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Letter from Glen Hardeman, 19 December 1843
Source Note
Source Note
, Letter, , St. Louis Co., MO, to JS, , Hancock Co., IL, 19 Dec. 1843; handwriting presumably of ; witnessed by P. T. Cordell; English with three lines of unknown characters in unidentified handwriting (presumably ); two pages; JS Collection, CHL. Includes address, wafer seal, postal stamp, postal notation, and dockets.
Bifolium measuring 9¾ × 7¾ inches (25 × 20 cm). The author inscribed the letter on the first and second pages and inscribed the address block on the fourth; the third page is blank. The letter was trifolded twice in letter style, addressed, and sealed with a red adhesive wafer. The letter was likely torn when opened, leaving a hole in the second leaf. The recto and verso of the second leaf contain wafer residue. Two dockets were later added, and the letter was refolded for filing.
The letter was docketed by , who served as scribe to JS from 1842 to 1844 and as temple recorder from 1842 to 1846. A later docket was inscribed by , who served as a clerk in the Church Historian’s Office (later Church Historical Department) from 1853 to 1859. The document was listed in an inventory that was produced by the Church Historian’s Office circa 1904. By 1973 the document had been included in the JS Collection at the Church Historical Department (now CHL). The document’s early dockets, its listing in a circa 1904 inventory, and its later inclusion in the JS Collection indicate continuous institutional custody.
Footnotes
- [1]
JS, Journal, 29 June 1842; “Clayton, William,” in Jenson, Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, 1:718; Clayton, History of the Nauvoo Temple, 18, 30–31.
Jenson, Andrew. Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia: A Compilation of Biographical Sketches of Prominent Men and Women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 4 vols. Salt Lake City: Andrew Jenson History Co., 1901–1936.
Clayton, William. History of the Nauvoo Temple, ca. 1845. CHL. MS 3365.
- [2]
“Obituary of Leo Hawkins,” Millennial Star, 30 July 1859, 21:496–497.
Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star. Manchester, England, 1840–1842; Liverpool, 1842–1932; London, 1932–1970.
- [3]
“Letters to and from the Prophet,” ca. 1904, [2], Historian’s Office, Catalogs and Inventories, 1846–1904, CHL.
Historian’s Office. Catalogs and Inventories, 1846–1904. CHL. CR 100 130.
- [4]
See the full bibliographic entry for JS Collection, 1827–1844, in the CHL catalog.
Historical Introduction
Historical Introduction
On 19 December 1843, composed a short letter from to JS in , Illinois, asking him to translate mysterious characters he claimed were copied from a piece of linen cloth in a stone box recently “dug out of a well” near St. Louis. Hardeman was likely Glen Owen Hardeman, an eighteen-year-old student at St. Louis’s Kemper College.
As news of JS’s translation of the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham spread across the country in the 1830s and 1840s, individuals occasionally visited or wrote to JS requesting that he translate “ancient” records in their possession. For example, in April 1842, , an Episcopalian minister and professor of divinity at Kemper College, visited “to test the scholarship” of JS’s translations. After securing an interview with JS, Caswall produced a medieval Greek manuscript and requested that JS interpret the inscribed text. Caswall later claimed JS told him the characters were Egyptian hieroglyphics, after which Caswall pronounced him a fraud; he later circulated his account of their conversation in an exposé published in . A Times and Seasons account published the following year refuted Caswall’s characterization of the meeting, stating that JS “declined having any thing to do with it” after a nervous Caswall requested a translation.
In April 1843, Kinderhook, Illinois, residents Robert Wiley and Wilbur Fugate persuaded Bridge Whitton to fashion six bell-shaped plates of brass, which they then etched with curious-looking characters. Wiley then buried them in a nearby Indian mound. He later informed local residents that he had dreamed about buried treasure in the mound and enlisted a group of men to help him exhume it. News of the discovery generated tremendous public interest. In late April, a man named Joshua Moore brought the plates to , and contemporaneous accounts indicate that JS attempted to translate at least one character etched on the fabricated plates.
’s letter appears to have been a similar attempt to entrap JS, as there are no extant accounts to corroborate the discovery of a stone box or a linen cloth inscribed with characters, and neither John Strangdon nor John E. Flays—the men who reportedly found the inscribed cloth—appear in census records or other contemporaneous sources. As a student at Kemper College, which had a very small student body, Hardeman most likely had prior contact with , who previously tried to test JS’s ability to translate ancient characters.
’s letter to JS briefly explained how he obtained a copy of the purportedly ancient characters, provided a transcript of the characters, and requested that JS translate them. Hardeman mailed the letter from on 25 December. Sometime after it was received in , JS’s clerk, , inscribed a docket summarizing the content of the letter as “Concerning Hieroglyphics.” There is no known response.
