This file lists every source worked up for index.md. Each entry says what the source is, which way it cuts for the Latter-day Saint claim (supports, undercuts or complicates, judged by what it shows and not by who wrote it), how much of it was read (full, part, or through another work), and whether the article cites it. Sources are named by their library key where they have one. The routes and page anchors behind each entry are in research/source-dossier.md.
The article was drafted on 4 August 2026, given footnotes on 8 August, and finished on 1 October 2026. The October pass opened the sources the August draft had only named, and re-checked every footnote.
The two testimonies and the manuscript
bofm-1830. The Book of Mormon, 1830, both testimonies. Full, from the Internet Archive scan bookofmormonacco1830smit. The subject of the article. Both testimonies are quoted whole in their 1830 wording and were diffed against the scan's text in October. Cited.
jsp-2026b. Printer's manuscript, Joseph Smith Papers. Part: the title page and manuscript pages 463–464. Complicates. The eleven names are a list in Oliver Cowdery's hand, not eleven signatures, and the Papers' note dates the change from "author and proprietor" to "translator" to 1837. Cited.
Doctrine and Covenants 17. Full, from the Church's website. Complicates. The revelation given before the event makes the sight conditional on faith and lists the objects the Three were to see. Cited inline.
The Three Witnesses
jsp-1838c. Stephen Burnett to Lyman E. Johnson, 15 April 1838. Full, Joseph Smith Papers transcript. Undercuts. A hearer's report, copied into Joseph Smith's own letterbook, that Martin Harris said he saw the plates "only in vision," and that he then stood to defend the book. The article's central document. Cited.
vogel-1998b. Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents 2 (1998). Part: the Martin Harris and John H. Gilbert collections. A documentary edition placed on the Internet Archive by its publisher. Through it were read Warren Parrish's letter of 1838 (undercuts), George A. Smith's letter of 1838 (supports), Sally Parker's letter on Hyrum Smith (supports), Harris's own letter of 1870 (supports), Anthony Metcalf's report (undercuts), Ole A. Jensen's statement (supports), Reuben P. Harmon's statement (undercuts), and John H. Gilbert's three tellings of 1879, 1892 and 1893 (undercuts). Vogel's own introduction argues that Harris admitted the visionary nature of the experience. Cited.
clark-1842. John A. Clark, Gleanings by the Way (1842), pp. 256–257. Part, with page images. Undercuts, weakly. A thirdhand report that Harris saw the plates "with the eye of faith." Cited.
tucker-1867. Pomeroy Tucker (1867), p. 71, and Jesse Townsend's letter of 24 December 1833 at pp. 288–291. Part, with page images. Undercuts. Two Palmyra reports of Harris's "spiritual eye" language. The Townsend letter was first printed here, so its date rests on Tucker. Cited.
tiffany-1859. Joel Tiffany's interview of Martin Harris, Tiffany's Monthly, August 1859. Full, in Dale Broadhurst's transcription. Complicates. Harris refuses to say how he was shown the plates, names four who saw them and leaves out the Eight, and gives dimensions and a weight. Cited.
whitmer-1887. David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (1887), with his 1881 Proclamation. Part, with page images of pp. 4, 7–10, 27 and 28. Supports sincerity; complicates the rest. Whitmer never denied his testimony, and he says God spoke to him a second time in 1838 and told him to leave the Latter Day Saints. Cited.
pratt-1878. "Report of Elders Orson Pratt and Joseph F. Smith," Millennial Star 40:49 (9 December 1878), pp. 771–774. Part: pp. 771–772, read from 400 dpi page images. Complicates. Whitmer says he saw the objects as plainly as the bed beside him, and describes a light, a table that "appeared," and many sets of plates. Cited.
vogel-2003c. Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents 5 (2003). Part: the David Whitmer and John Whitmer collections. Through it were read John Murphy's 1880 interview (undercuts, weakly), Whitmer's 1887 letter to Metcalf (complicates: "a spiritual view" and "as natural to us" in one sentence), Joseph Smith III's memory of Whitmer in 1884 (supports), the Richmond papers' deathbed reports (supports sincerity), and Theodore Turley's 1839 memorandum of John Whitmer (complicates). Cited.
democrat-1888. Richmond Democrat, 26 January 1888 p. 3 and 2 February 1888 p. 1. Part, from the Library of Congress scans. Supports sincerity. The town paper's report of Whitmer's dying testimony. Cited.
