by Jack Kelly
Lucy sent a message to her husband and son, who were returning from their treasure hunt in Pennsylvania, urging them to make haste. In her memoir published years later, Lucy wrote, “The anxiety of mind that I suffered that day can more easily be imagined than described.” Joseph Sr. rushed home, bringing money he had borrowed from Josiah Stowell, using next year’s wheat harvest as collateral. It was not enough.
A local man, Lemuel Durfee, agreed to pay the money, take possession of the farm, and allow the Smith family to live there as tenants. On December 20, 1825, title to the farm, which the Smiths had toiled and sweated over for eight years, passed permanently out of their hands.
Back in 1803, a similar calamity had crashed down on them after the ginseng debacle. Then, Lucy was twenty-eight, Joe thirty-two. Now both were in their fifties. They knew what a life of poverty meant. The loss of the first farm, Lucy remembered, “I did not feel so keenly, for I then realized we were young and by making some exertion we could better our circumstances.” Now they were old and the future glowered.
As tenants, the Smith family had to come up with a yearly rent payment. Joseph Jr. returned to Josiah Stowell’s home in the southern tier, where he could earn wages of fourteen dollars a month as a farm laborer and mill worker. The money was welcome, but another attraction drew him south. While hunting for Spanish silver the previous autumn, he had boarded in Harmony, Pennsylvania, at a tavern owned by Isaac Hale, the first white settler along that stretch of the Susquehanna. At sixty-two, Hale was a hunter of local renown. He had a daughter.
Emma Hale was a year and a half older than Joseph. She was tall and dark-haired; a visitor described her as “fine looking, smart, a good singer.” She was an excellent horseback rider, with arms hardened by canoeing up and down the river. Her people were frontier Methodists, and it was said of Emma that “she often got the power.”
When Joseph returned, he began to court her. During that winter of 1826, he even found some time to attend school. With a curious mind and a shaky grasp of spelling and grammar, Joseph welcomed the chance for some learning. During his stay, the naturally voluble young man told Josiah Stowell, his friend Joseph Knight, Knight’s sons, and probably Emma herself, about the breathtaking visit from Moroni, and the “gold book of ancient date” that he had found. He formed a small cadre of believers among the country people there. The Knights lived in Colesville, New York, thirty miles north of Harmony.
Joseph had told his mother that Emma “would be my choice in preference to any other woman I have ever seen.” But Emma’s father would not hear of a match. Smith had a bad reputation. He was, Hale said, “a stranger, and followed a business that I could not approve.” Hale knew about the money-digging, having been an investor in the business himself. In March 1826, his opposition was further hardened when Joseph was arrested and hauled into court. A nephew of Josiah Stowell had brought charges against the young man as a “disorderly person and an imposter.” He may have thought that Joseph was hoodwinking his gullible uncle.
Joseph admitted in court that he had “a certain stone, which he had occasionally looked at to determine where hidden treasures in the bowels of the earth were.” He had given up such activity of late, he said, because looking at the stone made his eyes sore. His father traveled down from Palmyra to testify for Joseph, saying that he had been mortified that his son’s “wonderful power which God had so miraculously given him should be used only in search of filthy lucre.” Josiah Stowell, far from feeling duped, stated he had “faith in the prisoner’s skill.” Joseph later told Emma’s brother Alva that seeing with a stone was “a gift from God” but that “‘peeping’ was all damned nonsense.” It was a strange double notion typical of Joseph’s homespun metaphysics.
During the trial, Joseph swore that when he looked at his stone he “discovered that time, place and distance were annihilated; that all the intervening obstacles were removed, and that he possessed one of the attributes of the Deity, an All-Seeing Eye.” It was an astounding claim.
The court found him guilty in the ambiguous case; his sentence, if any, was not recorded. He went back to work, and back to his pursuit of Emma Hale.
In January 1827, Emma visited the Stowells’ home. “I had no intention of marrying when I left home,” she later remembered. But Joseph proposed, Josiah Stowell urged her to say yes, and “preferring to marry him to any other man I knew, I consented.” Joseph was twenty-one, Emma twenty-two. Emma’s mother thought Joseph had “bewitched her.”
