Kinderhook plates: Examining a nineteenth-century hoax, The

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2003 by Peters, Jason Frederick

In 1854, Robert Wiley graduated from a medical school in St. Louis.64 The school had been established by Dr. J.N. McDowell in 1845. Wiley gave the plates to McDowell for the museum of antiquities on the campus. During the Civil War, McDowell, a southern sympathizer, served as a physician for the Confederacy. Viewed as a traitor in St. Louis, McDowell's college was turned over to the United States army in 1861 and was used as a prison. Members of the 2nd Iowa Reserve regiment ransacked the prison and the plates disappeared.65 With the plates gone, it seemed the story would soon be forgotten. However, one of the conspirators would soon come forward and rekindle a debate over the authenticity of the plates.

The first major challenge to the church's position on the Kinderhook plates came from one of the original three conspirators, Wilburn Fugate. In a letter to James T. Cobb in June 1879, a nearly eighty-year old Fugate described the plates as "a HUMBUG gotten up by Robert Wiley, Bridge Whitten, and myself." Fugate continued to trace the events from the reading of Pratt's A Voice of Warning to the manufacturing of the plates, through the staged discovery itself. Cobb, an anti-Mormon living in Salt Lake City, made the letter public and touched off a controversy that would persist for the next one hundred years.66 Many Mormons hoped to prove the authenticity of the Kinderhook plates in order to further validate the discovery of the original golden plates. Anti-Mormons, however, hoped to use the plates to expose Smith as a false prophet.

Fugate's letter that exposed the plates as a hoax was a direct challenge to the Church's position on the subject and had the potential to cause a great embarrassment. Many of the Nauvoo men who had addressed the discovery of the plates had became very important members of the church. After the death of Brigham Young in 1877, John Taylor became the third president of the church. He was followed by Wilford Woodruff in 1887. While in Nauvoo, Taylor and Woodruff edited the Times and Seasons and the Nauvoo Neighbor, publishers of the Kinderhook plates broadside. The Mormon Church was already under fire for their doctrine of polygamy; this new controversy would have to be addressed and dealt with soon.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Mormon scholars, including noted historian B.H. Roberts, began compiling and expanding the History of Joseph Smith published in the Deseret News and Millennial Star in the 1850s into the multi-volume, History of the Church.67 Included in this work was the May 1843 journal entry of Smith's secretary, William Clayton, concerning the plates, which had been altered to seem as if written by Smith. In order to address the situation, Roberts explained the church's position on the plates in a lengthy footnote. He argued that since Fugate waited until 1879 to expose Smith as a fraud (when the plates were conveniently missing), Fugate's story, not the plates, was a hoax.68 Aside from the thirty-six year wait and the unavailability of the plates, the fact that the other conspirators were not available for comment had convinced the church that Fugate's only motive was to discredit Joseph Smith.69 The church dismissed the letter. After the initial publication of the History of the Church in 1909, this became the official church position on the subject and influenced all church publications on the topic for the next seventy years.