* Millennial Harbinger, 1844, p. 39. The Rev. Alexander Campbell
testified that this conversation took place in his presence.
One of the elders of the Disciples' church was Darwin Atwater, a farmer, who afterward occupied the pulpit, and of whom Hayden says, "The uniformity of his life, his undeviating devotion, his high and consistent manliness and superiority of judgment, gave him an undisputed preeminence in the church." In a letter to Hayden, dated April 26, 1873, Mr. Atwater said of Rigdon: "For a few months before his professed conversion to Mormonism it was noticed that his wild extravagant propensities had been more marked. That he knew before the coming of the Book of Mormon is to me certain from what he said during the first of his visits at my father's, some years before. He gave a wonderful description of the mounds and other antiquities found in some parts of America, and said that they must have been made by the aborigines. He said there was a book to be published containing an account of those things. He spoke of these in his eloquent, enthusiastic style, as being a thing most extraordinary. Though a youth then, I took him to task for expending so much enthusiasm on such a subject instead of things of the Gospel. In all my intercourse with him afterward he never spoke of antiquities, or of the wonderful book that should give account of them, till the Book of Mormon really was published. He must have thought I was not the man to reveal that to."*
* "Early History of the Disciples' Church in the Western
Reserve," p. 239.
Dr. Storm Rosa, a leading physician of Ohio, in, a letter to the Rev. John Hall of Ashtabula, written in 1841, said: "In the early part of the year 1830 I was in company with Sidney Rigdon, and rode with him on horseback for a few miles.... He remarked to me that it was time for a new religion to spring up; that mankind were all right and ready for it."*
* "Gleanings by the Way," p. 315.
Having thus established the identity of the story running through the Spaulding manuscript and the historical part of the Mormon Bible, the agreement of the doctrinal part of the latter with what was taught at the time by Rigdon and his fellow-workers in Ohio, and Rigdon's previous knowledge of the coming book, we are brought to the query: How did the Spaulding manuscript become incorporated in the Mormon Bible?
It could have been so incorporated in two ways: either by coming into the possession of Rigdon and being by him copied and placed in Smith's hands for "translation," with the theological parts added;* or by coming into possession of Smith in his wanderings around the neighborhood of Hartwick, and being shown by him to Rigdon. Every aspect of this matter has been discussed by Mormon and non-Mormon writers, and it can only be said that definite proof is lacking. Mormon disputants set forth that Spaulding moved from Pittsburg to Amity in 1814, and that Rigdon's first visit to Pittsburg occurred in 1822. On the other hand, evidence is offered that Rigdon was a "hanger around" Patterson's printing-office, where Spaulding offered his manuscript, before the year 1816, and the Rev. John Winter, M.D., who taught school in Pittsburg when Rigdon preached there, and knew him well, recalled that Rigdon showed him a large manuscript which he said a Presbyterian minister named Spaulding had brought to the city for publication. Dr. Winter's daughter wrote to Robert Patterson on April 5, 1881: "I have frequently heard my father speak of Rigdon having Spaulding's manuscript, and that he had gotten it from the printers to read it as a curiosity; as such he showed it to father, and at that time Rigdon had no intention of making the use of it that he afterward did." Mrs. Ellen E. Dickenson, in a report of a talk with General and Mrs. Garfield on the subject at Mentor, Ohio, in 1880, reports Mrs. Garfield as saying "that her father told her that Rigdon in his youth lived in that neighborhood, and made mysterious journeys to Pittsburg."*** She also quotes a statement by Mrs. Garfield's** father, Z. Rudolph, "that during the winter previous to the appearance of the Book of Mormon, Rigdon was in the habit of spending weeks away from his home, going no one knew where."**** Tucker says that in the summer of 1827 "a mysterious stranger appears at Smith's residence, and holds private interviews with the far-famed money-digger.... It was observed by some of Smith's nearest neighbors that his visits were frequently repeated." Again, when the persons interested in the publication of the Bible were so alarmed by the abstraction of pages of the translation by Mrs. Harris, "the reappearance of the mysterious stranger at Smith's was," he says, "the subject of inquiry and conjecture by observers from whom was withheld all explanation of his identity or purpose."*****
* "Rigdon has not been in full fellowship with Smith for more
than a year. He has been in his turn cast aside by Joe to make room for
some new dupe or knave who, perhaps, has come with more money. He
has never been deceived by Joe. I have no doubt that Rigdon was the
originator of the system, and, fearing for its success, put Joe forward
as a sort of fool in the play."—Letter from a resident near Nauvoo,
quoted in the postscript to Caswall's "City of the Mormons". (1843)
* For a collection of evidence on this subject, see Patterson's
"Who Wrote the Mormon Bible?"
** "Scribner's Magazine," October, 1881.