Embedded Files
1 May 1843 • Monday
Monday. I rode out with Lucien Woodworth, and paid him £ 20 for the Nauvoo House, which I borrowed of William Allen.
I have seen <insert fac similes of> the six brass plates of a bell shape, found near Kinderhook, in Pike Co. Illinois, on April 23 by Mr. R[obert] Wiley <& others> while excavating a large mound. They had found a skeleton about 6 feet from the surface of the Earth, which must have stood 9 feet high. The plates were found on the breast of the Skeleton, and were covered with ancient characters there being from 30 to 40 on each side of the plates.
At Cory Stokes request... Kinderhook Plates
Note: accounts from "hoaxers" are
--- 40 yrs after the fact...
--- do NOT agree on the method of manufacture (engraved vs. etched)
--- May 1 1843 JS Journal... says only that 6 plates were delivered to him, and that he sent W. Smith for his Hebrew Dictionary & Lexicon (anti - say this was the Book of Egyptian Alphabet & Grammar... NOT)
--- William Clayton "journal" was used to publish Joseph Smith's 1st person Times & Seasons paragraph where the words “I have translated a portion” originally read “Prest J. has translated a portion. …”
--- problem phrase is "they contain the history of the person with whom they were found. He was a descendant of Ham, through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the ruler of heaven and earth.”
--- The statement taken from William Clayton’s journal didn’t appear until September 1856 in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News.
ADDITIONAL DETAILS
a letter written in 1855 (but not published until 1912) by Dr. W. P. Harris—the same W. P. Harris who authored the statement that appeared in the Times and Seasons article. In this letter he wrote that in 1843 he had accepted the discovery of the plates as genuine. “I washed and cleaned the plates and subsequently made an honest affidavit to the same,” he said. “But since that time, Bridge Whitton [a blacksmith in Kinderhook, Illinois] said to me that he cut and prepared the plates and he (B. Whitton) and R. Wiley ENGRAVE them themselves, and that there was nitric acid put upon them the night before they were found to rust the iron ring and band. And that they were carried to the mound, rubbed in the dirt and carefully dropped into the pit where they were found.”
=> we know that by fall they were back in Robert Wiley’s possession, for on November 15 [1843] he wrote a letter to one J. J. Harding suggesting that he was interested in selling the plates to “the National Institute,”...
AND in his letter of 1855, W. P. Harris said he had heard from a fellow physician “that R Wiley graduated [from the college] since finding the plates and that Dr. Professor McDowell on surgery has the plates now in his office"...
a letter written in 1879 by Wilbur Fugate (another of those present at the excavation of the plates) to an anti-Mormon in Salt Lake City. Fugate declared that the alleged discovery of the Kinderhook plates was “a HUMBUG, gotten up by Robert Wiley, Bridge Whitton [black smith] and myself. … None of the nine persons who signed the certificate [a document included in the Times and Seasons article] knew the secret, except Wiley and I.
“We read in Pratt’s prophecy that ‘Truth is yet to spring out of the earth.’ [The quote is from Parley P. Pratt’s 1837 missionary tract Voice of Warning.] We concluded to prove the prophecy by way of a joke. We soon made our plans and executed them. Bridge Whitton cut them out of some pieces of copper; Wiley and I made the hieroglyphics BY MAKING IMPRESSIONS ON BEESWAX AND FILLING THEM WITH ACID and putting it on the plates. When they were finished we put them together with rust made of nitric acid, old iron and lead, and bound them with a piece of hoop iron, covering them completely with the rust.”
Sunday, May 7, Parley P. Pratt said..."Six plates having the appearance of Brass have lately been dug out of a mound by a gentleman in Pike Co. Illinois. They are small and filled with engravings in Egyptian language and contain the genealogy of one of the ancient Jaredites back to Ham the son of Noah. His bones were found in THE SAME VASE (MADE OF CEMENT). Part of the bones were 15 ft. underground.”...
This is nearly word-for-word what William Clayton "wrote" in his journal... except:
Pratt heard of a discovery in Pike County; Clayton said Adams County.
Pratt, said that the find was made fifteen feet underground. Clayton said six feet underground
Pratt spoke of A CEMENT VASE—an item mentioned in no other account.
Clayton mentioned a skeleton nine feet tall—also unmentioned in any other account.
Clayton said that the plates gave a history of an Egyptian; Pratt mentioned a Jaredite.
========
Ancient Records,” Times and Seasons, 1 May 1843, pp. 185–87. The Times and Seasons was published twice monthly, dated on the first and fifteenth of the month, no matter what the date of its actual release. This issue, dated Monday, May 1, picked up a story from the Quincy Whig that was published on Wednesday, May 3. Obviously it couldn’t have been published before the Whig story appeared, and in fact the editorial subhead above the story on “Ancient Records” reads “CITY OF NAUVOO, WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, 1843.” So the Times and Seasons issue in question was printed no earlier than Wednesday, May 3, and possibly a day or so later.
Hard Evidence is lacking that Joseph Smith ever concluded the plates were genuine, other than conflicting statements from members who hoped that a translation would come forth—and in fact no evidence that the Prophet manifested real interest in the “discovery” after his initial viewing of the plates. => Times and Seasons, "Ancient Records" => "Mr. Smith has had those plates, what his opinion concerning them is, we have not yet ascertained."
Quincy Whig - “...if Joseph Smith can decipher the hieroglyphics on the plates, he will do more towards throwing light on the early history of this continent than any man living.” => "We think that he has done that already, in translating and publishing the Book of Mormon, and would advise the gentleman and all interested, to read for themselves, and understand.”
Modern "scientific" dating of ONE "magical" Plate
Modern "scientific" dating of ONE "magical" Plate
1953 - it was examined by two engravers who made an affidavit stating that “to the best of our knowledge this Plate was engraved with a pointed instrument and not etched with acid”
1969 by Dr. Paul Cheesman of Brigham Young University. He secured permission from the Chicago Historical Society to bring the plate to BYU for exhaustive non-destructive testing... The plate was examined by physicists, engravers, a jeweler, a metalworker, and several photographers, with mixed results. The physicists concluded that the plate was acid-etched and of non-ancient brass; the others could not agree whether it was etched, engraved, or both. NOTE: Paul Cheesman is the SAME guy who declared the Padilla plates "fake"
1980 - performed by Professor D. Lynn Johnson of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University.... Dr. Johnson used a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to examine the grooves that form the characters on the plate to determine whether they were cut or scratched with a tool or whether they were etched with acid.... A thorough SEM examination of the characters on the plate brought Dr. Johnson to the conclusion that the characters on the plate were indeed prepared by acid etching, not by any form of tooling, scratching, or cutting.
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