jenson-1888b. Andrew Jenson, The Historical Record 7 (1888), pp. 621–624. Part, with page images. Supports. Reprints the Democrat and records John C. Whitmer's account of his grandmother Mary Whitmer. Cited.
anderson-1968. Richard L. Anderson, BYU Studies 8:3 (1968). Full. Supports. Prints Oliver Cowdery's 1848 statement that he "beheld with my eyes, and handled with my hands, the gold plates." The strongest single item against the article's verdict, and the article says so. Cited.
dunbar-1886. Chicago Sunday Inter Ocean, 17 October 1886. Part, in Broadhurst's transcription. Complicates. Whitmer at eighty-one is reported calling the Kirtland temple visitation "a grand fizzle." Late, through a reporter, and the paper names the wrong city. Cited, with those cautions.
The Eight Witnesses
whitmer-1836b. John Whitmer, "Address," Messenger and Advocate 2:6 (March 1836), pp. 286–287. Part, from page images. Supports. A first-person printed statement that he saw and handled the plates. The August draft did not know of it. Cited.
anderson-2005b. Richard L. Anderson, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 14:1 (2005). Part: p. 23 read closely. Supports. Argues that Turley's phrase "supernatural power" came from Turley and not from John Whitmer. Cited. The rest of the article was not worked through.
Lucy Mack Smith, History, 1845, Joseph Smith Papers, manuscript pp. 154–157. Part. Complicates. The only account of the setting of the Eight's experience, in which the plates are brought to the spot "by one of the ancient Nephites." Cited.
vogel-2024. Emma Smith's "Last Testimony" (1879). Full, in Vogel's transcription. Supports the existence of an object; says nothing of its origin. Cited.
smith-1839. Hyrum Smith, "To the Saints scattered abroad," Times and Seasons 1:2 (December 1839), pp. 20–24. Full for the passage; p. 23 read from the page image. Supports. A printed first-person statement by one of the Eight: he would rather die "than deny the things which my eyes had seen, which my hands had handled, and which I had borne testimony to." It does not name the plates. Found through Anderson 1981, p. 148, by the verification pass of 1 October 2026. Cited.
mclellin-1847. Hiram Page to William E. McLellin, 30 May 1847, Ensign of Liberty 1:4 (January 1848), p. 63. Full for the passage, read from the page image. Supports and complicates. Page will not say he knew a thing true in 1830 and false in 1847, nor that he "had forgotten what I saw"; the same letter reports "holy Angels who came and showed themselves to me as I was walking through the field." Cited.
The strongest Latter-day Saint case
Richard Lloyd Anderson, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (Deseret Book, 1981). Part: chapters 11 and 12 in full, and pp. 24, 74, 86–88, 129–131, 134 and 147 by phrase search. Supports. The Internet Archive copy (investigatingboo0000ande) is print-disabled and was read through bin/iapdsearch.py; nothing of it is kept and it has no library row. His case is stated in six parts in the article and answered in seven. Cited.
jsp-2026, jsp-1830, jsp-1838b. Full for the passages used. The Church's own historians on the eleven men's lives, the printing contract, and Joseph Smith's "too mean to mention" letter. Cited.
putnam-1966. Read H. Putnam, "Were the Golden Plates Made of Tumbaga?", Improvement Era 69:9 (September 1966), pp. 788–789, 828–831. Full for the weight argument. The Latter-day Saint model's own position on the plates' weight: not pure gold, a gold and copper alloy of 8 to 12 carats, about half the stack air, 53 to 86 pounds. Stated in the article before its own arithmetic. Cited.
smith-1842. Joseph Smith, "Church History," Times and Seasons 3:9 (1 March 1842), p. 707. Full for the passage (Joseph Smith Papers transcript). Joseph Smith's own description: plates with "the appearance of gold," six by eight inches, the volume "something near six inches in thickness." Cited.
rlds-1879. Saints' Herald 26 (1879), OCR of the Internet Archive scan. Part. Used only to fix the page of the Emma Smith passages (page 290, not 289) and to confirm their wording against Vogel's transcription. Cited in the source note to the Emma Smith interview.