Having married in South Bainbridge, they traveled to Palmyra and moved in with the Smith family. A neighbor remembered, “Joseph’s wife was a pretty woman, just as pretty a woman as I ever saw.”
During the summer, Emma wrote her father. She had left everything behind and wanted to collect some clothing, furniture, and cows that belonged to her. Joseph hired his neighbor Peter Ingersoll to drive them the 150 miles to Harmony and bring the goods back. Isaac Hale was still seething over Joseph’s theft of his daughter, but the deed was done and he was unable to resist Joseph’s charm. Smith promised to steer clear of money-digging; Hale agreed to allow the couple to live on his property. He would help his new son-in-law establish himself.
First, Joseph and Emma had to return north, ostensibly to fetch their belongings, but also to keep an important date. During the journey, Smith remarked to Ingersoll that it would be hard to keep his promise to Emma’s father because of his connections to the Palmyra treasure hunters. “They want me to look in the stone for them to dig money.”
In September 1827, Josiah Stowell and Joseph Knight made what had become a regular seasonal trip to the Rochester area to buy wheat. They scheduled their visit to the Smith family to coincide with the day when the angel had instructed Joseph to make his annual pilgrimage to the hill. They were not the only ones who knew of the routine. Joseph was afraid of being waylaid by locals greedy for the “gold Bible.” Instead of waiting until the evening of September 22, he decided to make the visit on the twenty-first. Staying past midnight would fulfill his vow.
After Stowell and Knight had retired, Joseph asked his mother if she had a wooden chest with a lock. The request made her nervous. Would this be the year that the angel’s promise was fulfilled? Would her son bring back the gold plates? She had no chest, but Joseph told her not to worry. He went out, followed by Emma in her riding clothes and bonnet. They borrowed a wagon and horse belonging to Joseph Knight. They disappeared into the late-summer darkness.
We can only imagine the excitement of the young couple as they traveled the three miles to the spot so familiar to Joseph. The height that would be named Hill Cumorah overlooked the Palmyra-Canandaigua road. Emma waited in the wagon. Joseph climbed the mound. Time passed. History was about to pivot.
In the morning, Knight reported that his horse was missing. Lucy made an excuse: the animal had probably wandered to a far corner of the pasture. Joseph Sr. sat down to breakfast and asked where his son was. Give him and Emma their privacy, Lucy said.
Why was it taking so long? Lucy was well aware of how many treasure-hunting ventures had come to ruin at the last moment. If instructions were not followed to the letter, an offended spirit could snatch away the cache forever. The angel had suggested that Joseph would have the plates only “if he would Do right.”
Suddenly, Joseph walked in. He was glowing. He took his mother aside and whispered, “I have got a key!” He showed her “three-cornered diamonds set in glass” with frames that resembled old-fashioned spectacles. After breakfast, Joseph told Knight what had happened. It was “ten times Better than I expected.”
He was not sure of the significance of the plates, which were “writen in Caracters.” He would have to have them translated by scholars. But the two “keys,” which would be known as Urim and Thummim, divination tools mentioned in the Bible, excited him immensely. “I can see any thing,” he exclaimed, “they are Marvelus.”
; Returning from the hill, he had hidden the gold plates in a hollowed birch log and carefully replaced the bark. He would retrieve them later. For now, he had to be careful. During his money-digging days, he had been part of a group of searchers who pooled their talents and labor. Having renounced worldly gain from the plates, Joseph found himself in a precarious situation. “The money-diggers,” Martin Harris stated, “claimed that they had as much right to the plates as Joseph had, as they were in company together.”
As always, the relentless drumbeat of poverty sounded at Joseph’s back. The day after making his wondrous discovery, he hurried to the nearby town of Macedon to dig a farmer’s well, glad for the work.