Footnotes
- [1]
Kemper College, Catalogue of the Officers and Students, 11; Hardeman, “Sketches of Dr. Glen Owen Hardeman,” 42.
Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Kemper College, for the Year 1842–43. St. Louis: Ustick & Davies, 1843.
Hardeman, Nicholas P. “Sketches of Dr. Glen Owen Hardeman: California Gold Rush Physician.” California Historical Society Quarterly 47, no. 1 (Mar. 1968): 41–71.
- [2]
Kemper College, Catalogue of the Officers and Students, 9. For more on Caswall’s account, see Historical Introduction to Letter from Reuben Hedlock, 16–17 October 1843.
Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Kemper College, for the Year 1842–43. St. Louis: Ustick & Davies, 1843.
- [3]
“Reward of Merit,” Times and Seasons, 15 Oct. 1843, 4:364–365.
Times and Seasons. Commerce/Nauvoo, IL. Nov. 1839–Feb. 1846.
- [4]
Historical Introduction to Letter from David Orr, 14 June 1843. Contemporaneous accounts suggest that JS used one or more lexicons to translate at least one prominent character from the top of one of the fabricated plates and that he shared his scholarly method of translation and its results with a group of church members and nonmembers. (Bradley and Ashurst-McGee, “Joseph Smith and the Mistranslation of the Kinderhook Plates,” 452–523.)
Bradley, Don, and Mark Ashurst-McGee. “Joseph Smith and the Kinderhook Plates.” In A Reason for Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine and Church History, edited by Laura Harris Hales, 93–115. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016.
- [5]
Caswall reportedly returned to his home country of England by June 1843; any contact with Hardeman would likely have occurred before this date or through subsequent correspondence. (Foster, “Henry Caswall: Anti-Mormon Extraordinaire,” 146; “Domestic,” 178; Caswall, America, and the American Church, 328–330.)
Foster, Craig L. “Henry Caswall: Anti-Mormon Extraordinaire.” BYU Studies 35 no. 4 (Oct. 1995): 144–159.
“Domestic.” The Spirit of Missions 8, no. 6 (June 1843): 165–191.
Caswall, Henry. America, and the American Church. 2nd ed. London: John and Charles Mozley, 1851.
Dec 19th 1843.
Dear Sir,
The folowing is a copy of what I suppose to be a Egyptian hieroglyphics. The characters were found written on a piece of linen cloth and enclosed in a stone box and dug out of a well about three miles South East of this place by John Strangdon and John E Flays. The box and all are in my possession and to you I have applied as the only person who in my estimation can give a satisfactory translation. The men are extremely illiterate who found it and would not have given it to me had I not promised to keep the secret untill I could communicate with you
[3 lines of unknown characters]
If you can give me a translation of this I will believe in you & that is all I can do
I await your answer with extreme impatience
Yours with respect
Jos Smith [p. [1]]
Source Note
Source Note
Document Transcript
Document Information
Document Information
Footnotes
Footnotes
Handwriting presumably of Glen Hardeman begins.
- [1]
In a historical account published in the 2 May 1842 issue of the Times and Seasons, JS indicated that the gold plates from which he translated the Book of Mormon were originally deposited in a “stone box” buried in a hill near the village of Manchester, New York. Henry Caswall was aware of this verbiage; in his 1843 book about JS and the Latter-day Saints, he described JS finding gold plates that were “deposited in a stone box.” (“History of Joseph Smith,” Times and Seasons, 2 May 1842, 3:771; Caswall, Prophet of the Nineteenth Century, 75.)
Caswall, Henry. The Prophet of the Nineteenth Century; or, The Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Mormons, or Latter-day Saints. London: J. G. F. and J. Rivington, 1843.
- [2]
St. Louis and East St. Louis, Illinois, had dozens of pre-Columbian mounds and mound complexes, as well as stone box grave clusters in and around the ancient Mississippian city of Cahokia. (Pauketat et al., “Mississippian Conflagration at East St. Louis,” 210–211; Collins and Henning, “Big River Phase,” 79–104; Henry M. Brackenridge, Baton Rouge, LA, to Thomas Jefferson, 25 July 1813, in Looney, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, 6:322–330.)
Pauketat, Timothy R., Andrew C. Fortier, Susan M. Alt, and Thomas E. Emerson. “A Mississippian Conflagration at East St. Louis and Its Political-Historical Implications." Journal of Field Archaeology 38, no. 3 (July 2013): 210–226
Collins, James M., and Dale R. Henning. “The Big River Phase: Emergent Mississippian Cultural Expression on Cahokia’s Near Frontier, the Northeast Ozark Rim, Missouri." Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 21, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 79–104.
Looney, J. Jefferson, ed. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series. 15 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005–2018.