The Kinderhook Plates

A forgery, confessed in 1879 and proved by metallurgy in 1980 — in testing the Church itself paid for and published. The trap was real. The prophet did not walk into it.

The Charge — Stated Fairly

In April 1843, six small bell-shaped brass plates covered in strange characters were said to have been dug from a mound near Kinderhook, Illinois. They were brought to Joseph Smith in Nauvoo. And History of the Church carries a first-person passage saying: “I 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.”

The plates were fake. Wilbur Fugate confessed in 1879 that he and Robert Wiley manufactured them specifically to bait Joseph Smith.

So the charge is clean and it is serious: a man claiming to translate by revelation translated a forgery. That would be a decisive test, and it deserves a decisive answer rather than a shrug. Here is the record.

Who Proved It Was a Hoax

Start where the story usually is not told, because it reverses the moral of it.

One plate survived, held by the Chicago Historical Society. In 1980 Professor D. Lynn Johnson of Northwestern University’s Department of Materials Science examined it under microscopy and scanning analysis. His findings: the metal composition and tolerances matched what a nineteenth-century blacksmith shop could produce, and the grooves were not engraved at all — they were etched with acid, with nitrogen residue still detectable from the nitric acid used.

That matches Fugate’s 1879 confession exactly: “Wiley and I made the hieroglyphics by making impressions on beeswax and filling them with acid and putting it on the plates.”

And the results were published in the Ensign in August 1981 — the Church’s own magazine, announcing to its own members that the plates were a forgery. Read that again. The institution supposedly embarrassed by this artifact is the institution that ran the test and printed the finding.

The Quotation Is Not in Joseph’s Words

Now trace the famous sentence back to its source, because the first person is an editorial artifact.

The passage originates in the journal of William Clayton, Joseph’s clerk, writing about what he understood the plates to contain. History of the Church was compiled after Joseph’s death, and its editors followed the practice of the period: they folded material from clerks’ journals into a continuous first-person narrative under the prophet’s name.

So “I have translated a portion of them” is not a statement Joseph Smith wrote, signed, dictated, or published. It is a clerk’s note, rewritten by later hands into a voice that was not his. The Church’s own history topic on the plates says so plainly, attributing the remark to Clayton.

This matters because the entire charge depends on a claim of REVELATION. Strip the manufactured first person away and there is no such claim on the record — nothing signed, nothing published, nothing preached.

And No Translation Ever Appeared

Compare the two cases and the contrast does the arguing.

What a Real Translation Looked Like

The gold plates — a five-hundred-page book, scribes, a printer, eleven signed witnesses, and a revelation directing the entire process.

The Kinderhook plates — a remark in a clerk’s journal, no scribe, no dictation, no manuscript, no published text, and no revelation claimed. The Church’s history states that Joseph “evidently did not attempt a revelatory translation as he had done with the Book of Mormon plates,” that he “quickly lost interest in them,” and that “no translated text resulted.”

What appears to have happened is ordinary and unremarkable. Someone brought him curious characters; he compared them against the Egyptian alphabet documents he and his associates had been compiling; he offered a guess about one character; and then he set the whole thing down and moved on.

Ask what a forger would have done instead. Fugate and Wiley built a trap and delivered it personally. A fraud with a captive following and an eager audience produces a translation — a long one, quickly, with doctrinal weight attached. Joseph produced NOTHING. The bait was taken to him, and he left it on the table.

A Prophet Is Not an Instrument With No Off Switch

Underneath the objection is an assumption that scripture never supports: that a prophet, being a prophet, automatically knows everything about everything he is handed.

Samuel looked at Eliab and concluded the Lord’s anointed stood before him — and was corrected: “the Lord seeth not as man seeth” (1 Samuel 16:6–7). Nathan told David to build the temple and had to return the next day with the Lord’s actual answer (2 Samuel 7:3–5). Elisha said of a grieving woman, “the Lord hath hid it from me, and hath not told me” (2 Kings 4:27).

Revelation comes when God gives it, on His terms, about what He chooses. A man examining a curiosity in his front room and forming an opinion is a man forming an opinion — and that is exactly the category the record puts this in.

The Verdict

Kinderhook was designed as a test of the prophet. Run the test and score it honestly.

This is what the forgers intended: bait a man into translating a fake. This is what he produced: no manuscript, no dictation, no published translation, and no claim of revelation in his own hand. This is where the incriminating sentence comes from: a clerk’s journal, converted to first person by editors after the prophet was dead. This is who proved the plates were fraudulent: Northwestern University, at the Church’s request, with the result printed in the Church’s own magazine in 1981.

The strongest version of this objection needs a translation to exist. There is not one, and there never was. What is left is a hoax that failed, an editorial convention of the 1850s, and a prophet who looked at a curiosity, said something about it in passing, and went back to work.