Kinderhook Plates

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Front and back of four of the six Kinderhook plates are shown in these facsimiles, which appeared in 1909 in History of the Church, vol. 5, pp. 374–75.

The Kinderhook Plates were a set of 6 small, bell-shaped pieces of brass with strange engravings discovered in 1843 in an Indian mound near Kinderhook, Illinois.

Designed to appear ancient, the plates were in fact a forgery created by three men (Bridge Whitten, Robert Wiley, and Wilburn Fugate) in Kinderhook who were hoping to trick Latter Day Saints (Mormons), whose headquarters at the time were in nearby Nauvoo. According to Latter Day Saint belief, the Book of Mormon was originally translated from a record engraved on Golden Plates by the ancient inhabitants of the Americas.

The forgers intentionally "discovered" the plates in the presence of a Latter-day Saint neighbor, who took them to the prophet and church founder, Joseph Smith, Jr. According to William Clayton's journal (Clayton was the personal secretary to Joseph Smith), Smith had begun to "translate" the writing on the plates, but with Smith's assassination in 1844 and the subsequent removal of most of the Latter-day Saints from Illinois, no translation was ever completed or published, and some question whether Smith ever commenced his translation. ^{[citation needed]}

The Kinderhook Plates were presumed lost, but for decades The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published facsimiles of them in its official History of the Church — pointing to them as a evidence that ancient Americans wrote on metal plates. The LDS Church now acknowledges the plates as a hoax, and makes no attempt at defending their authenticity. They also make note that there is no proof that Joseph Smith made any attempt to translate the plates. "There is no evidence that the Prophet Joseph Smith ever took up the matter with the Lord, as he did when working with the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham."^[1] Most Mormons look at the events surrounding the plates as little more than historical trivia, ^{[citation needed]} though often the story is used by opponents of the church as evidence that Joseph Smith was a false prophet.

In 1920, one of the plates came into the possession of the Chicago Historical Society. Several tests were done on the plate in years to come with mixed results. ^{[citation needed]} Some determined the engravings were etched, whereas others concluded they were acid etched as the historical record attests. In 1980 Professor D. Lynn Johnson of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University used various scanning devices and concluded the “the plate owned by the Chicago Historical Society is not of ancient origin” and that the plates were in fact etched with acid.^[1]

In 1966 a plate similar to one of the Kinderhook Plates was recovered and tested at Brigham Young University and Northwestern University. The insciptions matched facsimilies of the plate published contemporaneously, and the presence of a dent that had been interpreted in the facsimilie as part of a character indicated that the plate was one of the Kinderhook Plates. The tolerances of its metal proved consistent with the facilities available in an 19th century blacksmith shop, and, more importantly, traces of nitrogen were found in what were clearly acid-etched grooves. The tests were deemed conclusive and today there is general agreement that the plates are a hoax.