The news of the gold plates soon reached Willard Chase, one of Joseph’s partners. Chase plotted with a dozen men to get their fair share. They sent for a necromancer and diviner who could direct them to any precious metal Smith might have hidden. The Smiths heard about this plot. They called Joseph back from his well-digging. Suddenly anxious, he retrieved the plates, which reportedly weighed fifty pounds, from the birch log. He wrapped them in his work frock and headed home. A man appeared in the forest and attacked him with the butt of a rifle. Joseph escaped. Another man assailed him, Joseph eluded him as well. Then came a third attack, just as in the Masonic story of Hiram Abiff. Unlike the ancient stonemason, Joseph managed to flee. He reached home battered and with a dislocated thumb.
He concealed the gold plates in a locked cherrywood chest that Hyrum had arranged to have made. Now everyone was burning with curiosity. Knight and Stowell asked questions. As gossip spread the news, neighbors stopped by and offered cash for a glimpse of the treasure. Joseph Sr. declared that because of the plates “my family will be placed on a level above the generality of mankind.”
Joseph looked into his seer stone to warn him of threats. The gang organized by Chase approached the house, accompanied by their hired diviner. The Smith family helped Joseph bury the wooden chest under the hearthstone of their fireplace. Just in time.
Later, they moved the plates to the nearby workshop where Joseph Sr. carried on a coopering business. They buried the box under the floor, but removed the plates and hid them in a bundle of flax in the loft. Chase returned with his sister Sally. Looking into her green glass, she determined that the treasure was nearby. The searchers tore up the floor of the shed and smashed open the expensive box. They found nothing inside.
Martin Harris took a special interest in the affair. The forty-four-year-old Palmyra farmer was a religious seeker—a Presbyterian minister called him “a visionary fanatic.” Harris stood up to Smith’s local detractors. “I do not wish to make myself a fool,” he declared, and only a fool would dismiss Joseph’s discovery without a thorough investigation. As with many country people, Harris’s credulity was combined with skepticism. To avoid being duped, he questioned members of the Smith family separately to test their stories against each other. Joseph refused to let him see the plates, but did allow him to heft their weight in the box. He told Harris to appeal to God whether they were genuine.
Harris warned Joseph that the money-diggers were planning more forceful methods for getting the plates. They might even tar and feather Smith for holding out. Joseph became alarmed. In December, he wrote to Emma’s brother Alva Hale, asking him to help move the couple back to Harmony. By now they knew that Emma was pregnant with their first child. Martin Harris lent Joseph fifty dollars. Before leaving, Joseph concealed the gold plates in a barrel of beans. A mob of men appeared but did not discover the hiding place.
Joseph and Emma endured the long trip to Harmony and settled into a small house on her father’s farm. The work of translating the gold plates was about to begin.
Ingenious
While the Irondequoit embankment was under construction, engineers were also tackling the difficult eastern section of the canal. To bypass the thundering Cahoes Falls and descend more than four hundred feet to sea level at the Hudson River required fifty-five locks. Among those working on the project was the engineering prodigy John Jervis. Hired to clear brush in 1817, the slight but sinewy twenty-one-year-old farm boy had been promoted to targetman the next year.
He was assigned to help David Bates, whom he described as “a man of very pleasant manners.” Jervis had a keen head for mathematics and for envisioning the complexities of a three-dimensional design. Bates allowed him to practice with the equipment and was himself “ready to learn,” Jervis said, “even from me.”
Jervis spent the winter of 1818 weighing stone for the locks. The following season, he found himself replacing Bates, who was to move westward, as resident engineer for a portion of the middle section. On his way home that winter, Jervis was lucky enough to borrow a copy of the Edinburgh Encyclopedia from his uncle. He studied the book’s state-of-the-art canal articles during the cold months. After another year as resident engineer, he took over as a principal builder on the eastern section under the direction of Canvass White, who was himself only thirty.
Jervis’s section, from east of Utica to Little Falls, fell a hundred feet in thirteen miles. Guided by White but increasingly making his own decisions, Jervis pushed the work forward. When water was let in to test the section, the canal leaked so badly that it had to be drained and relined with clay. Puddling was a learned art.
