[Roswell Nichols]
... I lived a neighbor to the said family about two years. ... he [Joseph Smith Sr.] told me that he had received an express command for me to repent and believe as he did, or I must be damned. I refused to comply, and at the same time told him of the various impositions of his family. He then stated their digging was not for money but it was for the obtaining of a Gold Bible. Thus contradicting what he had told me before: for he had often said, that the hills in our neighborhood were nearly all erected by human hands--that they were all full of gold and silver. And one time, when we were talking on the subject, he pointed to a small hill on my farm, and said, "in that hill there is a stone which is full of gold and silver. I know it to be so, for I have been to the hole, and God said unto me, go not in now, but at a future day you shall go in and find the book open, and then you shall have the treasures." He said that gold and silver was once as plenty as the stones in the field are now--that the ancients, half of them melted the ore and made the gold and silver, while the other half buried it deeper in the earth, which accounted for these hills. Upon my enquiring who furnished the food for the whole, he flew into a passion, and called me a sinner, and said he, "you must be eternally damned."
[Eber D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed (Painesville, Ohio: E. D. Howe, 1834), 257-58., as cited in Dan Vogel, Early Mormon Documents: Roswell Nichols Statement]
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