to his leaving
Conneaut for Pittsburgh during the late summer or early autumn of that same year. (See
Matilda Spalding-Davison’s 1839 statement as printed in The Spalding Enigma, pp.106-
09.)
Unable to digest all of this, however, Roper seeks to chip away at it in small ways by
which he obviously hopes to magnify his readers’ distrust of the old evidence. This he
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does by attempting to divert their attention to unsupported quibbles and outright
misrepresentations. For example, he writes that according to The Spalding Enigma,
“A considerable body of evidence exists, indicating that Solomon
Spalding wrote a second novel entitled A Manuscript Found, which
disappeared prior to 1833.” Unfortunately for their position, much of
that evidence comes from very late testimony solicited long after the fact,
in which “witnesses” recalled, with ever-increasing detail, what
Spalding had reportedly done or said through the years.”
Apparently this is a only a problem when someone other than Roper himself cites such
“late testimony.” Consider the following quote from Roper’s review of The Spalding
Enigma in which he attempts to argue that certain statements made by Spalding’s widow
and daughter should be taken as evidence that the manuscript Solomon Spalding
submitted to the Pattersons was the same document which is now at Oberlin College.
According to Roper,
“Spalding’s widow related that, in an attempt to get his manuscript
published, Spalding submitted it to Patterson for evaluation. Patterson
‘informed Mr. S. that if he would make out a title page and preface, he
would publish it and it might be a source of profit....’ According to
Spalding’s daughter, ‘when he [Patterson] returned it to my father, he
said: “Polish it up, finish it, and you will make money out of it.”’ ...[T]his
statement indicates that the manuscript in question was incomplete, not
ready for publication... a description consistent with the state of the
document recovered in 1884 known as Manuscript Story.”
In analyzing Roper’s position, it is important to note that he quotes two statements given
by two different people and separated by more than forty years. In the first, made by
Spalding’s widow in 1839, we are told that the manuscript needed only a title page and
preface to be complete and ready for publication. In the second, made by Spalding’s
daughter in 1880, we are told it needed to be polished and finished. The first statement
was given by Spalding’s widow directly from her memory; the second is Spalding’s
daughter recalling second-hand what her mother had told her many years earlier. (“My
mother... said that my father loaned this ‘Manuscript Found’ to Mr. Patterson, of
Pittsburgh, and that when he returned it to my father, he said: ‘Polish it up, finish it, and
you will make money out of it.’”) Under normal circumstances, most objective historians
would be moved to accept the widow’s first-hand statement made in 1839 as more likely to
be accurate than the daughter’s second-hand recollection made forty-one years later, yet
Roper somehow sees fit to argue that the less-specific language of the second must
describe the circumstances more reliably than the first. Once again, Roper seems content
to accept that which is more convenient to his point of view over something which is
more likely to be historically correct—hardly the sort of behavior one would expect from
a truly objective historian.
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As As authors of The Spalding Enigma, we find it extremely interesting that Mr. Roper takes
us to task for citing “very late testimony solicited long after the fact,” and then attempts
to use words uttered by Matilda McKinstry in 1880 to expand upon something her mother
had said in 1839.
Obviously, the point which Roper is trying to dilute here is that if the manuscript
Spalding submitted to the Pattersons needed only a preface and a title page to be
complete, it obviously cannot have been identical with the Spalding holograph now at
Oberlin. That document would have required a total rewrite before its story would have
made any sense, which is to say that the plot could not have been brought to a conclusion
which harmonized with its beginning chapters, simply by adding a few more pages of
narrative.
XII. Belated Evidence and Other Trivialities:
“Aron Wright’s testimony actually provides us with a very strong hint about the subject
matter of Spalding’s other manuscripts.”
Since his admitted prejudices will not permit him to accept any evidence adverse to his
point of view, Roper attempts to marginalize it by complaining that much of it was
recorded at a late date. However, if evidence derived from “very late testimony solicited
long after the fact” is unacceptable to Brother Roper, then surely he is prepared to apply
this same standard to the many sources that he and other pro-Mormon writers are often
quick to cite when defending their cause but which also fall into this same category. For
example, Lucy Mack Smith’s often quoted work Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith
the Prophet was not dictated until 1844-45, more than twenty years after Joseph’s alleged
first encounter with an angel, and was not finally published until 1853—and then only
after it had been heavily edited. In addition, the LDS scriptural account of Joseph Smith
seeing God the Father and God the Son in the flesh dates to nearly two decades after the
purported encounter. If Roper and his co-religionists are inclined to give this sort of late
evidence credibility, we suggest that they offer the same courtesy to alternative evidence.
In another, equally transparent, objection, Roper suggests that since six of the Conneaut
witnesses mention only one Spalding manuscript, there must have been only one. “Out of
eight statements about Spalding collected by Hurlbut... six mention only one work.”
Needless to say, if he truly believes this is sufficient reason to conclude there had to have
been only one Spalding manuscript, then, as a scholar, he is certainly in rare, if not
unique, company. Since it is doubtful that Hurlbut had any reason to ask his witnesses
whether they were aware of more than one Spalding manuscript, the fact that some of
them volunteered this information on their own should be regarded as significant. In this
instance, however, Roper seems more interested in what the witnesses did not say than in
what they did; even though he is surely aware of the long-established principle that an
absence of evidence cannot be construed as proof that no evidence exists. In such light,
the fact that three witnesses (Wright, Miller, and the widow Spalding) stated Solomon
Spalding had more than one manuscript is significant, and the fact that others failed to
mention the matter at all is irrelevant.
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Although Roper admits that these three statements do pre-date Hurlbut’s retrieval of
Manuscript Story from the widow’s trunk, he attempts to circumvent the issue by arguing
that none of these witnesses said anything about the content of the multiple manuscripts.
Yet it is not the content which is at question, Mr. Roper, but the quantity. Here we have
multiple witnesses who clearly state Spalding wrote more than one manuscript. We ask
Mr. Roper if he has ever written a story, or a professional paper, or even his review of our
book, in a single draft? People writing for anticipated publication typically produce
several drafts of their text before the content is finalized. The Spalding holograph now on
file at Oberlin itself shows the orthographic artifacts of having been copied in part from
an earlier draft. Even if Spalding only ever wrote one fictional tale in his life, chances are
greater that he wrote several drafts, than that he wrote only a single manuscript. The
compiled testimony of the witnesses indicates that Spalding wrote more than a single
manuscript, no matter the content or the quality of those writings. To reject their
statements about quantity because they fail to mention content is not good scholarship, it
is apologetic nonsense!
As to content, however, Aron Wright’s testimony actually provides us with a very strong
hint about the subject matter of Spalding’s other manuscripts. Consider for a moment
what Judge Wright must have had in mind when he told Hurlbut, not once, but twice, that
he fully expected to see Spalding’s other writings if Joseph Smith later came forth with
translations from additional plates. Surely Wright would not have told Hurlbut such a
thing if at least one of the other Spalding manuscripts he knew of—such as one called
Manuscript Story, perhaps—did not contain stories which Wright felt also bore
similarities to those found in The Book of Mormon.
We might also ponder the fact that Judge Wright made this prediction before Rigdon and
Smith produced their Book of Moses and their Book of Enoch, both of which have literary
and chronological links with the earlier Book of Ether. Had Wright been able to inspect
these later Mormon productions, or even the Smith story of how he used a lever to pry up
a stone atop a hill in order to retrieve his ancient record, what would the Conneaut
witness have then said? We cannot know, but we can study these subsequent Mormon
texts to see whether Wright’s prediction might have “come to pass.”
Roper must find Aron Wright’s credibility as a witness very troubling. Here is a man who
was clearly trusted and well respected in his community, yet he had never shown a
preference for any particular church, and indeed appears to have been very open-minded
on the subject of religion (see “Death of Aaron [sic] Wright,” Conneaut Reporter, 17
Nov. 1853). Unable to argue that Wright’s testimony could have been motivated by an
anti-Mormon religious bias, Roper is left to find what comfort he can by complaining that
Wright’s unsigned letter of 31 December 1833 might not be authentic (a matter beyond
question), and suggesting that Wright’s failure to “produce so much as one Book of
Mormon name from his remarkable memory” is a flaw which “raises questions about the
reliability of his memory or about his probity” (a matter beyond comment). Indeed,
Roper goes to a lot of trouble to complain about what Wright does not say, while largely
ignoring what he does. He also seeks, once again, to raise the question of Howe’s
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integrity by finding it suspicious that this letter does not appear in Mormonism Unvailed.
Unfortunately, he offers nothing to demonstrate that Howe had ever seen the letter—an
event which seems unlikely since the formal copy probably went to the Citizens’
Committee which had employed Hurlbut (hence the letter’s greeting “Dear Sir:”) and
not to Howe. In fact, if the document now in the New York Public Library is a copy of
Wright’s original which Hurlbut intended to keep for his own records and then
inadvertently left behind, it clearly would not have been among Hurlbut’s papers when he
turned them over to Howe, thus explaining why Howe seems to have had no awareness of
it. It also explains why the handwriting is Hurlbut’s and not Wright’s.
In order to argue that the letter is not authentic, one would have to explain why Hurlbut
copied it out and then left it in Conneaut where it ended up in the hands of the Lake
family, who did nothing with it for eighty-one years until they donated it to the New
York Public Library in 1914.
Mr. Roper at least contributes something new to the discussion, however, when he
attempts to use Conneaut witness John Miller’s statement about “humorous passages” in
Spalding’s manuscript as evidence that The Book of Mormon cannot have be derived
from that work. “Any reference to ‘humorous passages’ in the Book of Mormon is
untenable,” Roper informs us, “as anyone who has read it can attest.” Untenable? We
beg to differ. Some of us find the nearly ten pages of rambling verbiage in The Book of
Mormon (1830 ed., pp.131-140) about the lord of the vineyard and the olive tree to be
extremely humorous. In addition, lest he find our opinion overly biased, we should like to
cite 1988 Sunstone Foundation lecturer Stephen Walker, who wrote these words in
summarizing his featured presentation which he called “How to Read the Book of
Mormon and Stay Awake”: “Literary identification can ‘liken’ the Book of Mormon to
us, can bring its people alive as we read ourselves into the book’s human situations, its
tragedies and its triumphs--even its humor. A literary eye open to such unlikely aspects of
the Book of Mormon as humor can penetrate deep enough between Book of Mormon lines
that we begin to catch glimpses not only of the book’s profoundest dimensions, but of our
own.” (Ref. Sunstone XIII [Feb 89]:1,54.) Fawn Brodie went over this same observation
in her 1945 Smith biography. It is not our fault that people like Brodie and Roper do not
see the humor evident in certain parts of The Book of Mormon. If we can imagine
ourselves sitting by Solomon Spalding’s fireside on some cold winter night in 1811, we
might there hear him give the verbal accentuation by which the stories of Ammon’s
hacking off innumerable clubsmen’s arms, or Shiz’s gasping for breath after his head had
been cut off are rendered laughable. We say that it is difficult for the perceptive reader to
browse through either the Oberlin manuscript or the more Spaldingish sections of The
Book of Mormon, while keeping a straight face. And finally, one cannot pass this point
without noting that even Jesus himself smiles, not once but twice, in The Book of
Mormon, see 3 Nephi XIX:25,30.
XIII. If not this Manuscript, then which Manuscript?
“Since no one seriously disputes that Spalding did submit a manuscript to the Pattersons,
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and if [Manuscript Story] cannot be the manuscript which he submitted, then perhaps
Mr. Roper will be kind enough to inform us which manuscript he did submit?
As already noted, when Hurlbut returned to Conneaut in December of 1833 with
Spalding’s Manuscript Story in hand and proceeded to show it to several of Spalding’s
former neighbors, these people verified that it was not the manuscript to which they had
referred in their earlier statements (Howe, 288; Aron Wright’s unsigned letter of 31
Dec.1833). In order to refute this, one must first sustain the claim that Hurlbut initially
manipulated his witnesses, and then argue that the deception stuck even after they were
shown the original manuscript containing the very same story about which their
memories had allegedly been manipulated in the first place. Isn’t it odd that, upon being
confronted with Spalding’s original, not one of them ever said, “Why yes, this is the story
you were trying to get me to recall, and it’s nothing like you coached me into saying it
was”?
Concerning the existence of more than one Spalding manuscript, the words of Rev.
Robert Patterson, Jr. are worth repeating:
“When so many hearers of the story in different places concur in their
recollections of names constantly recurring in the story, and when some
of them heard it read again and again, it seems impossible that, after
twenty years, they should confound it with a story [i.e. Manuscript
Story]... in which not one of these familiar and unique names of persons
and places did once occur. The memory of people who, at that period,
read or heard very few romances, would be all the more tenacious of the
few (it might be the only one) they did hear.... Moreover, it is unitedly
testified by these witnesses that before Spalding became a bankrupt, and
when he wrote only to while away the hours of his illness, without any
thought of making money by publishing his book, his purpose in the story
they heard him read was to show (seemingly) that our Indians were
descended from the ten lost tribes. He therefore started the colonists
from Jerusalem. This was the raison d’être-- the very foundation-- of the
whole fiction. How is it possible that such a story in 20 years became
confused in the memory of those who heard it with a story which left the
Jews out altogether?” (Patterson Jr. to J.H. Fairchild, Sept. 22, 1885.)
According to Mormon sources, after the death of her husband, Spalding's widow resubmitted
the manuscript intended for publication to the Rev. Robert Patterson, Sr. While
we cannot fault Patterson for refusing to finance the printing of any questionable text
during the hard times following the War of 1812, we would think both Patterson and Mrs.
Spalding exceptional fools to have even discussed the publication of the unfinished
Roman/Mound-builder tale as a money-making proposition. Furthermore, the Oberlin
manuscript’s story begins as a first-person narrative told by its hero Fabius, and remains
thus through chapter four. In chapters five through eight however, only a few passages
are in the first person; and in all the remaining text (which comprises more than half the
manuscript) everything is written in the third-person. These chapters contain lengthy and
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often intimate conversations, but provide the reader with no explanation as to how Fabius
could have obtained such information. As Spalding continued to compose his tale, he
must have realized that he had no plausible way to return to his first-person account, and
that radical changes to his manuscript would be necessary in order to reconcile this
difficulty. Aside from the fact that the manuscript itself is incomplete, can anyone
imagine that Spalding actually submitted such a work to the Pattersons for their erudite
consideration? Since no one seriously disputes that Spalding did submit a manuscript to
the Pattersons, and if this cannot be the manuscript which he submitted, then perhaps Mr.
Roper will be kind enough to inform us which manuscript he did submit?
XIV. The Paper Chase:
“[T]he term “foolscap,” as used at the time, applied to a special kind of paper with
particularly distinguishing and readily identifiable characteristics, especially with
respect to size.”
According to Roper, in a section which he calls Paper Dreams:
“In what the authors call their ‘strongest piece of evidence’ that
‘Manuscript Story’ and ‘Manuscript Found’ were separate works, they
cite testimony from two of Spalding’s neighbors in Amity,
Pennsylvania... who claim to have seen Spalding’s manuscript, which
they described as having been written on foolscap paper (pp. 90–91).
From this, Cowdrey, Davis, and Vanick conclude, based on the testimony
of Miller and McKee, that ‘Manuscript Found’ and ‘Manuscript Story’
cannot have been identical but must have been different documents since
one (the supposed ‘Manuscript Found’) was written on foolscap and the
other (the extant ‘Manuscript Story’) was not (p. 92). They note that the
paper for ‘Manuscript Story’ measures approximately 7 3/4 x 6 inches
for the first twelve pages and 8 x 6 3/8 inches for the remaining leaves
(p. 455 n. 38). ‘This suggests Spalding’s pages were created by cutting a
full-sized sheet both vertically and horizontally into four sections, one
sheet of 16 x 12 3/4 making four sheets of 8 x 6 3/8’ (p.456 n.38).
Unfortunately for this theory, though, the term foolscap in the nineteenth
century had a much broader meaning than it did originally. Foolscap
paper originally referred to a watermark showing a fool’s cap, but by
the 1700s this term was universally used to refer to a paper size.
