Mormon History
Memories of Joe Smith - 1867
Rochester Daily Union and Advertiser – October 1, 1867
For the Union & Advertiser.
Joe Smith, the
Mormon Prophet.
_____
Messrs. Editors: -- In your
last evening's paper (Saturday) in speaking of Mr. Tucker's forthcoming book on
Mormonism, you ask who and what was Joe Smith, and you spoke of men in Western
New York who can intelligently answer these and more questions from personal
knowledge.
I knew him well before his book was published. He was then a wood-cutter on my
farm, more willing to live by his wits than his axe, and worked through the
winter in company with some twenty or thirty others, rough backwoodsmen. He and
his two associates built a rude cabin of poles and brush, covered with leaves
and earth, in the woods open to the south, with a camp-kettle in front for
cooking; and here, at night, around a huge fire, he and his companions would
gather, ten or a dozen at a time, to tell hard stories and sing songs and drink
cheap whiskey, (two shillings per gallon), and although there were some hard
cases among them, Joe could beat them all for tough stories and impracticable
adventures, and it was in this school, I believe, that he first conceived his
wonderful invention of the golden plates and marvelous revelations. And as these
exercises were rehearsed nightly to his hearers, and as their ears grew longer
to receive them, so his tales grew the more marvelous to please them, until some
of them supposed that he also believed his own stories. But of this fact,
there is no proof. He was impudent and assuming among his fellows, but ignorant
and dishonest, plausible and obsequious to others, with sufficient low cunning
to conceal his ignorance, but in my estimation, utterly unqualified to compose
even such a jumble of truth and fiction as his book contained.
The most probable theory of the origin that I remember to have heard, is that it
was that strange work of an eccentric Vermont Clergyman, written to while away
the tedious hours of long confinement by nervous debility, and this idle
production, after his decease, fell into Joe's hands, and that having learned
something of the gullibility of his cronies, this incidental matter incited in
him the first idea of turning his foolish stories to account, and thus enable
him to make the surreptitious manuscript the text book of his gross imposition.
I speak understandingly in saying he was shameless as well as dishonest, and I
relate a small matter to prove it. During the winter he was chopping for me. I
was in the habit of riding through the clearing daily to see that the brush was
piled as agreed, the wood fairly corded, and no scattering trees left uncut, and
in this way became well acquainted with the conduct of every man; and on each
Saturday took an account and paid the hands. My mode was to ride around while
each party measured their ranks and turned a few sticks on the top to show they
had been counted. In this way I one day took Joe's account, he accompanying me
and removing the sticks on the top of each rank. After thus going the rounds and
returning to the shanty, he said that he had another rank or two that I had not
seen, and led me in a different direction in a roundabout way, to wood that I
had already measured, but the sticks on top had all been laid back to their
places. I saw the trick at once, and could only make him confess his attempt to
cheat, by re-measuring the whole lot; and all this he thought would have been a
fair trick if I had not found it out. So much for the man in small things.
After he left in the spring, I lost sight of him, until my friend Judge Whiting
(long deceased) of the very respectable firm of Whiting and Butler, Attorneys,
who was then loaning money on mortgages for a trust company, asked me if I knew
anything about Joe Smith. I told him that I knew him for a great rogue in a
small way, when he informed me that he pretended to be a prophet, and was about
publishing a Book of Revelations, and had induced two credulous men in Palmyra
to apply to him (Judge W.) for money on mortgages to publish it.
I learned afterward that Joe and an associate had prevailed on a worthy citizen
of Waterloo (Col. C.) who was then in a state of great depression from the
recent loss of his wife, to join their fraternity and cast in his lot among
them; and that while they were at his home taking inventory of his effects for
the purpose, his son, a spirited young man, came in and on finding what they
were about threatened them so strongly with a prosecution as swindlers, that
they left for the time until his father had recovered from his delusion and
escaped them.
I know nothing further of his doings here, but after his removal to Ohio, when
he established a bank that failed, I was shown one of his bills, and I recollect
that on examining it I thought the device on the face of it was most admirably
appropriate, viz.: a sturdy fellow shearing a sheep. T. D. H.
Note 1: The "Col. C." mentioned in this account may have been Col. James Covill.
As for there having been a second financier for the Book of Mormon, other than
Martin Harris, see the various later Daniel Hendrix statements, in which Hendrix
recalled a Mr. Andrews of Auburn, New York having furnished money for that
purpose.
Note 2: The writer's recollection of Joseph Smith, Jr. having been a wood-cutter
at one point in his young life may well be a true one. Various early accounts
tell of the Smith family men hiring out as temporary common laborers in the
Palmyra area, or even farther afield. A Mrs. J. B. Buck
recalled Smith having worked at "lumbering" in 1818 or shortly thereafter,
this being "some years before he took to 'peeping', and before [money] diggings
were commenced under his direction." Also, a corporate
agreement between Joseph Smith, Jr. and eight others -- executed at Harmony,
Pennsylvania, on Nov. 1, 1825 -- included provision for "the widow Harper," wife
of the late Oliver Harper. Harper's business interests included timber cutting
and the shipment of logs down the Susquehanna and it appears that Joseph Smith,
Sr. and his son Joseph Smith. Jr. were employed as early as 1822 by Harper, in
various capacities, up to the time of his murder in May of 1824.