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Kinderhook plates

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The Kinderhook plates were a set of 6 small, bell-shaped pieces of brass with strange engravings discovered in 1843 in an Indian mound near Kinderhook, Illinois. Designed to appear ancient, the plates were in fact a forgery created by three men (Bridge Whitten, Robert Wiley, and Wilburn Fugate) in Kinderhook who were hoping to trick Latter Day Saints (Mormons), whose headquarters at the time were in nearby Nauvoo. According to Latter Day Saint belief, the Book of Mormon was originally translated from a record engraved on Golden Plates by the ancient inhabitants of the Americas.

1 The "discovery" of the plates
2 LDS response to the plates
3 Exposure of the plates as a hoax
4 Notes
5 References
6 External links

The "discovery" of the plates

The forgers intentionally "discovered" the plates in the presence of a Latter-day Saint neighbor, who took them to the prophet and church founder, Joseph Smith, Jr. According to William Clayton's journal (Clayton was the personal secretary to Joseph Smith), Smith had begun to "translate" the writing on the plates. Upon learning of the plates, Smith sent for his "Hebrew Bible & Lexicon,"^[1] suggesting that he was going to attempt to translate the plates by normal means, rather than by use of a seerstone or direct revelation.^[2]

LDS response to the plates

In what is presumed to have been a statement made directly by Joseph Smith, page 372 of the History of the Church (DHC) reads: "I [Joseph Smith] have translated a portion of them, and find 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" (DHC 5:372). However some authors differ on the validity of the statement in the History of the Church, Diane Wirth, writing in Review of Books on the Book of Mormon (4: 210), discredits the DHC account by writing: “Joseph Smith’s supposed statement that the Kinderhook plates were authentic and that they were the ‘records of the descendants of Ham,’ came from the journal of William Clayton, who wrote in the first person, as though from the mouth of Joseph Smith. A first-person narrative was apparently a common practice of this time period when a biographical work was being compiled. Since such words were never penned by the Prophet, they cannot be uncritically accepted as his words or his opinion.” Latter-day Saint apologist Jeff Lindsay also notes that “The earliest known reference… to the Kinderhook plates as a fraud is in a private letter from W.P. Harris dated April 25, 1855, a letter which was not discovered and made known until 1912. … Another man who claimed to be in on the hoax, W. Fugate, wrote an affidavit in 1879 claiming it was a fraud. Both of these sources are puzzling. If Joseph fell for Fugate's trap in 1843, why did he wait 36 years to announce it? Why did he wait until after the deaths of the other 8 men he claimed to work with on the Kinderhook hoax? Likewise, if Harris's 1855 letter is authentic, why did he wait 12 years to write down that he had exposed Joseph Smith? If nine men had achieved their goal and successfully proven in 1843 that Joseph Smith could fall for a clumsy hoax, you can bet that nearly all of them would have been making it known far and wide right away - not years after Joseph had died. It would have been in publications, letters, newspapers, all over the place. But nothing is in the record until many years later. It really doesn't make any sense” ^[3]. As a result opinions continue to differ on whether or not Joseph Smith examined and commented on the plates. The Kinderhook Plates were presumed lost, but for decades The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published facsimiles of them in its official History of the Church — pointing to them as evidence that ancient Americans wrote on metal plates. The LDS Church acknowledged the plates as a hoax in 1981, and makes no attempt at defending their authenticity. They also make note that there is no proof that Joseph Smith made any attempt to translate the plates. "There is no evidence that the Prophet Joseph Smith ever took up the matter with the Lord, as he did when working with the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham."^[4] Most Mormons look at the events surrounding the plates as little more than historical trivia, though often the story is used by opponents of the church as evidence that Joseph Smith was a false prophet.

Exposure of the plates as a hoax

In 1920, one of the plates came into the possession of the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum). Several tests were done on the plate in years to come with mixed results. Some determined the engravings were etched, whereas others concluded they were acid etched as the historical record attests. In 1980 Professor D. Lynn Johnson of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University used various scanning devices and concluded the “the plate owned by the Chicago Historical Society is not of ancient origin” and that the plates were in fact etched with acid.^[5] In 1966 a plate similar to one of the Kinderhook Plates was recovered and tested at Brigham Young University and Northwestern University. The insciptions matched facsimilies of the plate published contemporaneously, and the presence of a dent that had been interpreted in the facsimilie as part of a character indicated that the plate was one of the Kinderhook Plates. The tolerances of its metal proved consistent with the facilities available in an 19th century blacksmith shop, and, more importantly, traces of nitrogen were found in what were clearly acid-etched grooves. The tests were deemed conclusive and today there is general agreement that the plates are a hoax.