Published accounts (given in the Oxford English Dictionary under
fool’s-cap) indicate that foolscap paper varied from 12 to 13.5 inches in
width and from 15 to 17 inches in length (that is, from 30 to 34 cm in
width and 38 to 43 cm in length).”[77] This would be consistent with the
above description of the pages for ‘Manuscript Story,’ indicating that
Miller and McKee were merely describing the known Spalding
manuscript and not a hypothetical second document.”
Redick McKee and Joseph Miller, Sr. of Amity, PA, befriended the Spaldings when they
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had lived in that town between 1814-16, and later recorded statements providing many
details about Solomon, his family, and his manuscript. What is important here is the fact
that both individuals recalled a certain specific detail about Spalding’s Manuscript Found
which seems to have escaped prior notice.
According to Miller: “...When Mr. Spalding lived in Amity, Pa., I was well acquainted
with him.... He had in his possession some papers which he said he had written. He used
to read select portions of these papers to amuse us of evenings. These papers were
detached sheets of foolscap. He said he wrote the papers as a novel. He called it the
Manuscript Found, or The Lost Manuscript Found. He said he wrote it to pass away the
time when he was unwell; and after it was written he thought he would publish it as a
novel, as a means to support his family.” (Washington (PA) Reporter, April 8, 1869;
Creigh, [1870], 89-93) And, “...Mr. S. was poor but honest. I endorsed for him twice to
borrow money. His house was a place of common resort especially in the evening. I was
presenting my trade as a carpenter, in the village and frequented his house. Mr. S.
seemed to take delight in reading from his manuscript written on foolscap for the
entertainment of his frequent visitors, heard him read most if not all of it, and had
frequent conversations with him about it.” (Pittsburgh Telegraph, Feb. 6, 1879.)
According to Redick McKee: “One day when I called he [Spalding] was writing upon
foolscap paper, taken from some old account book. My curiosity was excited, and I said
to him, that if he was writing letters I could furnish him with more suitable paper. He
replied that he was not writing letters, but... [a] story he called The Manuscript Found. It
purported to give a history of the ten tribes, their disputes and dissentions... etc.”
(McKee to Deming, Jan. 25, 1886.)
These memories constitute an extremely important detail because the term “foolscap,” as
used at the time, applied to a special kind of paper with particularly distinguishing and
readily identifiable characteristics, especially with respect to size. (Unfortunately The
Spalding Enigma went to press before we were able to develop this argument more fully
in its text, hence the treatment at-length which follows.)
Note that both Miller and McKee clearly say that they witnessed Spalding writing
Manuscript Found on foolscap paper. Miller at one point elaborates by specifying
“detached sheets of foolscap,” indicating sheets torn from some bound volume, which
McKee identifies in his statement as “an old account book.” Roper, in citing Oxford
English Dictionary, correctly states that “by the 1700s this term was universally used to
refer to a paper size” but conveniently omits the fact that the paper-size referred to in the
“published accounts” he speaks of (as quoted in Oxford) all clearly refer to sheets of
paper measuring between 12”x16” and 13½”x17,” and that smaller-sized pages created
by folding full-sized sheets were known as “folio” (folded to half-size), “quarto”
(quarter-size), and “octavo” (eighth-size). Had Miller and McKee been referring to
Spalding’s Manuscript Story, as Mr. Roper asserts, one would expect at least one of them
to have said “written on quarto,” which would have been the term then in common use
for the smaller-sized sheets found in the Spalding manuscript now at Oberlin. Since Mr.
Roper seems happy to accept Oxford as the final authority on this matter, and having now
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exposed his error of omission (or is it intellectual prevarication again?), this should
effectively quiet his objection.
Folio is folded once down the middle, hence making two leaves (four sides) of about
12”x8” (height over width) each. Quarto is folded twice, making four leaves (eight sides)
of about 8”x6” each, which compares favorably with the size of the pages in the Oberlin
manuscript. Octavo is folded yet again, making eight leaves (16 sides) of about 6”x4”
(pocket size). The Latin refers to the number of leaves, not the number of folds or the
total of sides. Quarto=4; octa=8. One encounters these descriptive terms over and over
again in the literature of the early 19th century, and it is clear the people of that time
visualized paper-sizes in such terms. In other words, if one said simply “foolscap,” the
hearer would visualize a full-sized sheet. If something smaller was intended, the
appropriate term was employed. Technically, the correct designation would be “foolscap
quarto” (etc.), but more often than not this was shortened to the size-descriptor leaving
the term “foolscap,” when used alone, to refer only to the full-sized sheet. Phrases like
“a letter written in quarto,” or “published in octavo,” or “document in folio” were derigueur
at the time. These terms died out in the late 19th century as paper became
available in pre-cut, standardized sizes bound in tablets, notebooks, etc. and sold as letterpaper.
The final word here is that since Miller and McKee both said “sheets of foolscap,” it is
difficult to imagine that they really meant “quarto.”
Because we have referred to this matter as our strongest piece of evidence that Spalding
must have written more than one manuscript, we recognize our obligation to illustrate the
point at length. Here, therefore, are four different examples. (For those skeptics who
might wish additional depth on this matter, fifteen more are provided in Appendix I.)
Perhaps the most illustrative of these is Oberlin College President James H. Fairchild’s
own description of the holograph known as Manuscript Story:
(1) Extract from James H. Fairchild’s 1885 letter describing the discovery of the Spalding
manuscript now at Oberlin College:
“...Mr. L. L. Rice, of Honolulu... [was] formerly an anti-slavery editor in
Ohio, and for many years state printer at Columbus. During a recent
visit to Honolulu, I suggested to Mr. Rice that he might have valuable
anti-slavery documents in his possession which he would be willing to
contribute to... the Oberlin College library. In pursuance of this
suggestion Mr. Rice began looking over his old pamphlets and papers,
and at length came upon an old, worn, and faded manuscript of about
one hundred and seventy-five pages, small quarto, purporting to be a
history of the migrations and conflicts of the ancient Indian tribes which
occupied the territory now belonging to the states of New York, Ohio,
and Kentucky....
(2) Joseph Smith, History of the Church, II:167n.
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“The Evening and Morning Star as first published was a quarto, but the
Messenger and Advocate was to be published in octavo form for greater
convenience in binding and preserving. It was also announced that the
two volumes of the Star would be reprinted in octavo form; which, by the
way, was done.”
(3) Brigham Young, History of the Church, VII:558.
“CHURCH PUBLICATIONS FOR THE PERIOD
“During the year 1845 there was published the Times and Seasons,
fortnightly, octavo, edited by John Taylor, Nauvoo, Illinois.
“The Nauvoo Neighbor, weekly, folio, edited by John Taylor, Nauvoo,
Illinois.
‘The Millennial Star, fortnightly, octavo, edited by Wilford Woodruff and
Thomas Ward, Liverpool.
“The Prophet, weekly, folio, edited by Samuel Brannan, New York,
which ended May 24th and was succeeded by
“The New York Messenger, July 25th, quarto, edited by Parley P. and
Orson Pratt.”
(4) “Wilford Woodruff's Journal,” III (1849): 478 & 484.
p.478: “[August] 22d I wrot [sic] A full letter of foolscap to Elder
Allexander [sic] Badlam....”
p.484: “[September] 28th I wrote A foolscap sheet full to John
Benbow....”
To summarize the situation:
Roper argues that by 1812 “foolscap” was a general term for paper, like “Clorox” is for
bleach today. In this he is correct. Paper did not have to bear the cap and bells watermark
to be called “foolscap.” However, at the time, the word “foolscap” meant only a fullsized
sheet measuring about 16”x12”. Before about 1880, there were several words in
common use which meant “paper” in the sense we use that word today. As Oberlin
College president J.H. Fairchild correctly stated in his 1885 letter (above), the leaves, or
pages, upon which Manuscript Story is written, are all cut to QUARTO size, which is to
say about 8”x6”.
If Miller and McKee had seen Spalding writing Manuscript Story, they would have
naturally chosen to describe the paper he was using as “sheets of quarto,” or
alternatively, “quarto-sheets of foolscap,” not just “sheets of foolscap.” When Miller
said Spalding was writing on “detached sheets of foolscap,” he meant full-sized pages
which had originally been bound into a book or ledger. McKee clarifies and says this
paper had come from an old account book. Account books and ledgers in those days were
commonly foolscap-size (16”x12”) pages. We have browsed though quite a lot of these
volumes during the course of our research. The account books of the Denny & O’Hara
firm of Pittsburgh, for example, were of this size. Moreover, due to the cost of printing
lined pages, these pages were commonly bound blank making it necessary to hand-rule each page before use—a process which must have driven the clerks to distraction, but
kept the cost of the ledgers down. Spalding had no doubt obtained some old discarded
account books and torn the unused pages out of them to use as writing paper. Perhaps the
Pattersons specified that manuscripts must be submitted in foolscap size, who knows.
The fact that different words were used to designate different sizes of paper provides
strong support for our argument that Solomon Spalding must have written two different
manuscripts, one called Manuscript Story on quarto paper, and another, which Miller and
McKee said was called Manuscript Found, and which they described as having been
written on full-sized foolscap sheets torn from some old ledger.
All of the above is supported by the entry for “foolscap” in the Oxford dictionary. Roper
cites this entry, but either mistakenly interprets it or purposely misrepresents it. He is
correct that “foolscap” meant “paper,” but he neglects to mention that the term also had
to do with the size of the paper. This is where his argument founders. Manuscript Story at
Oberlin is not on foolscap sheets, it is on quarto sheets; therefore it cannot be the same
manuscript which Miller and McKee witnessed Spalding writing at Amity. If Mr. Roper
chooses to contend that Miller and McKee intended otherwise, the burden now rests with
him to prove it.
XV. Oliver Cowdery, The Elusive Printer:
“On reading the name of Oliver COWDERY... whatever faith we might have been
inspired with... was banished, for we had known Cowdery some seven or eight years ago
[i.e. 1822-23], when he was a dabbler in the art of Printing, and principally occupied in
writing and printing pamphlets, with which, as a pedestrian pedlar, he visited the towns
and villages of western N. York, and Canada.” John Ransom St. John, 1830.
According to Roper,
“[T]here is no supporting evidence for the claim that Oliver was involved
in printing before December 1829, when he provided some assistance in
the preparation of the Book of Mormon for publication. In a letter to
Joseph Smith in December 1829, Oliver wrote: ‘It may look rather strange
to you to find that I have so soon become a printer.’ The clear implication
in this private letter to Joseph Smith is that printing was a new experience
for him. Moreover, it can be clearly shown that it was Franklin Cowdery,
Oliver’s uncle [sic.], and not Oliver Cowdery, who began publication of
the Newport Patriot in 1822 [sic].”
First of all, Benjamin Franklin Cowdery was not Oliver’s uncle, he was Oliver’s firstcousin
once-removed; which is to say that Franklin’s father and Oliver’s grandfather
were brothers.
As to credible, first-hand testimony that Oliver Cowdery was involved in printing prior to
1829, and that he had obtained his experience in western New York, we need only look to
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the contemporary statements of not one, but three, of the prominent newspaper editors
who had personal knowledge of that experience. Although two of these statements were
published in The Spalding Enigma, Mr. Roper attempts to dismiss them on the grounds
that they lack “supporting evidence.” Obviously what he means is that, prior to the
discovery of these two statements, there was no evidence that Oliver was involved in
printing before December of 1829. Now, forced to acknowledge the existence of this
important material, he is reduced to arguing that “there is no supporting evidence” for it.
As to the third recently discovered editorial comment, we offer it below, fully expecting
that Mr. Roper will next try to argue that there is no supporting evidence for the
supporting evidence.
The earliest of these three statements comes from John Ransom St. John who made the
following editorial comments about Cowdery in an article which he published in the
November 26, 1830 edition of his Cleaveland [sic] Herald:
“The Golden Bible. -- Yes, reader strange as it may appear, there is a
new Bible just published, entitled The Book of Mormon, and better
known to some as the Golden Bible.... This Bible is closed by two
certificates commending the work; to the first is attached the name of
Oliver Cowdery and two other persons, and to the last are 8 names,
among which are those of the father and two brothers of the reputed
author. On reading the name of Oliver COWDERY, in support of the
divine authenticity of the work, whatever faith we might have been
inspired with on reading the certificate, was banished, for we had known
Cowdery some seven or eight years ago [i.e. 1822-23], when he was a
dabbler in the art of Printing, and principally occupied in writing and
printing pamphlets, with which, as a pedestrian pedlar, he visited the
towns and villages of western N. York, and Canada....”
John R. St. John was raised in Buffalo, NY, and almost certainly served his
apprenticeship in the pioneer Canandaigua, NY printing establishment of James D.
Bemis, who was a cousin of one of St. John’s brothers-in-law. Needless to say, the Bemis
print shop at Canandaigua was within walking distance of the Smith farm at Manchester,
and the fact that St. John readily recalled having known Cowdery during this period and
had such a low impression of him is surely significant.
St. John’s testimony is corroborated by Orsamus Turner, one of the most prominent and
widely respected editors and historians of western New York. Turner, whose writings
make it clear that he had known both Oliver Cowdery and the Smiths since 1822,
published these words in the May 31, 1831 issue of his Lockport Balance:
“[T]he founder of Mormonism is Jo. Smith, an ignorant and nearly
unlettered man, living near the village of Palmyra, Wayne county; the
second, an itinerant pamphlet pedlar, and occasionally a journeyman
printer, named Oliver Cowdry; the third, Martin Harris, a respectable
farmer at Palmyra....”
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In addition, Turner had this to say in his Pioneer History of the Holland Purchase of
Western New York, (Buffalo: G.H. Derby, Inc., 1849), 658:
“In 1823... [Albion, NY] had sufficiently advanced to indicate the
necessity of a press and newspaper, and Oliver Cowdery, (who has been
the pioneer printer in at least a half dozen localities,) took a part of the
old battered ‘small pica’ that had been used in printing the Lockport
Observatory, and adding it to indifferent materials from other sources,
commenced the publication of the Newport Patriot.”
Although the description of pioneer printer in many locations may, at first glance, seem
more applicable to Oliver’s cousin Franklin, it could just as easily represent Turner’s later
perception of Oliver in light of his many printing enterprises both among the Mormons at
Kirtland, in Missouri, and subsequently at Tiffin, Ohio, and Walworth County,
Wisconsin. Moreover, the argument that Turner may have mistakenly confused Oliver
with Franklin can be dismissed because Turner clearly knew both individuals well and
was certainly aware of the difference between them. Therefore, if he indeed did write
“Oliver” when he meant “Franklin,” it can only have been because he closely associated
both names with the beginnings of the Newport Patriot enterprise at Albion. Further
evidence that Turner must have known what he was talking about can be found in the fact
that, as owner of the Lockport Observatory, he would have been the very person who
provided Oliver with the “old battered ‘small pica’“ type referred to. (Souvenir History
of Niagara County New York, [1902],15.)
Although Roper (in his n.302 & n.304) cites Milton W. Hamilton’s 1936 volume, The
Country Printer: New York State, 1785–1830 as his authority for claiming that the
Newport Patriot was started in 1824, and then argues that Turner’s 1849 recollection that
the undertaking began in 1823 “seems to have been off by a year,” Turner’s account is in
fact correct. According to Franklin Cowdery’s autobiography (“Forty Years a Typo,”
Genesee Olio, 13 February 1847, 41-2; 2 October 1847, 249), the prospectus for the
Newport Patriot was printed in the fall of 1823 and he moved to that town in December
of that year. Due to difficulties in obtaining type and equipment however, the first issue
of the Patriot wasn’t published until February 9, 1824. (See also Frederick Follett,
History of the Press in Western New York From the Beginning to the Middle of the
Nineteenth Century, [Batavia: 1847], pp.36-37, which says: “In 1823, Franklin Cowdery
commenced the publication, at Newport, (now Albion,) of the ‘Newport Patriot.’ He
continued it for nearly two years.”)