The work went on, the learning continued, and the eastern section was finished. In October 1823, a month after Joseph Smith first uncovered the gold plates on Hill Cumorah, DeWitt Clinton rode the prow of the canal boat DeWitt Clinton in a procession through Lock No. 1, a mile and a half above Albany. Clinton, the nation’s highest-ranking Freemason, watched his brothers give their solemn blessing to the stonework that completed the eastern section. Church bells rang, fireworks blazed, the West Point band hammered out a triumphant march. The canal was edging toward completion.
Barely a month earlier, more than two hundred miles inland, a similar celebration had unfolded. Life in the nation’s fastest-growing city, a city for which the term “boomtown” had just been invented, offered a continual stream of excitements to the citizens of Rochester. Only a hamlet a few years earlier, the town would soon be connected to the distant Hudson River by the canal that was being constructed through the middle of its business district.
By now, everyone in town knew David Bates, who had, over the past two years, overseen the work on the Irondequoit Creek embankment. He was a likeable man, smart but not snooty. When he reprimanded workers, he often accompanied the scolding with a humorous story to soften the blow.
Nathaniel Rochester had come to the area from Virginia in 1803 to speculate in western New York land. The tremendous falls, almost a hundred feet straight down, made the location ideal for mills. At first, few pioneers wanted to settle in the remote, swampy, and rattlesnake-infested area, but the rumors of a canal had sent seven hundred residents rushing to buy plots. Mills began grinding flour and sawing wood. Forges hammered iron. The town grew up almost overnight.
Bates was now supervising the building of an eight-hundred-foot-long aqueduct of his own design to take the canal across the Genesee. It would be the greatest mass of masonry along the entire canal. His friend Benjamin Wright was advising him, but it was Bates’s project. Both Wright and Bates agreed that the arches should be constructed of hard limestone shipped from quarries farther east on the canal. But the commissioners, always penny-wise, directed Bates to use the cheaper sandstone that could be had locally.
Nine stone arches, each fifty feet across at the bottom, supported the structure. Two more spanned the mill races that drew water along each bank of the river to power the factories. A feeder canal was being constructed along the bank to connect the canal to the Genesee. This channel would furnish water for the canal even as it allowed boats to navigate to and from the river.
Locals made sure that Bates understood how ornery the Genesee could be. It was the only major north-flowing waterway in th
e region, running a hundred fifty miles from Pennsylvania and draining an enormous swath of the country. It flooded every few years, having swamped the village in both 1817 and 1818. An aqueduct with its feet planted in the water would have to withstand the river’s periodic wrath.
Managing the actual construction of the long bridge was William Brittin, an experienced carpenter. Four years earlier, Brittin had built the state prison in Auburn, a Finger Lakes settlement just off the canal’s path sixty miles east of Rochester. He had served as its first warden. The commissioners considered Brittin “an ingenious and enterprising man.” Knowing of the chronic labor shortages in the region, they allowed him to employ convicts from his prison to work on the aqueduct.
“Who can contemplate without horror,” a newspaper editor gasped, “one hundred and fifty convicts, in the constant view of the children and youth of this populous settlement.” In fact, only twenty-eight laborers accompanied Brittin, all of them Irishmen who had been imprisoned for petty crimes. They joined the four hundred workmen already hired. Seven of the jailbirds took the opportunity to hightail it—none were recaptured.
Rochesterians stood along the riverbank to watch work begin in June 1821. Coffer dams were erected to divert river water, horses strained to haul stone, steel rang against steel. By autumn, Brittin’s workmen had bolted the sandstone foundation blocks solidly to bedrock in the river. Would they hold? No one knew. Trial and error was the ruling method.
That winter, river ice piled up, the water heaved, and the piers gave way. When the level dropped, watchers could see the twisted remains of the bolts. It was reported that the canal commissioners were impressed by the “prodigious violence and power” of the river. Wright begged Bates to “see that no bad material or ill workmanship is permitted.” But neither Bates nor the chief engineer could convince the cost-conscious commissioners to upgrade the materials. The bureaucrats were determined to try again with sandstone.
