[Lorenzo Saunders]
Dear Sir. I received your note ready at hand and will try (to) answer the best I can and give all the information I can as respecting Mormonism and the first origin. ... I was cutting corn for Lawrence and went to dinner and he took dinner with us and when dinner was over they went into another room and I didn't see him again till he came to Palmyra to preach. You want to know how Smith acted about it. The next morning after he claimed to have got (the) plates he came to our house and said he had got the plates and what a struggle he had in getting home with them. Two men tackled him and he fought and knocked them both down and made his escape and secured the plates and had them safe and secure. He showed his thumb where he bruised it in fighting those men. ... The time he claimed to have taken the plates from the hill was on the 22 day of September, in 1827, and I went on the next Sunday following with five or six other ones and we hunted the side hill by course and could not find no place where the ground had been broke. There was a large hole where the money diggers had dug a year or two before, but no fresh dirt. There never was such a hole; there never was any plates taken out of that hill nor any other hill in that county, was [or?] in Wayne county. It is all a lie. No, sir, I never saw the plates nor no one else. He had an old glass box with a tile (spelling doubtful, C.A.S.) in it, about 7x8 inches, and that was the gold plates and Martin Harris didn't know a gold plate from a brick at this time. ... He had a peep stone he pretended to see in. He could see all the hidden treasures in the ground and all the stolen property. ...
[Lorenzo Saunders Letter, in Charles A. Shook, The True Origin of the Book of Mormon (Cincinnati, Ohio: Standard Publishing Co., [1914]), 134-35., as cited in Dan Vogel, Early Mormon Documents: Lorenzo Saunders To Thomas Gregg]
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