Franklin’s one full-time apprentice at Newport, to whom he gave his “first two years
instructions in printing” during 1824-25, was his young brother-in-law, Daniel Munger,
with whom he would later (in 1836) enter into a brief partnership in Constantine,
Michigan. A compelling suggestion that he had another part-time or occasional assistant
during this period can be found in the wording of a notice to subscribers with overdue
accounts that appears in the Patriot of November 26, 1824. In this, he reminds them that
“there are, belonging to this concern, four or five mouths to be filled at three stated times
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every day -- and does it cost nothing to fill them? This is not a beggarly plea, asking
charity, but merely a justification to -- you-and-you-and-you -- who, through inattention,
may get sued for neglecting to ‘pay the printer.’” Although four of these individuals are
easily identified (Franklin, his wife, Amanda, their daughter Sarah, and his acknowledged
apprentice and brother-in-law Daniel Munger), all that can be said about the apparently
occasional fifth mouth in question is that it could well have been Oliver—Franklin and
Amanda’s daughter Lucy not having been born until April 8, 1825. (Mehling, Cowdery
Genealogy, 194)
In The Spalding Enigma, we maintain that Franklin Cowdery agreed to start publication
of a new paper at Newport only if his then assistant, Oliver, could come up with the
necessary press and type with which the operation could be begun. That is why Orsamus
Turner associates him with the beginning of the operation. It might also be worth
mentioning that, in 1824, two of Oliver’s first cousins, Obadiah and William Fuller,
purchased farms just six miles north of Newport.
As for Turner’s own pedigree, it can be established that he was apprenticed in Palmyra in
1818, that he was still there in 1820 when he wrote a patriotic article, that he was receiving
mail there in the summer of 1821, that he first knew the Smiths in 1819-20, that he was in
Palmyra prior to going to Lockport in late August of 1822, that he knew Oliver Cowdery
during this period, and that he boldly asserts Cowdery and the Smiths were closely
associated. Furthermore, Turner clearly associates Oliver with both Alvin and Mother
Smith during this time, and dismisses the elder Smith (Joseph, Sr.) as little more than a
hapless tool who did his wife’s bidding. Added to this, Turner’s first-hand knowledge of
events after August of 1822 can be attributed to his regular contact with Franklin and
Oliver Cowdery at Lockport throughout 1823, and occasional contact thereafter.
Another thing which tends to verify the accuracy of Turner’s recollections concerning
Oliver and the Smiths is that prior to the publication of Turner’s History of the Phelps and
Gorham Purchases of Western New York in 1852, the Rochester Daily American excerpted
his section on “Mormonism” and ran it as part of the publicity surrounding the forthcoming
work. The resulting news article, entitled “Origin of the Mormon Imposture” and prefaced
by an editorial comment that the facts therein were derived from “the author’s personal
knowledge,” was subsequently copied by a number of other newspapers and at least one
important weekly magazine, as was common practice at the time. (Rochester Daily
American, clipping not dated, but c.July, 1851; Littell’s Living Age [Boston], XXX, 380,
[30 August 1851], pp.429-31.) The all-important point to be made here is that at the very
time this article was printed, Benjamin Franklin Cowdery himself was associate editor and
printer of the Rochester Daily American. (Rochester, NY, City Directory for 1851-52,
which lists “Cowdery, Franklin, Editor, printer, American office, home 14 1/2 Main.”)
Since there is ample evidence to indicate that Orsamus Turner and Franklin Cowdery were
long-time friends, surely if what Turner had to say about Oliver was erroneous or
exaggerated in any way, Franklin could have sought and been accorded the opportunity to
correct the text prior to publication. This provides strong reason to presume that what
Turner had to say about Oliver Cowdery and the Smith family was entirely accurate as far
as Franklin Cowdery was concerned.
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In addition, it is important to notice that while J.R. St. John describes the Oliver he knew
in 1822-23 as a mere dabbler in printing, Turner, writing in 1831, refers to him as a
journeyman. Clearly Oliver did not have such training in the art of printing when he first
arrived at Palmyra in 1822 because he was only a fifteen year-old schoolboy from
Vermont. As he clearly cannot have received such training during his admitted
association with the Smiths from 1828-30, his experience could only have been acquired
during the six years between 1822 and 1828. Furthermore, it must have been reasonably
intensive because journeyman is hardly the sort of characterization a proud member of
the profession who had come up through the ranks himself would bestow lightly upon
someone who did not deserve it.
The third bit of evidence that Oliver had been associated with the printer’s trade before
he became involved with Mormonism, is this brief, but telling remark from the editor of
the Springfield Illinois Journal which appeared in the issue for June 1, 1848:
“OLIVER COWDERY, who forsook the type and took to Mormonism in
New York—there testified to the genuineness of Joe Smith’s golden
plates—has abandoned Mormonism, and identified himself with
Locofocoism* and is now a candidate for office in Wisconsin.”
*The Locofocos were a radical wing of the Democratic Party organized in New York in
1835. Oliver’s candidacy was not successful.
The editor of the Illinois Journal at the time was Simeon Francis (1796-1872). Prior to
his moving westward about 1829, possibly a result of his having been physically attacked
by anti-Masons in 1827 during the height of the William Morgan excitement, Simeon
Francis had filled the editorial chair of the weekly Buffalo [NY] Emporium between
1824-26, and then, from 1826-28, of its successor, the semi-weekly Buffalo Emporium &
Commercial Advertiser. By all appearances, Mr. Francis made his extemporaneous
comment out of personal knowledge, and was prompted to do so after seeing some notice
in a competing newspaper about Oliver Cowdery’s running for public office in
Wisconsin, where he (Oliver) was then serving as editor of the Walworth Democrat.
(Frederick Follett, History of the Press in Western New York, [1847], 23; Milton
Hamilton, The Country Printer: New York State, 1785-1830, [Port Washington, NY: I.J.
Friedman, 1936], 193, 273; 1830 U.S. Census for St. Louis, MO.) How else to explain
why the editor of a Springfeld, Illinois newspaper would trouble to print a personal
observation like this about someone running for local office more than 200 miles away in
another state?
Thus, it would seem that Mr. Francis, along with David C. Miller, Orsamus Turner, and
Oliver’s cousin, B. F. Cowdery, was one of the fraternity of pre-Morgan-Affair Masonic
editors in the far western counties of New York. When Francis says that Oliver Cowdery
“forsook the type and took to Mormonism,” he was evidently speaking of a period before
the actual founding of the Church of Christ on April 6, 1830. In fact, Francis makes the
transition sound rather abrupt—as though Oliver had been working in a print shop one
day, and was working for Joe Smith the next. All of this is reminiscent of Masonic
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historian Robert Morris’ claim that William Morgan became a half-way convert to
Smith’s visionary activities before Mormonism actually was made public.
In the 1820s, “journeyman printer” was not just a skill, it was a credential. No “mere
mortal” picked up a type-stick and began to set type, any more than a non-union teamster
drives a Coors beer shipment cross-country in the present day. Cowdery must first have
been an apprentice before he could be a journeyman—and he must have first been a
journeyman before he could be a printer. No wonder he wrote to his cousin Joseph Smith
on December 28, 1829, “[I]t may look rather strange to you to find that I have so soon
become a printer.” (Joseph Smith Collection, box 2, folder 1, LDS Archives) The
expression seems to reflect a modest boast on Oliver’s part that he had found some
acceptance at Grandin’s firm and that they had generously accorded him the privilege of
setting a few sticks of type from time to time. Perhaps Oliver H. P. Cowdery’s “lewis”
Masonic membership was enough of a “credential” with Freemason Grandin to allow
Oliver the journeyman to act for a few minutes as a “printer.” Or maybe Oliver carried a
journeyman’s certificate, bearing his cousin Franklin’s signature, in his back pocket. Who
knows? The telling factor here would seem to be Oliver’s use of the phrase “so soon
become a printer.” Why “so soon”? Why not merely say, “It may look rather strange to
you to find that I have become a printer”? His use of the phrase “so soon” seems to
imply that, to him, becoming a printer was something which did not happen “soon” in
the printing profession, but rather constituted a distinction which took a considerable
amount of time to achieve. Such a perception would be expected of one who was already
a journeyman in the profession. On the other hand, if Oliver was a stranger to printers and
printing, it does not seem likely he would have included any consideration of a time
factor in his phraseology, and is thus more likely to have composed his thought in its
simplest form, which would have been “It may look rather strange to you to find that I
have become a printer.”
In 1879, John H. Gilbert, a typesetter (or “typo”) in Grandin’s office when The Book of
Mormon was being printed, confirmed in a letter to James T. Cobb that although Oliver
was not formally employed as a compositor or printer by the Grandin firm, “He was a
frequent visitor to the office, and did several times take up a ‘stick’ and set a part of a
page -- He may have set 10 or 12 pages, all told -- He also looked over the manuscript a
few times when proof was being read.” (Gilbert to Cobb, February 10, 1879, New York
Public Library Collection)
In any case, most of the above evidence, and considerably more, is discussed at length in
The Spalding Enigma (pp.237ff), and since Roper is surely aware of it, perhaps what he
meant to say was that “there is no supporting evidence for the claim that Oliver was
involved in printing before December 1829” that he cares to acknowledge.
Since Cowdery’s preeminent position in Mormon printing can be traced in existing
records to the very earliest days of the Kirtland community, it follows that he must have
already been well versed in that trade before going there in 1831. Yet the events of
Cowdery’s “Mormon years” in New York from 1829-31 are reasonably well known, and
because they do not include his having been employed in any print shops, whatever
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experience he had in that trade can only have been obtained before 1828. Needless to say,
this squares with John R. St. John’s, and Orsamus Turner’s, and Simeon Francis’
aforementioned characterizations of him.
Will Mr. Roper now argue that there is “no supporting evidence” for the supporting
evidence, we wonder? Or will he complain that editor Francis’ brief comment is not as
specific as he would like? Is not Mr. Francis’ statement that Oliver Cowdery “forsook
[sic] the type [i.e. printing]—and took to Mormonism in New York,” specific enough to
demonstrate what we have argued all along—that Oliver was involved in the printing
trade in western New York before he became a Mormon? We think it is.
Roper, however, remains unconvinced. “It is true,” he writes, “ that, during the Kirtland
period and after his excommunication in 1838, Oliver engaged in a few printing ventures,
but there is no support for this kind of activity before 1829.”
In order to sustain such a statement, one must ignore the virtually contemporary
testimony of St. John (1830), and Turner (1831, 1849), and that of Francis (1848), which
we have already given. In addition, one must also ignore Orsamus Turner’s personal
reminiscence, published in 1852, in which Turner specifically places Oliver Cowdery at
the Smith’s farm prior to the death of Joseph’s elder brother Alvin, an event which
occurred on November 19, 1823 (Turner, History of the Pioneer Settlement of Phelps and
Gorham’s Purchase and Morris’ Reserve [Rochester, N. Y.: William Alling, 1852], 213).
And finally, one must ignore the 1869 recollection of Wells, Vermont historian Robert
Parks, who stated that Oliver “attended school in the District where we reside in 1821
and 1822” and that “[h]e then went to Palmyra.” Rather than accept this straightforward
recollection at face-value, Roper seeks to diminish its import by arguing that
“there is no reason to interpret Parks’s statement so narrowly,” and that “then” could
mean “anything between 1823 and 1829.” Yet Robert Parks was surely sufficiently
educated and well-enough versed in the English language to have qualified his statement
if it needed qualifying. The fact that he did not qualify it strongly suggests he intended it
to be interpreted exactly as written. Parks was a school teacher in Wells for many years,
and was about the same age as Oliver. Moreover, after the Cowderys had departed for
New York, Robert Parks’s family moved onto the farm where they had lived. (Hiland
Paul and Robert Parks, History of Wells, Vermont [Wells: Wells Historical Society,
1869], 79.)
Seeking to discredit St. John’s and Turner’s recollection of Oliver Cowdery as an
itinerant pamphlet peddler who traveled throughout western New York and Canada,
Roper seizes upon what he says is our physical description of Cowdery. According to
Roper, it “seems unlikely” that someone described as “weak, not very intelligent, and ‘a
poor, consumptive, wheezing “little man” with an often fragile constitution,’ could have
‘traveled on foot across the length and breadth of western New York and Canada.’”
The characterization of Oliver Cowdery as a “little man” comes not from us, but from
Sidney Rigdon (“that little man who bro’t me the Book of Mormon,” [Howe,
Mormonism Unvailed, 217] ). No one seems to dispute that he was a poor man of small
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stature and that he suffered from consumption, which he had probably contracted from
his mother. Our description of him as weak was not directed at his physical strength, but
rather his inability to resist being manipulated by Smith and others. Our exact words
were: “this poor, consumptive, wheezing ‘little man’ (as Rigdon once described
Cowdery), was simply too credulous for his own good as far as the scheming, fanatical
Rigdon was concerned, and at the same time too weak to resist the sly manipulations of
Joseph Smith’s overpowering personality.” We have been unable to locate any passage in
The Spalding Enigma which specifically describes Cowdery as “not very intelligent.”
Perhaps Mr. Roper has confused credulous with unintelligent, but if so, he is mistaken.
As to the unlikelihood of Oliver’s having “traveled on foot across the length and breadth
of western New York and Canada,” unlikely as it may seem, this is the same Oliver
Cowdery who also tramped more than 1,000 miles on foot all the way from New York to
western Missouri in 1830-31 on a mission to convert the Lamanite Indians as
commanded in one of Joseph Smith’s alleged revelations. (Revelation to Parley P. Pratt
and Ziba Peterson, given October, 1830 in Smith’s History of the Church, I:118; also in
Doctrine & Covenants [1835], 54:1. For confirmation that the journey was accomplished
“on foot,” see B. H. Roberts, New Witnesses for God, II:285-86.) ]
XVI. Those Missing 116 Pages:
“Another probability which emerged from our time-line research involves Oliver
Cowdery’s involvement with the strange episode of the missing 116 pages during the
summer of 1828. Mormons claim he wasn’t there; but we are equally certain that he
was.”
In The Spalding Enigma, we have gone to considerable effort to reconstruct the proper
sequence of events between Oliver Cowdery’s arrival at Palmyra in 1822 and the
publication of The Book of Mormon in 1830. Something which both interested and
surprised us during this painstaking work was the way so many things fit together so
well. We had expected many incongruities when actually there were few. However, it
was only after we had completed this process, aided by new discoveries along the way,
that we were finally able to examine various hypotheses in their proper perspective and
thus to draw rational, coherent conclusions. It was through this process that we were
able to shed considerable illumination upon Oliver Cowdery’s experiences as a teacher
in the Manchester area, not for one year, as the Mormons have claimed, but for two, and
possibly even three, if certain belated testimony is credited. (See The Spalding Enigma,
pp.288-94, and later in this paper.) This same process also enabled us to demonstrate
that Smith, Cowdery and Rigdon must have been together in Bainbridge, Chenango
county, NY, during the summer of 1830, three months before Mormons claim Rigdon
had any association with the other two (ibid. 327-33). A similar detailed reconstruction
of the events of Sidney Rigdon’s life between 1822 and 1830, revealed a number of
curious gaps in his known whereabouts. A comparison of these gaps with the
recollections of various witnesses who claimed to have seen Rigdon at the Smith’s farm
in New York before the fall of 1830, produced a remarkable coordination between
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Rigdon’s apparent absence from Ohio and the various occasions when he was allegedly
seen in New York (ibid. Ch.11).
Another probability which emerged from our time-line research involves Oliver
Cowdery’s involvement with the strange episode of the missing 116 pages during the
summer of 1828. Mormons claim he wasn’t there; but we are equally certain that he
was.
According to Roper:
“The Book of Mormon text as we have it was essentially dictated after the
arrival of Oliver Cowdery in early April 1829. When the translation
recommenced after the loss of the 116 pages, Joseph and Oliver
continued... the later phase being completed after the 1829 move to the
Whitmer home in Fayette, New York.... Readers may also be misled by
the... statement [in The Spalding Enigma] that the translation and
publication of the Book of Mormon took about two and one-half years.”
