Don Bradley on Joseph's Translation Stones (Part 1)

Mark Ashurst McGee, a good friend from BYU, did his master’s thesis largely on the Joseph Smith seer stones. Among other things, Mark examined traditional scribes who had used seer stones in European traditions—what characteristics made for a good stone? The literature suggested that opaque stones were less effective than clear or transparent ones. This led Mark to a compelling hypothesis: perhaps Joseph had progressed from a brown stone (less clear) to a white stone to interpreters (supposedly transparent). This progression aligned with the historical model he’d observed, so he interpreted the sources through this lens. Mike McKay, who worked with Mark on the Joseph Smith Papers, adopted this model as well.

However, the problem is that historical sources are messy. In this case, they’re nearly impossible to reconcile. We have multiple sources about the finding of Joseph’s seer stones, but they disagree on which stone he found first—the brown or the white. No way exists to make them all agree. Historians must therefore determine which account is closest to Joseph’s actual experience.

Mark’s analysis concludes that Joseph found the brown stone first. He looked in Sally Chase’s stone and saw another stone off the shores of Lake Erie, 150 miles away. He made the trek to obtain it. For the Chases, here’s the white stone. Then in 1827, an angel gave him a stone box containing the interpreters. This creates the clear progression Mark proposes.

However, I see this differently regarding those first two stones. One issue I see with the model—and there are several—involves the striking difference in the narratives of how he obtained them. One is a quest. He looks in the girl’s seer stone and must wait years to make this trek of about 150 miles. It’s dramatic. There’s the narrative of him digging all night under a tree, finding the stone, washing it in a creek, putting it in his hat, and time and space are obliterated—he can see anything and has acquired one of the attributes of deity, an all-seeing eye. This account comes from the W.D. Purple record of Joseph Smith’s 1826 hearing. I can offer several reasons to think Purple is accurate.

But Joseph obtained the other stone very differently. There’s no grand narrative of a quest. He’s simply digging a well with the Chases. He’s not even the one who finds this stone—Willard Chase finds it. Joseph asks to borrow it, looks at it, and says, “This is a seer stone, can I borrow this?” and ends up keeping it.

We know that Joseph gave the brown stone to Oliver Cowdery in 1829 after the Book of Mormon was translated. He kept the white stone the rest of his life. Why does he keep one stone and not the other? How does he decide which to give away? If the brown stone is the one for which he made this grand quest, it would seem to be the more valuable one. The stone requiring a quest would be the one he’d keep. Yet the one he keeps is the white stone.

Additionally, in Mark’s reconstruction, if the hierarchy of stone quality goes from brown to white to transparent interpreters, why does Joseph consistently use the white stone to translate the Book of Mormon? Why use the inferior stone when a superior one is available? I can offer only one explanation: the Chase Well stone would have been found within a couple of miles of Cumorah. There’s a connection between the Book of Mormon record and the seer stone due to proximity. Finding it nearby meant Joseph associated it with the record itself, so he used that stone for translation.

I don’t think Mark’s account can provide an explanation for this choice—or maybe it doesn’t require one, but he simply cannot give one. Another issue Mark faces involves something historians must explain: not just the details of ‘this’ source or ‘that’ source, but the spread of the sources. What explains why people interpret evidence so differently?

Consider the Fanny Alger case. Various historical sources say that relationship was either a marriage or it was adultery. As historians, we must explain not just individual sources but why people see this so differently. If it was adultery—just an adulterous affair—then why do some people, even early on, conclude it was marriage? That’s hard to explain, because adultery typically stands alone as adultery. You wouldn’t normally invoke polygamy to explain it. But if it was actually a secret polygamous marriage, and people only heard rumors about Joseph and Fanny being together, they wouldn’t assume they were married—they’d assume the default, which is adultery. Your neighbor found with a woman not married to him doesn’t automatically make you think, “This guy’s a polygamist.” The default assumption is infidelity. So if it was secret polygamy, that better explains the spread of the evidence. What we need to explain is why there is this spread of sources.