The control cases
jsp-1835. Joseph Smith, Journal, entries for 21 January, 27–30 March and 3 April 1836. Part. Complicates. The same men report angels again at Kirtland, David Whitmer among them, and a vision of Christ to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery is described as seen when "the eyes of their understandings were opened." Cited.
stewart-1843. The Shakers' Sacred Roll (1843). Full text searched; pp. 292, 303, 304 and 322 read from page images. Undercuts the argument from numbers. Ninety named living signers, counted for this article; eight sign a joint statement that they saw the angel, and at least nineteen more say so singly. Cited.
stein-1996. Stephen J. Stein, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 105 (1996). Full. A historian's account of the Shaker book. Some of its visionaries later left, and the Society dropped the book. It corrected the August draft's claim that the Shaker witnesses "did not recant." Cited.
strang-1991. James J. Strang, Book of the Law of the Lord, testimony of seven witnesses. Part, in the 1991 reprint. Undercuts the argument from form. Cited, with the caution that the 1851 printing was not opened.
taylor-1843. Times and Seasons 4:12 (1 May 1843), pp. 185–187. Part, from page images. Undercuts. The Church's paper takes the Kinderhook plates as evidence for the Book of Mormon and prints nine men's certificate. Cited.
wyl-1886b, pp. 207–208. Wilbur Fugate's sworn letter of 30 June 1879. Part. Undercuts. The plates were a hoax and seven of the nine signers did not know it. Cited.
kimball-1981. Stanley B. Kimball, Ensign, August 1981. Full. The Church's magazine reports the 1980 test and holds that Joseph Smith "did not fall for the scheme." Cited.
Joseph Smith, Journal, 7 May 1843, with the Papers' editorial note quoting William Clayton. Part. Complicates. Cited.
The alleged denials
tribune-1875. Part, in Broadhurst's transcription. The source of "a bottle of smoke," which is an unnamed correspondent's line and not William E. McLellin's. Cited, and the item is retired.
shook-1914, pp. 58–59. G. J. Keen's affidavit of 14 April 1885. Part. Undercuts, moderately. Cowdery joined a Methodist church at Tiffin and said he was "sorry and ashamed of his connection with Mormonism." Cited.
gates-1912, pp. 418–419. Part. Supports, weakly. A son's oath to his father's memory of Cowdery, sixty-three years on. Cited.
cole-1829. The Palmyra Reflector, September 1829. Part, in Broadhurst's transcription. Shows the book was being mocked in print before it was published. Cited.
Considered and not used
howe-1834 is cited for Harris's finances and the "partial derangement" line. The eight Hurlbut statements in the same book belong to the Spaulding article and are not used here.
ashurst-mcgee-2020 and the Bradley and Ashurst-McGee chapter it summarizes. Not used here. The question of what Joseph Smith did with the Kinderhook plates is argued in the article on his prophetic gift, and this article links to it.
jenson-1887b. Checked in August and not used; the witnesses material is in volume 7.
Vogel's Early Mormon Documents volumes 1, 3 and 4. On the Internet Archive from the same publisher upload and not opened. Volume 3 holds the Tucker, Townsend and Eight Witnesses collections and is the first thing a further pass should read.
Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History (1946), and Harry Beardsley (1931). Not opened. They appear only as Anderson quotes them.
Not reached, and what was tried
- Richmond Conservator, 25 March 1881 and 26 January 1888. Read through Whitmer's own 1887 reprint and through Vogel. No scan was found by web search.
- Hamiltonian (21 January 1881) and Kingston Times (16 December 1887), the Murphy interview. Read in Vogel. No scan sought.
- Evangelist (Carthage, Ohio), 1 October 1838, Warren Parrish's letter. Read as Vogel quotes it.
- Anthony Metcalf, Ten Years Before the Mast (1888). Not found on the Internet Archive by title. Read in Vogel.
- William Clayton's manuscript journal. Not published in full. Read as the Joseph Smith Papers editors and Kimball quote it; the two agree.
- Deseret News, 16 November 1878. Not sought; the Millennial Star reprint was read from images.
- Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States (1875). Not opened; quoted through Stein.
- Strang's 1851 printing. Read in the 1991 reprint.
- Reuben Miller's journal, Sally Parker's letter, Theodore Turley's memorandum. Manuscripts, read through Anderson and Vogel.
- Page images of Anderson's 1981 book. The copy is print-disabled; only its search text can be read.
- The source for Josiah Stowell seeing a corner of the plates. Not opened. The article says so.
Two sites answered with a bot challenge during the October pass: the Library of Congress, after about twenty requests, and Brigham Young University's repository. Work on each stopped there. The Richmond Democrat for March 1881 is in the same Library of Congress collection as the 1888 issues and may carry Whitmer's Proclamation. That is the best lead left.