The passage from The Spalding Enigma which Roper quotes out of context reads as
follows: “Finally the angel’s promise was fulfilled on September 22, 1827, and Smith
began ‘translating’ The Book of Mormon. The process of translation and publication
took about two and a half years.” The meaning is straight-forward and, since the period
from September, 1827 thru March, 1830 is almost exactly two and one-half years, the
subject is beyond dispute.
Concerning the matter of the lost 116 pages, Mormons have never satisfactorily
explained why, if Joseph’s original “translation” was indeed “of God,” it could not
simply be reproduced verbatim. Most, at a loss for any other answer, simply parrot
Joseph’s own highly suspicious excuse that “wicked men” who had gained possession of
the original, planned to alter the words so they would not agree with any retranslation.
(See “To the Reader,” in The Book of Mormon, 1830 ed., iii-iv.) Needless to say, to those
of us who are not Mormons, such an explanation gives every appearance of being
something Smith must have contrived out of desperation. Some of us detect Cowdery’s
and Rigdon’s hands in it as well. In any case, it is clear that Mrs. Martin Harris’ “theft”
of the first 116 pages of Smith’s “translation,” and her stubborn refusal to return them,
was a matter of serious concern to Smith and his associates, and this was their response to
it.
For the sake of discussion, let us presume for a moment that Joseph Smith had been able
to produce a second translation of the 116 pages which was identical in every respect to
the first, and that the “wicked men” who allegedly had the original in their possession
then undertook to change some of the words and phrases on the pages they had stolen so
they would not agree with the retranslation. The moment these men came forth with their
fabrication to challenge Smith’s second version, could not any text-alterations or pagesubstitutions
be easily exposed by simply examining the handwriting, the paper, and the
ink? Remember, we are dealing with original holographic material here, not typed pages,
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the content of which might be easily altered by retyping them on a similar typewriter
using similar paper, or by simple means of paste-up and Xerox.
A better explanation, of course, is that Smith had created this part of the “translation” by
paraphrasing something else, hence his need to be concealed behind a curtain when
Harris was present. (Mr. Roper will kindly remember that David Whitmer was not yet
involved with Smith and Cowdery, and so his testimony that there was no curtain is
irrelevant.) Unfortunately, the extemporaneous nature of the first “translation,” made the
production of a verbatim copy of the original completely impossible due to the natural
failings of human, as opposed to Divine, memory. As to the something else that Smith
had paraphrased to Harris in order to produce the first 116 pages, it is our position that he
was reading from Solomon Spalding’s Manuscript Found, either from the original
manuscript, or more likely, from an edited version which Rigdon and Cowdery had
created from the original, and to which they had added considerable Biblical material.
Although all sources agree that the 116-pages incident took place in the late spring
(probably early June) of 1828, several months before Oliver Cowdery’s admitted first
appearance on the stage of Mormon history, Orsamus Turner positively identifies him as
having been one of those involved. “It was agreed by the Smiths Cowdery and Harris,
not to transcribe these again...,” Turner recalled. (Turner, Phelps and Gorham, 214)
Martin Harris acted as Joseph Smith’s scribe for about two months, from mid-April
through mid-June 1828. On June 15, Emma Smith gave birth to a son, Alvin (or Alvah),
who was badly deformed and died either at birth or shortly thereafter. Harris obtained the
116 pages shortly before this, and it was only after Emma had sufficiently recovered and
was out of danger that Joseph was able to go to Palmyra to discover what had gone
wrong. Thus it is possible to date the occurrence.
As for Orsamus Turner’s assertion that Oliver was involved in the 116-page crisis, it is
important to note that, between May 1827 and the end of August 1828, Turner must have
made a number of extended trips from Lockport to Palmyra via the Erie Canal, and then
by stage to Canandaigua. These would have had to do with the fact that Turner had been
indicted in connection with the Morgan Affair in May 1827, indicted again in November,
and finally tried (with two other defendants) in a spectacular, trial that began on August
20, 1828, and lasted several days. Given his interest in law, it seems likely that Oliver
(and possibly his brother Lyman) attended this trial (at which Turner was acquitted), and
equally likely that Turner occasionally encountered Oliver in Palmyra during his comings
and goings. Once again, there is every reason to accept that Turner speaks from firsthand
knowledge, and that he had been personally acquainted with Cowdery since 1822.
Of course, according to the official Mormon version of events, Oliver Cowdery could not
possibly have been involved with the 116-page episode because he and Joseph Smith had
not yet met. And here we have part of the explanation as to why Oliver and Joseph had to
carefully conceal the fact that they had already known each other for many years.
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Based upon Lucy Smith’s account, (Lucy Mack Smith, “Preliminary Manuscript,”
(1845), LDS Archives, 90) the last day of the 1828-29 school term was probably Friday,
March 27. Allowing a few days for preparations, and taking into account Lucy’s
recollection that the weather was bad, Samuel H. Smith and Oliver Cowdery probably
left Manchester on April 1, arriving at the Whitmer farm that same evening. After a cold
trip, during which Oliver’s feet suffered considerably, they arrived at Harmony. (Phillip
R. Legg, Oliver Cowdery, the Elusive Second Elder of the Restoration, (Independence,
Mo.: Herald Publishing House, 1989), 13-32; also David Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the
Origins of the Book of Mormon, (Jefferson, N. C.: McFarland, 1985), 57.)
In Smith’s words: “On the 5th day of April, 1829, Oliver Cowdery came to my house,
until which time I had never seen him.” (Smith, History, of the Church, 1:32.) Cowdery
wrote: “Near the time of the setting of the Sun, Sabbath evening, April 5th, 1829, my
natural eyes, for the first time beheld this brother. He then resided in Harmony ....”
(Cowdery to Phelps, Messenger and Advocate I:1 (October 1834),14.) However, earlier
in this same letter, Oliver recalled: “Many have been the fatigues and privations which
have fallen to my lot to endure, for the gospel’s sake, since 1828, with this brother [i.e.,
Joseph Smith]. Our road has frequently been spread with the ‘fowler’s snare,... etc.”
(ibid.) No explanation has ever been offered for how Oliver can have been traveling
“with this brother... for the gospel’s sake, since 1828,” when both claim they didn’t meet
each other until 1829.
In any case, on April 7, 1829, just two days after their alleged first meeting, Oliver
replaced Martin Harris as scribe, thus breathing new life into the nearly moribund
translation process. As for Harris, a careful examination of the known facts makes it
appear likely that Smith was only “using” Harris temporarily in order to keep him (and
his money) in the fold, and that it had been the plan all along to replace Harris with
Cowdery at some convenient point. Meanwhile, Cowdery was quietly ensconced
elsewhere, busily copying out the rest of Spalding’s manuscript (with appropriate
alterations by both himself and Rigdon to further disguise it) while Smith, with Harris’
assistance, worked over the first 116 pages at a much slower rate. This would explain
why it took Smith and Harris two months (mid-April to mid-June 1828) to complete only
116 pages, while, after Cowdery’s arrival at Harmony a year later, the two managed to
finish nearly 600 pages in only 75 days. (Francis W. Kirkham, “The writing of The Book
of Mormon,” Improvement Era [June 1941]: 341ff.) The “75 days” encompassed the
period from roughly April 7, 1829, through the first week of July, with interruptions.
Legg’s assertion that Cowdery had finished copying the printer’s manuscript by August 1
is patently absurd in light of Oliver’s own comments regarding the matter in a letter
written to Joseph from Manchester (apparently from Hyrum Smith’s cabin) on November
6, 1829 (Joseph Smith Papers, Kirtland Letter Book 1829-1835, LDS Archives, 6-8):
“... received Joseph letter bearing date Oct 22d... (*) ... Hyrum and
Martin went out to Fayette last week Martin thinks of coming to the
South in the course of two to three weeks.... the printing goes rather slow
yet as the type founder has been sick but we expect that the type will be
in and Mr. Grandin still think[s] we he will finish printing by the first of
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february.... PS I have just got to alma commandment to his son in
coppying the manuscrip.... (**)
(*) Joseph’s letter to Oliver of October 22 contains a rare and candid admission that should not to
be passed over lightly. “I arrived at home on Sun morn. the 4th [of October] after a prosperous
journey... two of our most formidable persecutors are now under censure and are cited to a trial
in the church for crimes which if true are worse than all the Gold Book business.” [emphasis
added]
(**) “The Commandments of Alma to His Son”(now designated Alma:38-42) begins Chapter
XVIII on page 330 of the 588-page 1830 edition, and thus represents a point that is only 56
percent, through the volume. This gives rise to an interesting question: How can it have been
possible for Oliver and Joseph to have “translated” (presumably at the ponderous rate of one
phrase at a time) the entire 588 pages in only 75 days, when, in the nearly 100 days from August
1st to November 6th, Oliver had only managed to recopy 56 percent of that total? Moreover, if the
original was accomplished in such haste by means of divine intervention, why was the faithful
Oliver seemingly abandoned to his own devices when it came to producing the all-important
printer’s manuscript?
All of this would explain an alleged revelation which Joseph sought and received in
March, 1829, “at the request of Martin Harris,” wherein the Lord complained that his
“servant Martin” was demanding to be a witness (to the plates) instead of exercising his
faith, and that if this should continue, “behold, I say unto thee Joseph, when thou hast
translated a few more pages thou shalt stop for a season, even until I command thee
again; then thou mayest translate again... Stop and stand still until I command thee, and I
will provide means whereby thou mayest accomplish the thing which I have commanded
thee.” (For the complete text of this revelation, see History of the Church, I:30-31.
Confirmation that Harris was making demands for a “greater witness” to the plates can
be found in the March 24, 1834 statement of Isaac Hale as found in Howe, Mormonism
Unvailed, 264-65.) If Joseph was preparing to move Harris out of the way in anticipation
of Cowdery’s arrival, what better way to lay the ground-work for doing so? To Martin
Harris, who had probably never laid eyes on Cowdery up to that moment, his appearance
could be made to seem as if it were God’s will—providing, of course, that Joseph and
Oliver pretended they were meeting for the first time.
One factor frequently overlooked in this highly transitional event is that Cowdery arrived
in company with Joseph’s younger brother Samuel, who had made the trip specifically to
inform Joseph that their father and mother had just been evicted from their farm in
Manchester, and had been forced to move in with Hyrum. (Brodie, No Man Knows My
History, 60.) The fact that Cowdery had been “boarding” with them and was now
homeless (Hyrum’s place being “small”) provides a completely understandable and
totally human motivation for him to have gone to his partner Joseph at just such a
moment in order to secure shelter for himself and to try to get things moving at a faster
pace.
Even more likely, however, is that Joseph Smith knew the eviction was coming all along,
and thus could have easily included this circumstance in any plan he made with Cowdery.
Indeed, one of the objects of Joseph’s intense money-digging activity several years
earlier in 1825, was to secure enough capital to pay off the mortgage on his family’s
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farm, upon which they were delinquent. Unfortunately, the effort failed, and on
December 20, 1825, a Quaker named Lemuel Durfee assumed ownership. Mostly in
exchange for labor, he generously permitted the Smiths to remain as renters for another
three years. (Donna Hill, Joseph Smith, the First Mormon [Garden City, N. Y.:
Doubleday, 1977], 64, who in turn cites Carter E. Grant, “The Joseph Smith Home,” Era
[December 1959]: 978. Note, however, that this account varies slightly with that of
Joseph’s brother William, who published his own version of events in Lamoni, Iowa, in
1883. See William Smith on Mormonism [Lamoni, Iowa: Herald Steam Book & Job
Office, 1883], 13-14. Although he confirms that his family was served with a “writ of
ejectment,” his unfortunate instability, probably due to chronic alcoholism, renders him a
difficult witness.) The expiration of this time period on December 20, 1828, plus the
normally requisite 90 days to obtain a legal eviction, brings us to March 19, 1829, a mere
17 days before Cowdery’s arrival at Harmony. (If we allow for the likelihood that Durfee
would not have commenced procedures until after the Christmas holiday, the gap narrows
even further.) Given this set of circumstances, it is possible to argue that Smith was
anticipating Cowdery’s arrival all along, and that the revelations he allegedly received
about Harris in March were part of the plan. As far as Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery
themselves were concerned, convincing gullible Martin Harris that this was the first time
they had ever laid eyes on each other was an easy ruse.
Unfortunately, in working their little game upon Harris, Smith and Cowdery seem to
have painted themselves into a difficult corner by failing to take into account the serious
impact such a trick could have upon future efforts to compose a history of the events
surrounding the forthcoming of The Book of Mormon. In order to conceal this little secret
from Harris it would be necessary to conceal it from the rest of the world as well; which
meant that all of Oliver’s dealings with the Smiths prior to April 1829 would have to be
kept strictly off-the-record as far as any accounts of early Mormonism were concerned.
To do otherwise would be tantamount to admitting that Harris had been duped and that it
was not God’s will, but Joseph’s chicanery that had brought Oliver to his door to replace
Harris as scribe—which in turn meant that God’s subsequent commandment to Harris
(via Smith) directing him to finish paying off the cost of printing The Book of Mormon
was also a part of the same scheme, as was a later revelation commanding Harris to set a
good example by laying out still more cash. (See Doctrine and Covenants [1835], 44:3,
and History of the Church, I:74, v.76, which reads: “And again, I command thee that
thou shalt not covet thine own property, but impart it freely to the printing of the Book of
Mormon, which contains the truth and the word of God....” Evidence that Harris
continued to be a source of cash for Smith and his church for some time to come can be
found in “Revelation Given in Zion, August 1831” which reads: “It is wisdom in me that
my servant Martin Harris should be an example unto the church, in laying his monies
before the bishop....” (Doctrine and Covenants [1835], 18:7; History of the Church,
I:191, v.35; and “Revelation Given November, 1831”, Doctrine and Covenants [1835],
26:2-3.)
In any case, Oliver’s arrival at Harmony essentially marks a turning point in Mormon
history because the events of his life from that point onward are reasonably well
recorded.
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XVII. Divine Inspiration or Translation Trickery?
“[E]ither Joseph Smith really was ‘translating’ under divine inspiration, as faithful
Mormons believe, or he was employing some kind of trickery to deceive those not in on
the secret.... As far as we are aware, there is no record of anyone ever having verified
that the words spoken by Smith when he was ‘translating’ were actually the same words
which ended up in The Book of Mormon. Mormons simply seem to presume that they
were.”
Was The Book of Mormon text translated by divine inspiration, or was some other
process perhaps at work? According to Roper:
“[T]he Book of Mormon text, as we know it today, was—according to
those who witnessed its dictation—dictated by Joseph Smith by placing the
seer stone in a hat, covering his face or eyes with the hat, and dictating
hour after hour without the apparent aid of papers or manuscript of any
kind.... It seems to me that this is a key problem for theories of Book of
Mormon origins that suggest that Joseph Smith was reading something
from notes or a prepared manuscript. In order to support such an
explanation, one has to dismiss the firsthand testimony of those who were
there as well as evidence in the original manuscript.”
Roper then quotes David Whitmer, who recalled that he had “often sat by and saw and
heard them translate and write for hours together.”
Mr. Roper is entirely correct when he describes the circumstances surrounding Smith’s
“translation” of The Book of Mormon as a “key problem.” Indeed, the difficulty here is
obvious and the lines are clearly drawn—either Joseph Smith really was “translating”
under divine inspiration, as faithful Mormons believe, or he was employing some kind of
trickery to deceive those not in on the secret. From what we know of Smith’s penchant
for money-digging and con-artistry as found in the statements of many of those who
knew him, as well as in accounts of his 1826 conviction for “glass-looking” (i.e. fortunetelling),
and in several contemporary newspaper articles, it would seem to us that the
question of chicanery is the real “key” problem here.
This leads us to an important observation. As far as we are aware, there is no record of
anyone ever having verified that the words spoken by Smith when he was “translating”
were actually the same words which ended up in The Book of Mormon. Mormons simply
seem to presume that they were. But what if The Book of Mormon manuscript had already
been prepared by Rigdon and Cowdery, and the rest was just for show. Perhaps that
famous curtain placed between Smith and Martin Harris during the early “translation”
process was part of an effort to get everything into the handwriting of Martin Harris, but
after he lost the 116 pages, circumstances forced Cowdery to step-in and finish the
process. This may explain the rapid production of the rest of the manuscript in only 75
days from the time Cowdery took over as Smith’s scribe as well as Cowdery’s
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considerably slower pace in copying out the printer’s manuscript. We are aware of the
argument offered by some Book of Mormon defenders, saying that the orthography of the
preserved parts of the “original” or “dictated” manuscript shows numerous evidences of
its having been transcribed into Cowdery’s handwriting by way of a scribe’s listening to
and duplicating an oral rendition of the narrative. This may indeed have been the method
by which certain sections of that first manuscript were set down in Oliver’s hand, but it
does not eliminate the possibility that the final manuscript had already been largely
prepared by Cowdery, Smith and Rigdon beforehand, and that the “translation” process
was only an act staged to impress those who were not in on the secret. In the final
analysis, the actual authorship of The Book of Mormon does not depend upon any
“miraculous” dictation of its final draft—the actual authorship depends upon the events
transpiring prior to Oliver’s 1829 scribal activities, and only two men knew for certain
what all those obscure events entailed: Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith.
XVIII. How Cowdery Met Whitmer:
“Oliver Cowdery, a school teacher, came to Fayette and taught a district school in the
Yost district before 1830, and he with David Whitmer and Martin Harris, constituted the
three witnesses certifying to the Book of Mormon.”
As to David Whitmer, one question which seems never to have been asked is how
Whitmer (1805-88), one of the privileged Three Witnesses to The Book of Mormon, first
came to meet Oliver Cowdery. Perhaps the presence of Oliver’s cousin Benjamin
Franklin Cowdery in nearby Geneva is the answer, Franklin having commenced
publication of the Ontario Chronicle on February 13, 1828. (Genesee Olio [October 2,
1847]: 248; Geneva Gazette & Advertiser, issues of February 6 and 13, 1828.) Franklin
Cowdery published the Chronicle until “the sixth month of the third year” (i.e., August
1830), and then suspended it. (Olio, 248.) Geneva was within walking distance of the
Whitmer farm and it is not out of the question that they were among the Chronicle’s
subscribers. (By David Whitmer’s own description, the Whitmer farm was located “at a
point mid-way between the northern extremities of Lake Cayuga and Seneca, two miles
from Waterloo, seven miles from Geneva, and twenty-seven miles from Palmyra.”
(“Interview with David Whitmer,” Kansas City Journal, 5 June 1881.) All that can be
said for sure is that Whitmer and Cowdery must have met before early autumn, because
by then they already knew each other well enough for Whitmer to be sojourning with his
friend Oliver during a business trip to Palmyra. As Whitmer later explained:
“I first heard of what is now termed Mormonism in the year 1828. 1
made a business trip to Palmyra, New York, and while there stopped
with one Oliver Cowdery. A great many people in the neighborhood
were talking about the finding of certain golden plates by one Joseph
Smith, jr., a young man of the neighborhood. Cowdery and I, as well as
many others, talked about the matter, but at that time I paid but little
attention to it, supposing it to be only the idle gossip of the
neighborhood. Cowdery said he was acquainted with the Smith family,
and believing there must be some truth in the story of the plates, he
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intended to investigate the matter.... I had never seen any of the Smith
family up to that time, and I began to inquire of the people in regard to
them. I learned that one night during the year 1827, Joseph Smith, Jr.,
had a vision, and an angel of God appeared to him and told him where
certain plates were to be found, pointing out the spot to him, and shortly
afterward he went to that place and found the plates, which were still in
his possession. After thinking the matter over a long time, and talking
with Cowdery, who also gave me a history of the finding of the plates, I
went home.
“After several months Cowdery told me he was going to Harmony,
Pennsylvania, whither Joseph Smith had gone with the plates on account
of the persecutions of his neighbors, and see him about the matter. He
did so, and on his way he stopped at my father’s house and told me that
as soon as he found out anything, either truth or untruth, he would let me
know. After he got there he became acquainted with Joseph Smith, and
shortly after wrote to me telling me that he was convinced that Smith had
the records and that he (Smith) had told him that it was the will of
heaven that he (Cowdery) should be his scribe to assist in the translation
of the plates.” (“Interview with David Whitmer,” Kansas City Journal, 5
June 1881.)
Whitmer’s choice of words is extremely important here. He says he “stopped with one
Oliver Cowdery” during a business trip to Palmyra in 1828. The language here is critical
because in the parlance of the day, “to stop with” meant “to stay with,” or, as defined by
the scholarly and authoritative Oxford English Dictionary, “to sojourn as a visitor,
resident or guest.” (The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1989], XVI:781,36a,36c.) “Sojourn” is defined as “to stay temporarily” or “to reside for
a time.” By choosing these words, instead of simply saying “I met” or “I happened to
encounter” or even “I had a conversation with,” Whitmer seems to be communicating
the fact that he had known Cowdery previously. One hardly “stops with” a stranger.
Furthermore, though Whitmer says only that this occurred in 1828, it must have been
before the beginning of that year’s school term in late October, because after that point all
sources agree that Cowdery was boarding at the Smiths’ home. Cowdery’s telling
Whitmer that “he was acquainted with the Smith family” becomes ridiculous if in fact he
was already living with them. Clearly Oliver was then staying (and probably working) at
Palmyra, and Whitmer “stopped with” him, which is to say “stayed with him” while in
that town on business—apparently for more than a single day because the two seem to
have had rather extensive conversations about Joseph’s “golden plates,” and Whitmer
states he thought the matter over for “a long time” and spoke to others about it as well
before returning home.
Whitmer’s trip to Palmyra must have taken place late in 1828 because he says that
several months after this event, Cowdery told him he was planning to go to Harmony,
“whither Joseph Smith had gone with the plates.” Based upon Lucy Smith’s 1845
account (L.M. Smith, “preliminary manuscript,” 90), Oliver must have told this to
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Whitmer early in 1829. If so, then Whitmer’s trip to Palmyra must have occurred in the
autumn of 1828, just prior to Oliver’s acceptance of a teaching position at the Armington
school and his arranging to board at the Smith’s home, both of which took place shortly
before the beginning of the school year that October. Prior to that, Oliver was evidently
living in Palmyra.
Moreover, the fact that Whitmer sought additional conversation with Oliver after he had
asked around town concerning Smith and his plates suggests an on-going and reasonably
close relationship of some kind, thus further implying that the two were already on
friendly terms. If so, then the presence of Franklin Cowdery’s print shop in Geneva once
again suggests how these two could have first met, especially given that Franklin edited
the Chronicle from February of 1828 through August of 1830.
Certainly from the evidence given above, it seems clear that the Whitmers knew nothing
of the Smiths until after David’s Palmyra conversation with Oliver in the fall of 1828.
Therefore, one might conclude that it was Oliver’s careful maneuverings that brought the
Whitmers into the fold, rather than anything the Smiths themselves did. And indeed, even
though David Whitmer eventually became disillusioned with the Smiths, he and Oliver
remained fast friends right up to the time of Oliver’s death.
David Whitmer’s credulity is poignantly illustrated in a letter written to him by Oliver
Cowdery from Kirtland on January 1, 1834 (Huntington Library Collection, San Marino,
CA), wherein Oliver laid this bit of recent spiritual intelligence on him: “Since I came
down I have been informed from a proper source that the angel Michael is no less than
our father Adam and Gabriel is Noah. I just drop this because I supposed that you would
be pleased to know.”
As for the Whitmer family in general, the Rev. Diedrich Willers, Sr., who knew them
personally, penned the following description in 1830:
“I am acquainted with the Whitmers. During the past nine years, they
were followers of the Methodists, Reformers, Presbyterians, Mennonites,
and Baptists, and are unstable, spineless men; moreover, they are
gullible to the highest degree and even believe in witches.” (D. Michael
Quinn, [trans. & ed.], “The First Months of Mormonism: A
Contemporary View by Rev. Diedrich Willers,” New York History 54
[July 1973]: 317-33. The original was written in German in 1830; month
and day not given.)
Although the likely presence of Oliver Cowdery, perhaps as a journeyman printer, at his
cousin Franklin’s newspaper office in Geneva is one possible explanation for how Oliver
and David Whitmer had come to know each other prior to the fall of 1828, the authors
have recently discovered another more intriguing piece of information which, although
admittedly a late source, seems to offer an even better answer. The following account is
from Diedrich Willers, Jr.’s Centennial Historical Sketch of the Town of Fayette, Seneca
County, N.Y., (Geneva, NY: Press of W.F. Humphrey, 1899/1900), 51):
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“The Mormon church which has arisen to prominence at the present
time, was first organized at the house of Peter Whitmer, a Pennsylvania
German farmer (residing upon a farm in the southeast corner of Military
Lot No. 13, in Fayette), April 6, 1830....
“John Whitmer became the first historian of the Mormon Church. He
died at Far West, near Kingston, Caldwell County, Missouri, a few years
ago....
“Oliver Cowdery, a school teacher, came to Fayette and taught a
district school in the Yost district before 1830, and he with David
Whitmer and Martin Harris, constituted the three witnesses certifying to
the Book of Mormon. (Mr. Lee Yost, now of Lenawee County, Michigan,
aged eighty-five years, attended this term of school.)”
The 1820 U.S. census for Seneca, Fayette/Varick, lists Yosts on pages 86 and 93, and the
Peter Whitmer (given as “Whitmore”) family on page 88. Clearly they were all living in
close proximity. The 1870 U.S. census for Michigan lists Lee Yost, age 56, married, born
NY, living in Ypsilanti, 3rd ward.
Since it is reasonably certain that Oliver Cowdery was teaching at the Stafford school
near the Smiths’ farm during the 1826-27 school term (see The Spalding Enigma,
p.289ff). and since we know he was teaching at the nearby Armington school during the
1828-29 term, we are left to conclude that Oliver’s teaching experience in the Yost
district took place either during 1825-26 or 1827-28. Moreover, since the testimony of
Lorenzo Saunders (see following section) would seem to rule-out the latter, we are left
with 1825-26, a time when almost nothing is known of Oliver’s activities. School terms
in those days ran October through March. If this is where he first met David Whitmer, it
explains why they were already well acquainted by the time of David’s visit to Palmyra
in the late summer of 1828 when David says he “stopped” with Oliver for several days
and first learned about Joseph Smith and the Golden Bible. During these years, Lee Yost
(b.1814) would have been between eleven and thirteen years-old, and thus of proper age
to have been attending a local school and old enough to have formed and retained a
memory of the experience. Moreover, he would have had no visible reason to invent such
a fact.
In 1899, while preparing his history of Fayette Township, Willers seems to have sent out
a number of letters to people who had been former residents of Fayette, asking them to
correspond with him regarding their early recollections of that place. Lee Yost was one of
these people, and the information recounted by Willers, above, came from one such
letter.
Diedrich Willers Jr. (1833-1908) was secretary of New York State in 1874-75, was
deputy secretary of state for eight years, private secretary to Governor Seymore in 1864,
member of assembly for Seneca county in 1878 and was supervisor from his town and
chairman of the town board in 1865 and 1866. Lee Yost, son of Caspar and Rachel Yost,
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was born in Fayette in 1814. At the time of his correspondence with Willers, he was
living in Hudson, MI.
XIX. Maybe Oliver Wrote it?
“All that is necessary to apprise one’s self of the extreme depth and breadth of Oliver
Cowdery’s abilities is to peruse the extensive examples of his writings that can be found
in the early editions of the LDS Messenger and Advocate, of which he was editor during
the mid-1830s.”
Roper expends considerable effort arguing that neither Joseph Smith nor Solomon
Spalding was sufficiently talented to produce a literary work of such magnitude and
complexity as The Book of Mormon. This leads him to conclude, quite predictably, that it
can only have had a divine origin as still claimed by most Latter-day Saints today.
First of all, in spite of a few assertions to the contrary, The Book of Mormon is hardly an
exemplary work of literature, especially as we find its problematic text in the 1830
edition. Indeed, most non-Mormons who attempt to wade through its more than 500
pages find it turgid, confusing, boring, and generally uninspiring.
With respect to the question of authorship, those who do not accept the book’s selfproclaimed
Nephite origin have advanced several different theories. Fawn Brodie, Joseph
Smith’s best-known biographer, for example, has asserted that Smith, relying on his
obviously vivid imagination, could indeed have produced such a work—an idea which
many non-Mormons have since found a comfortable explanation of things. Others are of
the opinion that a writer such as Solomon Spalding was sufficiently educated and talented
to have created the basic narrative and its unique characters entirely on his own, and that
his abilities as a writer should not be predicated upon the obviously poor quality of
Manuscript Story, which was nothing more than a very rough draft of a tale never
intended for publication. Still others hold that Sidney Rigdon, having surreptitiously
obtained Spalding’s manuscript, spent several years rewriting it during the 1820s in
Pennsylvania and Ohio, and that Smith then merely parroted, paraphrased, or slightly
expanded the result to create The Book of Mormon.
There is, however, one extremely intriguing possibility which seems to have been largely
overlooked up to now—that being whether Smith’s cousin Oliver Cowdery, the shadowy
third hand in what we believe to have been the Book of Mormon conspiracy, possessed
the talent, interest, and ability to recast either Spalding’s original Manuscript Found, or
Rigdon’s presumed rewrite of it, into what is now known as The Book of Mormon.
In that light, presuming Mr. Roper’s introduction of late evidence when it benefits his
cause accords us the same privilege, there is the testimony of Lorenzo Saunders (b.
Palmyra, NY, 1811), who stated unequivocally that he personally witnessed Oliver in the
process of doing just that.
“As respecting Oliver Cowdery, he came from Kirtland in the summer of
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1826 and was about there [i.e. the Smith’s farm] until fall and took a
school in the district where the Smiths lived and the next summer he was
missing and I didn’t see him until fall and he came back and took our
school in the district where we lived and taught about a week and went
to the schoolboard and wanted the board to let him off and they did and
he went to Smith and went to writing the Book of Mormon and wrote all
winter. The Mormons say it wasn’t wrote there but I say it was because I
was there. I saw Sidney Rigdon in the spring of 1827, about the middle of
March. I went to Smiths to eat maple sugar, and I saw five or six men
standing in a group and there was one among them better dressed than
the rest and I asked Harrison Smith who he was and he said his name
was Sidney Rigdon, a friend of Joseph’s from Pennsylvania. I saw him in
the Fall of 1827 on the road between where I lived and Palmyra, with
Joseph. I was with a man by the name of Ingersol. They talked together
and when he went on I asked Ingersol who he was and he said it was
Rigdon. Then in the summer of 1828 I saw him at Samuel Lawrence’s
just before harvest. I was cutting corn for Lawrence and went to dinner
and he took dinner with us and when dinner was over they went into
another room and I didn’t see him again till he came to Palmyra to
preach. You wanted to know how Smith acted about it. The next morning
after he claimed to have got plates he came to our house and said he had
got the plates and what a struggle he had in getting home with them.
Two men tackled him and he fought and knocked them both down and
made his escape and secured the plates and had them safe and secure.
He showed his thumb where he bruised it in fighting those men. After
[he] went from the house, my mother says ‘What a liar Joseph Smith is;
he lies every word he says; I know he lies because he looks so guilty; he
can’t see out of his eyes; how dare [he] tell such a lie as that.’ The time
he claimed to have taken the plates from the hill was on the 22 day of
September, in 1827, and I went on the next Sunday following with five or
six other ones and we hunted the side hill by course [i.e. “in a search
pattern”] and could not find no place where the ground had been broke.
There was a large hole where the money diggers had dug a year or two
before, but no fresh dirt. There never was such a hole; there never was
any plates taken out of that hill nor any other hill in country, was in
Wayne county. It is all a lie. No, sir, I never saw the plates nor no one
else. He had an old glass box [i.e. a box used for holding plates or panes
of glass] with a tile in it, about 7x8 inches, and that was the gold
plates[;] and Martin Harris didn’t know a gold plate from a brick at this
time. Smith and Rigdon had an intimacy but it was very secret and still
and there was a mediator between them and that was Cowdery. The
manuscript was stolen by Rigdon and modelled over by him and then
handed over to Cowdery and he copied them and Smith sat behind the
curtain and handed them out to Cowdery and as fast as Cowdery copied
them, they was handed over to Martin Harris and he took them to Egbert
Granden [sic], the one who printed them, and Gilbert set the type.”
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(Letter of Lorenzo Saunders to Thomas Gregg, 28 January 1885, in
Charles Shook, True Origin of the Book of Mormon [Cincinnati: 1914],
132-33.)
Aside from placing Smith, Rigdon and Cowdery together well before 1829, this letter is
interesting in a number of respects. For example, there are Saunder’s assertions that
“Smith and Rigdon had an intimacy but it was very secret,” that “there was a mediator
between them and that was Cowdery,” and that the “manuscript was stolen by Rigdon
and modelled over by him and then handed over to Cowdery.” Then there is his unique
mention of Cowdery having come “from Kirtland in the summer of 1826.” Up to the
publication of The Spalding Enigma, everyone had presumed this to be a serious flaw
because there would have been no reason for Cowdery to have been in Kirtland, Ohio, in
1826, that town not being associated with Mormon activity until 1831. As it turns out,
however, up until about 1835, there were three places in Ohio called Kirtland, the first
lesser-known of which was located in Trumbull county within walking distance of
several farms which were owned by cousins of Oliver Cowdery, and within less than a
day’s travel from the farm owned by Oliver’s brother Erastus just north of Youngstown,
which was then also in Trumbull county. (See The Spalding Enigma, 288-291; and
“Henshaw’s Map of Trumbull County Ohio,” drawn c.1830.) The other lesser known
“Kirtland, Ohio,” was a hamlet or tract of land in Auburn township, Geauga county,
adjacent to Sidney Rigdon’s 1826-27 residence in neighboring Bainbridge township. This
last Kirtland may be of special interest because its environs were largely settled by
pioneers from the region surrounding Palmyra, New York, among whom were the
Stafford family, whom Richard L. Bushman identifies as money-diggers. This is the same
Stafford family that Joseph Smith’s early companion Orrin P. Rockwell married into.
Orrin is known to have visited his sister in Auburn township after Sidney Rigdon had
moved away from Ohio, but there is reason to suspect that he and his friend may have
visited the Auburn “Kirtland” as early as 1825-26, when Sidney Rigdon was living only
six miles to the west of the Stafford family’s homestead. In fact, one early Auburn
resident placed Joseph Smith in the company of Sidney Rigdon, in that same very small
patch of frontier wilderness, during the winter of 1825-26. (More of this in an upcoming
paper which is still in process.)
All that is necessary to apprise one’s self of the prodigious depth and breadth of Oliver
Cowdery’s literary abilities is to peruse the extensive examples of his writings that can be
found in the early editions of the LDS Messenger and Advocate, of which he was editor
during the mid-1830s. Moreover, a comparison of some of these with passages from The
Book of Mormon proves instantly illuminating. Here, for example, are selections of
Oliver’s writing excerpted from two 1835 issues of the LDS Messenger and Advocate,
followed by a selection taken from the 1830 edition of The Book of Mormon:
(1) Cowdery writing in LDS Messenger and Advocate, I:6, 86-87 (Mar. 1835)
“Who cannot easily discover, that the order of things set forth... from
the prophets, has never yet been on the earth, neither indeed can be,
until the Lord comes? For it is at that time that Jerusalem is to be built
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and never to be thrown down, and it is at that time that the earth is to
bring forth in her strength, and when the mountains are to drop down
new wine, and all nature to rejoice before the Lord; for he comes to
judge the earth in righteousness. It is also at that time, that the
ploughman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that
soweth seed. And it is at that time, that the tabernacle of David shall be
built, and Israel become the praise and glory of the whole earth.
“...I noticed the change which was to be wrought upon the beast at
that day, or thousand years; but not only the beast but the vegetable
kingdom is also to be greatly changed the trees and the vines -- the one
is to bring forth their fruit in abundance, the other to load itself to such a
degree that the mountains will literally drop down new wine. So that a
great change is to be wrought on all the lower creation -- the very earth
is to become more fruitful than ever it has been since it was cursed; and
the Spirit of God is to be poured out on all flesh, and his power to be
exalted in changing all things, so as to make them conduce to the
happiness of men in the highest degree their nature is capable of. This is
the Millennium, and this only. If the power of God is not exerted on both
man and beast, as well as on all other parts of the lower creation, the
idea of Millennium is worse than folly. ...the prophets, must be fulfilled....
The fulfillment of these prophecies will make a Millennium, and nothing
else will; for these are the things which God has promised to do for the
world, and which he has said will take place. -- Whatever power
therefore is necessary to change the nature of the lion, the leopard, the
bear, the ass, the cockatrice, together with all other animals, which hurt
and destroy, is necessary to be exerted to bring about the Millennium,
and nothing else will do it. And not only the power necessary to effect
this, but also to change the earth so as to make it more fruitful, and the
seasons so that the ploughman can overtake the reaper, and the treader
of grapes him that soweth seed; for our present seasons will not admit
such a thing -- so that a great change must be wrought on all things,
miracle or no miracle. If all this can be done without miracle, so be it,
and if not, the days of miracles are not past, or else the idea of the
Millennium is worse than folly.”
(2) Cowdery writing in LDS Messenger and Advocate, I:8, 116-18 (May, 1835)
“[B]ehold the dealings of God among men in connection with the series
of events relating to the Savior. -- Behold all the spiritual gifts bestowed
in the world at one time and another, with all the powers and blessings
ever enjoyed at any period of the world among men, while those
possessing them were persecuted, reviled, hated, scourged, buffeted,
smitten, put to death, chased from place to place, to caves and dens of
the earth; being afflicted and tormented, without any clothing but sheep
skins and goat skins, until they were wasted and destroyed, and the
whole church disappeared; and all the spiritual gifts ceased, and
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revelations were obtained no longer among men. And they looked until
darkness covered the earth, and gross darkness the people; and until the
vision of all had become as the words of a book which was sealed; and
the people groped their way in darkness having no light; and party arose
after party; sect after sect multiplied until the earth become a scene of
confusion; sentiment warring with sentiment, and opinion lashing
against opinion; and the true light of heaven was lost. But in the midst of
this confusion the prophets beheld the God of heaven setting his hand the
second time to recover his people, and to restore to the world what they
had lost. Beginning as a grain of mustard planted in the earth; and from
this small beginning the work began to roll; the spiritual gifts began to
return one after one, until the blind began to see, the lame to walk, the
deaf to hear, and all manner of diseases and sicknesses pass away from
among the people of God. And the power become so great that the
waters were again smitten and the foundations of rivers and seas were
discovered; and people went over dry shod, as they did in the day when
the children of Israel came out of the land of Egypt. The very heavens
themselves were shaken, and all things were rebuked by their Creator.
The spirit of God began to be poured out as in days of old, until it fell
upon all flesh. The lion become peaceable; the leopard and the bear
ceased to devour the asp; and the cockatrices lost their venom; & all the
spiritual gifts that were ever enjoyed on earth among men at any period
of the world returned and was possessed by men again: even all that
were numbered among the living. And revelation followed revelation;
vision came after vision; men and women became prophets and
prophetesses, until the knowledge of God covered the earth as the waters
covered the sea. The earth put on a new aspect; the curse was taken
away, and it yielded in its strength, and all creation smiled. The trees
clapped their hands, while animal and vegetable life united together to
praise their Maker, with the mountains, the floods, and the flames. The
Savior also come down from heaven and all the saints with him, who
received their bodies glorified like his glorious body. The people of God
they beheld gathered from all nations, tongues, languages and kindreds
under heaven, unto the mountain of the Lord to rejoice before him. And
when they beheld all this glory returning to the earth they sang of the
latter day glory, and of that which was to come. -- And from these visions
came our ideas of a Millennium.”
(3) Excerpt from The Book of Mormon, 1830 edition, Chs.IX-X: 499-502 (Set forth as 3
Nephi, Ch.XXI in current editions)
“And verily, I say unto you, I give unto you a sign, that ye may know the
time when these things shall be about to take place, that I shall gather in
from their long dispersion, my people, O house of Israel, and shall
establish again among them my Zion. And behold, this is the thing which
I will give unto you for a sign: for verily, I say unto you, That when these
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things which I declare unto you, and which I shall declare unto you
hereafter of myself, and by the power of the Holy Ghost, which shall be
given unto you of the Father, shall be made known unto the Gentiles,
that they may know concerning this people which are a remnant of the
house of Jacob, and concerning this my people which shall be scattered
by them; verily, verily, I say unto you, When these things shall be made
known unto them of the Father, and shall come forth of the Father from
them unto you: for it is wisdom in the Father that they should be
established in this land, and be set up as a free people by the power of
the Father, that these things might come forth from them unto a remnant
of your seed, that the covenant of the Father may be fulfilled which he
hath covenanted with his people, O house of Israel; therefore, when
these works, and the works which shall be wrought among you hereafter,
shall come forth from the Gentiles unto your seed, which shall dwindle in
unbelief because of iniquity: for thus it behooveth the Father that it
should come forth from the Gentiles, that he may shew forth his power
unto the Gentiles, for this cause, that the Gentiles, if they will not harden
their hearts, that they may repent and come unto me, and be baptized in
my name, and know of the true points of my doctrine, that they may be
numbered among my people, O house of Israel; and when these things
come to pass, that thy seed shall begin to know these things, it shall be a
sign unto them, that they may know that the work of the Father hath
already commenced unto the fulfilling of the covenant which he hath
made unto the people which are of the house of Israel. And when that
day shall come, it shall come to pass that kings shall shut their mouths:
for that which had not been told them shall they see; and that which they
had not heard shall they consider. For in that day, for my sake shall the
Father work a work, which shall be a great and a marvellous work
among them; and there shall be among them which will not believe it,
although a man shall declare it unto them. But behold, the life of my
servant shall be in my hand; therefore they shall not hurt him, although
he shall be marred because of them. Yet I will heal him, for I will shew
unto them that my wisdom is greater than the cunning of the Devil.”
Having read and compared the above, is anyone prepared to say that Oliver Cowdery did
not possess the necessary literary talent to have written both? Clearly he did, yet up to
now, no one has attempted to seriously examine this question. Could Cowdery have been
the eminence-grise responsible for having recast a mediocre Spalding manuscript into the
present Book of Mormon? At the very least, this is clearly a subject worthy of further
consideration.
Did Oliver Cowdery arrive in Manchester, New York with a manuscript written by
Sidney Rigdon in his peddler’s pack? Did he come from one of the lesser known
Kirtlands, following consultations in Ohio with Sidney Rigdon? Was Oliver entrusted
with the final revision of the Rigdon-Spalding composition—being charged to work out
in his own mind any final changes, and then to seek conformation via his divining rod, as
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to whether those alterations were in accord with a divine oversight of an especially pious
“pious fraud?” If so, then there may have been complexities within complexities in the
founding of Mormonism, and no simple one-sentence answer will ever suffice for our
attempts to explain to the modern public what went on out of the public eye so many
years ago.
While all of this may not be sufficient to prove that Oliver Cowdery was one of those
responsible for creating The Book of Mormon, it clearly demonstrates that he possessed
the necessary talents and religious motivation for doing so, even if Smith and Spalding,
and perhaps even Rigdon, may not have.
XX. Sidney Rigdon:
“The widow’s daughter, Matilda Spalding McKinstry, correctly recalled the different
appearances of the two Patterson brothers, and that one had a nice library. Robert
Patterson, Jr. agreed that she was describing his uncle Joseph and not his father, Robert,
Sr. The fact that Joseph Patterson was more slender and considerably younger than his
brother Robert is not something Mrs. McKinstry can be expected to have known or
discovered on her own.”
Since a significant portion of The Spalding Enigma is devoted to demonstrating how
Sidney Rigdon could have obtained Spalding’s Manuscript Found, and how Oliver
Cowdery was probably the intermediary responsible for having brought both it and
Rigdon to the attention of Joseph Smith, we shall limit our comments here to those
necessary for specific rebuttal.
First of all, in making reference to what seems to have been the earliest published account
which links Sidney Rigdon to Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon, Mr. Roper writes,
“In what appears to have been a mixture of fact, rumor, and speculation, James Gordon
Bennett proposed that a preacher named ‘Henry Rangdon’ may have been the chief
conspirator in the Book of Mormon enterprise. ‘Henry Rangdon’ might have been a
badly garbled reference to Sidney Rigdon.” (emphasis added)
Might have been, Mr. Roper? Bennett specifically identifies “Ringdon” or “Rangdon” as
an ex-preacher from “near Painesville,” Ohio, on no less than six different occasions in
his New York Morning Courier and Enquirer articles of Aug.31-Sept.1, 1831. There
surely can be NO mistake about the intended reference here.
Next, concerning the question of Rigdon’s presence in Pittsburgh prior to 1822, Roper
tries to sidestep the issue by arguing that, “the question was not whether Rigdon had ever
lived in the city, but whether he frequented it on a regular basis. But since Rigdon [in an
1839 letter] only denied residence during that time, not visits, there is no evidence of
deception.”
No evidence of deception? Why mince words like “frequented... on a regular basis,” and
“resided”? Let us recall that the Sidney Rigdon writing this letter is the same Sidney
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Rigdon who, as a young man, had a self-avowed thirst for reading, and who, according to
those who knew him then, borrowed all the books he could get and regarded reading as his
greatest pleasure. Yet this same man claims he knew nothing of what went on with respect
to the book business in Pittsburgh prior to his having moved there at the close of 1821?
Where then did he go to fulfill his insatiable desire for books—a desire which, by the way,
his father opposed and which would thus have been better taken up away from home?
Given that he grew up in a rural area only two hours by horse from Pittsburgh, a busy town
of about 4,000 inhabitants which boasted several booksellers and at least three libraries
during the years 1812-16, there can be only one answer: In spite of Mr. Roper’s claim that
Rigdon might have borrowed books from his neighbors, it seems certain that Sidney
Rigdon went to Pittsburgh to get his books—just as we now know he went there to collect
his mail during the same years Solomon Spalding was also collecting his mail at the same
post office. (See The Spalding Enigma, pp.134-40.)
Rev. Robert Patterson, Sr. (1773-1854) was involved in both book selling and printing in
Pittsburgh for nearly forty years under a variety of different ventures. The earliest of these
was the partnership of Patterson & Hopkins which was formed on June 14, 1810 for the
purpose of publishing and marketing books. This was dissolved on October 31, 1812, at
which time Robert’s younger brother Joseph (1783-1868) joined him in the firm of R & J
Patterson, a venture which was in turn overtaken by the partnership of R. Patterson &
Lambdin on January 1, 1818. According to legal records, this enterprise survived until
February of 1823, fully thirteen months after Rigdon’s move to Pittsburgh and during the
very time he was serving as pastor of the First Baptist Church only a short distance away.
(The church was at 3rd and Grant; Patterson’s shop was three short blocks north on Wood
St. between 3rd and 4th.) Indeed, the firm of R. Patterson & Lambdin published The
Pittsburgh Almanac for 1822. In addition, Patterson remained a partner in the R & J
Patterson Steam Paper Mill until its dissolution in September, 1823, more than a year-anda-
half after Rigdon’s move to the city. And finally, following the financial collapse of
Patterson & Lambdin, Rev. Patterson continued in the business of bookseller for another
thirteen years until 1836. How can Rigdon, with his self-confessed passion for books,
credibly claim not to have known this? Is it not reasonable to accept that Rigdon did in fact
frequent the offices of R & J Patterson, publishers and booksellers, during those very
crucial years of the Spalding enigma from 1812 to 1816? And in so doing, is it not likely
that he would have come to know Mr. Patterson during the very years Solomon Spalding
would have been calling on the Pattersons in connection with his project?
Moreover, if, as we assert in The Spalding Enigma, the Patterson brother with whom
Solomon Spalding had most of his dealings was Joseph and not Robert, then much would
be explained.
The widow’s daughter, Matilda Spalding McKinstry, correctly recalled the different
appearances of the two Patterson brothers, and that one had a nice library (The Spalding
Enigma, pp.150-51, 163-64). Robert Patterson, Jr. agreed that she was describing his
uncle Joseph and not his father, Robert, Sr. The fact that Joseph Patterson was more
slender and considerably younger than his brother Robert is not something Mrs.
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McKinstry can be expected to have known or discovered on her own. Also, Joseph was
the rich brother, who could afford luxuries like a nice library, even if business was bad.
Roper next points to an editorial comment published by Walter Scott in the July, 1839
issue of his periodical, The Evangelist, in which Scott expressed doubt about the claimed
connection between Rigdon, the Pattersons, and the Spalding manuscript.
Yet, by the very nature of what he writes, it seems obvious that Scott had no pertinent
information he could share. As to Joseph Patterson, Jr. (the “J” of the R & J Patterson
firm), by the time Walter Scott arrived in Pittsburgh, the only business that Joseph was
running was the steam paper mill, and he may have operated that by way of local proxies,
while he spent time in Philadelphia, etc.
Scott has no knowledge of Robert Patterson operating a printing office—which is true.
The Pattersons were part-time publishers and full-time stationers and it was Robert, not
Joseph, who was out in front, managing the bookshop. Engles or others ran the printing
end of the business—either on contract or possibly with the Pattersons as silent partners,
who never got ink on their hands.
Mrs. Hurlbut said that Robert Patterson, Jr. came to visit her husband in later years and
admitted a family relationship with Sidney Rigdon. If such a connection did exist (and it
may have via the Spear family), perhaps the older generation did not want it mentioned
and that is why the elder Pattersons never undertook to clear up the story, leaving it to
Robert, Jr. to try and sort out the pieces many years later. It may well be that “Mr.
Patterson’s testimony” was not often “adduced” because he was not in the habit of
offering it.
“If Walter Scott could live in Pittsburgh for several years and not know whether or not
Robert Patterson had a printing office,” Roper asks, “why must we assume that Rigdon
must have known and hence that he was being dishonest?” The answer is because the
Pattersons were publishers and booksellers, not printers—and because Scott arrived on
the scene rather late in the game and would have been viewed as a distasteful apostate,
not welcome in the Pattersons’ Presbyterian social circle. Rigdon, on the other hand, had
been in Pittsburgh at an earlier date and was clearly on friendly terms with Robert
Patterson’s young ward, Jonathan H. Lambdin, who was also clerk for the R & J
Patterson enterprise—thus Rigdon could have mentioned Joseph, had he wished to. The
fact that he mentions neither Joseph Patterson, Silas Engles, nor young Lambdin shows
he was holding back information. Had Rigdon really wished to “clear the air” in 1839,
he could have done a far better job of it. Instead, he leaves all of his Pittsburgh
connections unmentioned and points his finger at Rev. Robert Patterson, Sr., (who
probably never wanted to talk about these matters).
Roper makes a point of noting that Walter Scott, like Rigdon, suggests that someone
should obtain testimony from Robert Patterson, and observes that since Scott seems to
have made his suggestion in good faith, it is only fair to conclude that Rigdon did the
same. Yet he fails to note that while Rigdon, in his 1839 reply to the widow Spalding’s
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statement, says he had only “a very slight acquaintance” with Robert Patterson, Walter
Scott avers that he personally knew Rigdon “to be perfectly known to Robert Patterson.”
Clearly one of these two men is not being entirely truthful. If Roper favors Walter Scott
on this matter, then in all fairness, we agree, at least on this point.
As to whether Sidney Rigdon could have known Solomon Spalding, Mr. Roper
conveniently neglects to mention that for the entire time of Spalding’s residence in Amity,
PA (1814-16)—during which time he was known to everyone in town since he operated
the local roadhouse—Rigdon’s cousin, George, was living a short distance north of that
place on a farm in Buffaloe township, while George’s mother, Mary, along with his
younger sister and brother, were occupying a house on Amity’s main street a mere stone’s
throw from Spalding’s tavern. Since this family of Rigdons had immigrated to
Pennsylvania from Maryland with Sidney’s father, it seems likely Sidney would have
visited them once in a while after his own father’s death in 1810—especially since both
George’s farm and Mary’s home at Amity lay within twenty miles of Sidney’s home in St.
Clair township along the main coach route from Pittsburgh to Waynesburg. And where, in
Amity, would Rigdon likely stay, or at least go to refresh himself, while visiting the
widowed Mary Rigden? Of course there is no evidence to indicate that Sidney did visit his
cousins; but given the circumstances, it does seem likely. At the very least, it would explain
Matilda Spalding-Davison’s strange recollection that “Sidney Rigdon... was connected with
the printing office of Mr. Patterson... as Rigdon himself has frequently stated.” The
question here is how Mrs. Davison, as early as 1833, could possibly have known of Sidney
Rigdon’s very existence, not to mention anything he might have said—indeed, frequently
said—regarding his supposed connections with the Pattersons’ publishing establishment.
Next there is the matter of what Sidney Rigdon’s grandson, Walter, had to say about him
in an 1888 interview published by J.H. Beadle. In this interview, Walter Rigdon makes it
clear that his father and other members of the family knew that The Book of Mormon was
derived from Spalding’s manuscript, but refused to talk about it while their father was
alive. However, rather than consider the possibility that Walter may have been the only
member of the Rigdon family who dared to break ranks, Roper merely dismisses his
testimony as “inconsistent.” Of course it’s inconsistent, but it also demonstrates that not
all of the members of Rigdon’s family accepted that old Sidney was innocent, and that’s
why it’s important.
Finally, Roper points to our assertion in The Spalding Enigma that Rigdon made no
significant attempt to respond to the Hurlbut/Howe allegations in print until 1839, and
takes issue with our suggestion that perhaps this was because he may have had something
to hide. According to Roper, “although there may not be any printed accounts of such a
response, some who lived in Kirtland remembered public rebuttals to claims linking him
with the origin of the Book of Mormon.” He then quotes a recollection which Phineas,
Hiel, and Mary D. Bronson recorded in the 1890s:
“In the spring of 1833 or 1834, at the house of Samuel Baker, near New
Portage, Medina county, Ohio, we... did hear Elder Sidney Rigdon, in
the presence of a large congregation, say he had been informed that
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some in the neighborhood had accused him of being the instigator of the
Book of Mormon. Standing in the door-way, there being many standing
in the door-yard, he, holding up the Book of Mormon, said, ‘I testify in
the presence of this congregation, and before God and all the Holy
Angels up yonder, (pointing towards heaven), before whom I expect to
give an account at the judgment day, that I never saw a sentence of the
Book of Mormon, I never penned a sentence of the Book of Mormon, I
never knew that there was such a book in existence as the Book of
Mormon, until it was presented to me by Parley P. Pratt, in the form that
it now is.’”
However, even if this belated recollection is true, it is worthless as evidence of Rigdon’s
innocence, for surely no one seriously believes that Rigdon, in 1833 or ’34, would have
dared to face such a crowd and admit that The Book of Mormon was a fraud. Of course,
had the idea to call Spalding’s reworked manuscript “The Book of Mormon” not
originated with Rigdon, then he might well have felt comfortable in asserting that he had
never seen or written any book by that title.
If Rigdon was so truthful and reliable, perhaps he should have been made the LDS
President in 1844 instead of that role having been usurped by Brigham Young. When it
comes to this delicate matter however, Mr. Roper carefully avoids mentioning the details
of why Rigdon was thrown out of the Church by his one-time followers and lieutenants
from northern Ohio for being such a religious liar and schemer who willingly crafted
false revelations to fool the common members, and fostered secret conspiracies to gain
ecclesiastical power.
XXI. The Unseeing Eye of Faith:
“[S]ince there is considerable reason to doubt Smith’s claims about the origin of The
Book of Mormon, is there not equal reason to doubt the claims of his so-called
witnesses?”
One can hardly discuss Joseph Smith’s claims about the origin of The Book of Mormon
without also saying something about the men who signed their names to statements
saying they had personally witnessed Smith’s miraculous plates of gold. What about
these eleven loyal witnesses? Clearly this is a sensitive subject as far as faithful Mormons
are concerned, because it lies at the heart of their very belief-system. Yet not all of us are
blinded by the eye of faith in this matter, and for those of us who aren’t, there are some
issues here which suggest that not everything is as Mormon-friendly writers would have
us believe.
As to the Three Witnesses (Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris and David Whitmer), we have
already discussed Cowdery’s complicity with Smith in duping Harris, and we have
already demonstrated that Cowdery must have known Whitmer well before 1828, and
that it was Cowdery who brought him into the Church. What, then, is there about any of
these three that would make them impartial, or even credible witnesses to anything Smith
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“...Unfortunately there is no direct evidence to support the historical
claims of the Book of Mormon—nothing archaeological, nothing
philological. As a result, those for whom Truth is the product of spiritual
witness, not empirical inquiry, resort to developing analogies and
parallels to defend the book’s historical claims. That is the apologetic
historical methodology.... When challenged, some Mormon apologists do
not deal with the evidence adduced. Rather they dismiss it out-of-hand
and denounce with ad hominems anyone who arrives at a conclusion
unacceptable to them, accusing them of already having made up their
minds according to a faith-position; of arriving at false and
misperceived conclusions; of being enemies; of being anti-Mormons.”
(“A Record in the Language of My Father: Evidence of Ancient
Egyptian and Hebrew in the Book of Mormon,” in Brent Metcalfe, ed.,
New Approaches to the Book of Mormon, ch.IX: 373-374, and n.54).
It is truly unfortunate that one so erudite as Mr. Roper has allowed himself to fall in with
such company.
Perhaps Mr. Roper reveals more of himself than he intends, when he writes, “The Book
of Mormon will always be an enigma for the unbeliever. The Latter-day Saint, of course,
already has an explanation that nicely circumvents that puzzle.” In two short sentences,
he admits, first, that The Book of Mormon is a “puzzle,” and second, that the only way to
solve the puzzle is to be a “believer.” As non-Mormons, and hence, in Mr. Roper’s eyes,
as non-believers, we respectfully beg to differ. In our opinion, the enigma surrounding
the origin of The Book of Mormon has been largely exposed, the solution to the puzzle is
clearer than it ever was, and it is only the believers, in their constant efforts to circumvent
the puzzle, who cannot see which way the preponderance of evidence is pointing. We
have nothing to defend, Mr. Roper. ALL of our evidence is on the table. More will no
doubt be uncovered as time passes.
It is our belief that an authorship theory of this type will prove predictive—in other
words, that the accumulated evidence gathered thus far in its support will help us predict
the content of future finds of hitherto unknown evidence. As additional historical
testimony, documents, public records, and circumstantial connections are uncovered, we
believe that most of the “new” information will dovetail with what we have already
compiled. We are thus willing to challenge Dr. Peterson, Mr. Roper, and the people at
FARMS to a prediction: We predict that more future evidence will be uncovered, and
published, in support of the Spalding-Rigdon explanation (such as a certain 1829 letter
from Oliver Cowdery, perhaps), than will be uncovered for a Nephite civilization in
ancient America, or examples of Reformed Egyptian on golden (or any other) plates, or
seer’s stones set in silver bows and attached to ancient breastplates. If The Book of
Mormon’s city of Zarahemla is excavated before the pages of Manuscript Found turn-up,
then of course we will be proven wrong. It is a challenge we are willing to revisit in ten
or twenty years, in order to see which theory in the enigma has gained the most ground.
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Meanwhile, we have advanced our hypothesis—we have provided a viable alternative
explanation for the origin of The Book of Mormon, an explanation supported by a
considerable volume of historical evidence. Mr. Roper, and his esteemed editor, Dr.
Peterson, on the other hand, bring nothing new to the table, but only seek to defend that
which cannot be defended except on a belief-through-faith level. We readily admit they
could be right. They refuse to acknowledge they could be wrong. For those who have
patience, we are confident the truth will eventually prevail.
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APPENDIX I.
EXAMPLES OF TERMS COMMONLY USED IN THE 19TH CENTURY
TO DESIGNATE THE VARIOUS SIZES OF SHEETS OF PAPER:
(1) Extract from James H. Fairchild’s 1885 letter describing the discovery of the Spalding
manuscript now at Oberlin College:
“...Mr. L. L. Rice, of Honolulu... [was] formerly an anti-slavery editor in
Ohio, and for many years state printer at Columbus. During a recent
visit to Honolulu, I suggested to Mr. Rice that he might have valuable
anti-slavery documents in his possession which he would be willing to
contribute to... the Oberlin College library. In pursuance of this
suggestion Mr. Rice began looking over his old pamphlets and papers,
and at length came upon an old, worn, and faded manuscript of about
one hundred and seventy-five pages, small quarto, purporting to be a
history of the migrations and conflicts of the ancient Indian tribes which
occupied the territory now belonging to the states of New York, Ohio,
and Kentucky....”
(2) Anti-Masonic Almanac for the year 1829 (Giddins, Rochester, NY), pg.9. An entry
entitled “Rate of Postage” goes into some detail about single “sheets” and “pieces” of
paper and makes clear distinction between folio, quarto, octavo, etc. A similar article in
the 1830 edition adds a few lines about magazines and pamphlets and says that those
“containing a half-sheet or less are charged with half the postage for a sheet.” In all cases,
the implication is that a “sheet” or “piece” of paper means a full-sized sheet of foolscap.
(Paper copy of 1829 article on file along w/transcription of 1830 addition.)
(3) The [LDS] Evening and the Morning Star, II,14: 106.
"It is announced that Dr. Noah Webster, the lexicographer, is engaged in
preparing for publication an edition of the Bible.... yea, with all the
euphemisms he could collect from his Quarto dictionary, he could not
destroy the sublimity of the scripture faster, than Dr. Dickinson has.”
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(4) Latter-day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate, I,7: 112 (April 1835).
“And if the fact was known, it would be found, that of all the heavenly
communications to the ancients, we have no more in comparison than
the alphabet to a quarto vocabulary.” [i.e. a vocabulary, such as a Latin
or Greek vocabulary, printed on quarto-sized pages].”
(5) LDS Times and Seasons, V,15: 611.
“The Star will be issued monthly on a royal sheet quarto....” [Note:
Royal quarto was about ½” larger than ordinary quarto.]
(6) John Phillip Walker, Dale Morgan and Early Mormonism, 152.
“Burgess also had Peter Whitmer's copy of the original quarto edition of
The Evening and Morning Star, the first I have located.”
(7) LDS Times and Seasons, II,5: 257.
“THE TIMES AND SEASONS will be published on the 1st and 15th of
every month... and will contain 16 pages octavo.”
(8) Extract from a letter to the editor published in the Painesville [Ohio] Telegraph, 22
March 1831:
“A quarto Bible now in this village, was borrowed....”
(9) Joseph Smith, History of the Church, II:167n.
“The Evening and Morning Star as first published was a quarto, but the
Messenger and Advocate was to be published in octavo form for greater
convenience in binding and preserving. It was also announced that the
two volumes of the Star would be reprinted in octavo form; which, by the
way, was done.”
(10) Brigham Young, History of the Church, VII:558.
“CHURCH PUBLICATIONS FOR THE PERIOD
“During the year 1845 there was published the Times and Seasons,
fortnightly, octavo, edited by John Taylor, Nauvoo, Illinois.
“The Nauvoo Neighbor, weekly, folio, edited by John Taylor, Nauvoo,
Illinois.
‘The Millennial Star, fortnightly, octavo, edited by Wilford Woodruff and
Thomas Ward, Liverpool.
“The Prophet, weekly, folio, edited by Samuel Brannan, New York,
which ended May 24th and was succeeded by
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“The New York Messenger, July 25th, quarto, edited by Parley P. and
Orson Pratt.”
(11) “History of Joseph Smith” in LDS Times and Seasons, III,14: 785.
“Mr. Harris... returned again to my house about the twelfth of April...
and so we continued until the fourteenth of June..., by which times he
had written one hundred and sixteen pages of manuscript on foolscap
paper.”
(12) “Diary of Joseph Smith, III,” entry for April 20, 1885:
“Visited James Whitehead had chat with him. He says he saw the
Rev[elation].--about 1 page of foolscap paper.”
(13) R.S. and M.C. van Wagoner essay on Orson Pratt, Jr. in Dialogue, XXI, 1: 89.
“[The] principals of the “Literary Mutual Improvement,” published the
first issue of a semi-monthly manuscript newspaper, the Veprecula. Each
of the men contributed a foolscap page of matter in each issue....”
(14) LDS Times and Seasons, II, 21: 534.
“THE subscriber would respectfully announce to the citizens of this
county, and vicinity, that he has just received and will keep constantly on
hand, a general assortment of STATIONERY Such as... Ruled and plain
foolscap; Ruled and fancy colored Letter paper....”
(15) History of Wilford Woodruff, 296.
“April 4 [1838].--Mr. Kent, the postmaster, showed me a letter
containing two sheets of foolscap....”
(16) “Wilford Woodruff's Journal,” III: 478 & 484.
p.478:
“[August] 22d [1849] I wrot A full letter of foolscap to Elder
Allexander Badlam....”
p.484:
“[September] 28th [1849] I wrote A foolscap sheet full to John
Benbow....”
(17) LDS Evening and the Morning Star, I,5: 36 (October, 1832).
“Mr. Ross Cox in his six years pegrinations, and singular adventures...
among various tribes of Indians... hitherto unknown; all of which have
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been thrown before the public in the shape of a goodly octavo, by the
Messrs. Harpers.”
(18) The Seer, II,8: 306 (August, 1854).
“All the multiplied and varied duties of one year might possibly be
printed on one hundred octavo pages....”
(19) LDS Times and Seasons, III,3: 615.
“ ‘Prairie Flower’... is a neat literary work of 24 octavo pages”
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APPENDIX II.
BOOK OF MORMON WORDPRINT ANALYSIS
In his review of The Spalding Enigma, Roper cites Ernest Taves (Trouble Enough, 1984)
as saying:
“It has been suggested that there was another Spaulding work, that the
manuscript Hurlbut unearthed was not what everyone was referring to
as Manuscript Found.... If there was another Spaulding manuscript
would it not be stylistically similar to the one Hurlbut found, and thus
have little in common with the Book of Mormon? Only a skillful writer...
can significantly alter his way of writing. Whatever else can be said of
Joseph Smith and Solomon Spaulding, neither was a skillful writer. It
suffices to read a page or two of Joseph Smith and of Spaulding to
understand that those pages were written by different writers.”
He then suggests that empirical support for this view can be found in wordprint studies
of The Book of Mormon, citing Wayne Larsen, Alvin Rencher and Tim Layton’s, “Who
Wrote the Book of Mormon? An Analysis of Wordprints,” BYU Studies XX:3 (1980),
225–51, a “careful and important critique of this article” by D. James Croft, “Book of
Mormon ‘Wordprints’ Re-examined,” Sunstone, (March–April 1981): 15–21, and finally
John L. Hilton’s “more reliable study,” “On Verifying Wordprint Studies: Book of
Mormon Authorship,” in Reynolds, ed. Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited, 241.
Roper does not mention, however, that Croft’s skepticism is supported by H.V. Hong’s
studies on the works of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who wrote his early work
under a variety of pseudonyms so he could present distinctive viewpoints in a complex
dialogue. According to Hong, who is a recognized authority on the writings of
Kierkegaard and apparently something of a computer expert as well, studies show that the
Danish existentialist was capable of adjusting his wordprint according to the various
pseudonyms he used when writing.
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It might also be recalled that some authors can alter their writing style to a great extent.
Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court contains the same wry
humor as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but it reads very differently from the
Mississippi River tales. Twain incorporated a lot of Mallory's The Daeth of Arthur into
his manuscript, and he mimicked Mallory's narrative style to a certain extent. If that same
book had been edited by another writer, and then perhaps had been re-written with the
help of yet another writer, the final results might read so little like Huckleberry Finn as to
have no seeming relationship to the latter volume.
Blake T. Ostler, in his review of Noel B. Reynolds, Book of Mormon Authorship: New
Light on Ancient Origins, (1982) in Dialogue, XVI:4, 142, adds this comment:
“To assume that Nephi had access to a King James Bible or that he was
acquainted with nineteenth-century Arminian theology in the sixth
century B.C. is beyond the bounds of competent scholarship. Yet this is
precisely what must be assumed if the wordprint is to be taken seriously.
Even given this criticism, however, the results of the wordprint study
must be explained. Perhaps the wordprint analysis tells us more about
computers than about the Book of Mormon.”
While wordprint analysis may be a valuable tool in cases of disputed authorship, it can
only produce meaningful results in instances where a specific text is purported to have
been written by a specific author. In other words, if only Spalding, or Smith, or Cowdery,
or Rigdon was individually responsible for creating The Book of Mormon, wordprint
comparison with their known writings might (and we reiterate might) produce interesting
results. Contaminate the sample, however, and the odds of producing a useful result
diminish with the degree of contamination. In the case at hand, the contamination is
considerable.
If our hypothesis is correct, we are dealing with a manuscript here that was originally
authored by Spalding, revised and reworked by Rigdon, further revised and recast by
Cowdery, and then ultimately paraphrased by Smith to several different “scribes,” the
last of whom was Cowdery himself, before taking its final form as The Book of Mormon,
1830 edition (which text has since undergone a number of official revisions at the hands
of the LDS). Can wordprint produce valid results under such circumstances? We think
not.
It should also be recognized that much of The Book of Mormon was composed in a highly
repetitive and limited vocabulary. Take anybody’s known writings, and edit the text to
include hundreds of “Yea, and beholds,” “wherefores,” and “Then it came to passes,”
and it is possible to so distort the word-print, that the original author’s “voice” is lost
among all the repetitive verbiage.
Moreover, since the degree of contamination would hardly be uniform throughout, one
might well expect wordprint analysis to produce results which would suggest multiple
authors for The Book of Mormon while at the same time rejecting the likelihood of
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specific authorship of any of the four candidates above. (Note that Hilton’s study only
focused on three of these four; Rigdon not having been considered. Moreover, Hilton’s
unabashed declaration that the purpose of his study was to “bolster the establishment of
faith” does little for his credibility outside of that faith. Ref. Hilton, “On Verifying
Wordprint Studies: Book of Mormon Authorship,” BYU Studies XXX [Summer 1990]:
101. Hilton is, by his own acknowledgement, a faithful Latter-day Saint. Sunstone 7:3
[May 82], 2.)
Composite texts, written in affected and repetitious King James-style biblical English will
naturally be very difficult to word-print. Rather than investigators searching for the most
likely and least likely author, they would be better advised to first of all sort out the
internal structure of the text, and determine its degree of literary diversity. Only after the
book has been “de-constructed” in this manner, can we expect to match its various
internal divisions to any one of a number of suspected authors—one section may better
match a certain suspected author than does another section. And, if there indeed were
multiple authors, some sections of the book may be so intermixed with different
“voices,” as to defy all word-printing.
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APPENDIX III.
RELIGIOUS MATERIAL IN THE BOOK OF MORMON
AND THE THE KING JAMES BIBLE CONUNDRUM:
According to Roper:
“In their statements published by E. D. Howe, former Spalding
neighbors claimed that Spalding’s manuscript was identical or nearly
identical to the historical parts of the Book of Mormon but that the Book
of Mormon contained religious material that was not found in Spalding’s
novel.... For those familiar with the Book of Mormon, however, such
descriptions are extremely problematic.... Both Latter-day Saint and
non–Latter-day Saint critics of the Spalding theory have discussed the
problematic nature of this claim.”
Roper then quotes an 1883 rebuttal to the Spalding theory by LDS writer George
Reynolds, which he says, “sets out the nature of the problem:”
“Persons unacquainted with the contents of the Book of Mormon . . . have
suggested that Solomon Spaulding wrote the historical portion . . . and
that Joseph Smith or somebody else added the religious portion. To those
who have read the Book of Mormon, this hypothesis is supremely
ridiculous.”
This, however, is not necessarily true. Once all sides of the question have been carefully
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considered, some of us who have read The Book of Mormon find this hypothesis to be
more realistic than ridiculous. In the end, it’s really all a matter of perspective.
In a rare, candid admission by Mormon historian Hugh Nibley which he appears to have
later retracted, perhaps due to editorial pressure,
“We can never prove absolutely that the Book of Mormon is what it
claims to be; but any serious proven fault in the work would at once
condemn it. If I assume the Book of Mormon to be fraudulent, then
whatever is correct in it is merely a lucky coincidence, devoid of any real
significance. But if I assume that it is true, then any suspicious passage
is highly significant and casts suspicion on the whole thing, no matter
how much of it is right.” (Ref. Nibley, “New Approaches to Book of
Mormon Study: Part I, Some Standard Tests.” Improvement Era, LVI
[Nov. 1953]:831. Curiously, everything except the first clause was
deleted from a 1989 reprint of this article, ref. J.W. Welch, ed., “The
Prophetic Book of Mormon,” in Collected Works of Hugh Nibley,
vol.VIII [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co./FARMS, 1989],56.)
One thing about the Biblical passages found in The Book of Mormon which LDS
scholarship has never satisfactorily explained is why, if these Bible passages derive
from a 5th century text written in “reformed Egyptian” on plates of gold, as claimed by
Joseph Smith, they happen to contain a number of contextual errors peculiar to the 1611
King James (or Authorized) translation of the Holy Bible. Surely in any divinely
authentic translation of Holy Scripture, God would have at least inspired Joseph Smith
to correct the mistakes made by the 1611 translators. And surely Biblical passages
found on metal plates allegedly dating from around the 5th century C.E., regardless of
which language they may have been written in, would hardly contain errors which
managed to creep into the 1611 King James translation but which are not found in
manuscripts produced many hundreds of years, and in some cases more than a
millennium earlier. An excellent and highly scholarly treatment of this question can be
found in Stan Larson’s well-researched essay, “The Historicity of the Matthean Sermon
on the Mount in 3 Nephi,” published in Brent Metcalfe,ed. New Approaches to the Book
of Mormon, (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1993), ch.5, pp.115ff.
Mormon arguments that Joseph Smith later revised the translation he received so that it
would compare favorably to that of the 1611 Bible are largely apologetic in nature and
simply don’t wash. (See for example B.H. Roberts, “Bible Quotations in the Book of
Mormon; and Reasonableness of Nephi's Prophecies,” Improvement Era VII [Jan.
1904]: 184; S.B. Sperry, Our Book of Mormon, [Salt Lake City: Stevens and Wallis,
Inc., 1947], 190, and Answers to Book of Mormon Questions, [Salt Lake City:
Bookcraft, 1967], 112; B.T. Ostler, “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of
an Ancient Source.” Dialogue XX [Spring 1987]: 78; and Hugh Nibley, “Literary Style
Used in Book of Mormon Insured Accurate Translation.” Church News section, Deseret
Evening News, 29 July 1961.) Some Mormons even go so far as to claim that God
speaks in Elizabethan English and thus deliberately chose to quote from the King James
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Bible! (Ref. M.E. Petersen, Those Gold Plates! (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1979), 52-
56; J.E. Welch, The Sermon at the Temple and the Sermon on the Mount: A Latter-day
Saint Approach, (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book/FARMS, 1990), 131-136; and R.
Skousen, “Towards a Critical Edition of the Book of Mormon,” BYU Studies XXX
(Winter 1990):55.
The religious parts of The Book of Mormon are indeed so interwoven with the plot as to
make it difficult to believe that Spalding's original story did not contain a great deal of
religious material, no matter what early witnesses may have said. However, after
moving to Pittsburgh in 1812, it seems likely Spalding became aware of Thomas and
Alexander Campbell's primitive Christian reforms, and the other innovations in religion
going on in the diverse and progressive environment of southwestern Pennsylvania and
western Virginia. Thus, it is entirely possible that he enlarged his original story, so as to
include subtle parodies of Campbellism, revivalism, scriptural literalism, etc. If so, the
final draft of his fictional tale could have been more overtly religious than what his old
neighbors in the Conneaut area recalled reading and hearing read.
In his one known extant fictional story (Manuscript Story) Spalding includes a great
deal of “religious” material, including divine revelation given to lost mariners, a
providential passage of their ship to the New World, their organizing a religious society,
choosing a minister, resolving to build a pre-Columbian Christian church in America,
etc. Besides this, Spalding also gives details of an embellished and exaggerated
American Indian religion, in the course of which he parodies the Christian theological
arguments and viewpoints of his day. He also had a mysterious Quetzalcoatl-like holy
man found a new religion for the ancient mound-builders, complete with ersatz holy
scriptures, a religious hierarchy, seers, prophets, etc. Obviously Spalding was interested
in religion as a human phenomenon, and it would be not at all unusual if he explored
that interest in his other fictional writings. Thus, the final draft of his Manuscript Found
may have been far more religious than what his Conneaut associates ever saw.
Secondly, it should be recalled that Robert Patterson, Sr. remembered Spalding’s story
as being written in biblical style, and John Winter remembered Rigdon calling the story
a “romance of the Bible.” Redick McKee, a neighbor of Spalding’s in Washington Co.,
PA, remembered that some of Spalding’s writings featured the ancient Canaanites—a
people closely related to the Israelites, and a people whose religion was closely related
to some of the earliest Israelite religion. If Solomon Spalding wrote about the lost tribes
of Israel, he may have portrayed those people as apostates from the biblical religion—
but still a religious people, rather like the Canaanites.
Thirdly, it is the view of many people that Sidney Rigdon re-worked the Spalding story
into a more religious narrative—perhaps beginning his editing as a personal hobby, and
later adapting the results to serve as a new divine revelation. If so, and if Spalding had
already laid down the basis for some of the “lost tribes” coming to the Americas (a
topic over which Rigdon was reportedly very enthusiastic), then Rigdon’s re-vamping
of Spalding's old story might have involved mainly his injection of “Reformed Baptist”
views and expectations into an already “religious” narrative.
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Rigdon is known to have evolved away from the rational limitations of Campbellite
Christian primitivist restorationism, and to have advocated the return of divine miracles,
visitations of angels, visions, prophecy, etc. If Rigdon had already re-worked Spalding’s
story to incorporate Cambellite religious ideas, he may have also injected his own
“Rigdonite” views into the final draft of the manuscript. It is also possible that as early
as 1826, Rigdon was working secretly with Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith to
produce a prophetic “revelation” to modern Christians.
All of these influences could have worked together to create a “Book of Mormon”
which was in many ways different from what Spalding’s Conneaut associates were
aware of. And, the incremental addition of new religious material, in “layers” over a
period of two or three major re-writings, would be a logical method by which the book
was composed—at least a far more logical explanation than saying that a non-religious
story of lost tribes could be turned into the Mormon scriptures simply be the addition of
pious-sounding passages here and there.
Elder Roper is correct in raising this objection—but he has not sought for its possible
solution.
With respect to this problem, Robert J. Matthews, former dean of religious instruction at
Brigham Young University, concedes:
“The reader of the Book of Mormon is forced to decide: either Joseph
Smith was a fraud who has now been exposed through his citing biblical
passages that have been disproved by scientific investigation, or Joseph
Smith was a prophet who translated an ancient historical, doctrinal,
religious record—a new witness for Jesus Christ. There is no middle
ground to this matter without compromise and a loss of truth.” (Ref. R.J.
Matthews, “What the Book of Mormon Tells Us about the Bible,” in
Bruce A. Van Orden and Brent L. Top, eds., Doctrines of the Book of
Mormon: The 1991 Sperry Symposium, [Salt Lake City: Deseret Books,
1992], 107).
END