Undoubtedly the most significant of Joseph Smith’s treasure quests occurred on a prominent hill that is now known to Latter-day Saints as the “Hill Cumorah,” situated on the east side of the Canandaigua Road about two miles south of the Chase cabin. At that time, the hill was on the property of Randall Robinson, who did not mind the occasional attention this hill received.43 Joseph’s involvement with Robinson’s hill began, according to Joseph’s own account, on the night and early morning hours of 21-22 September 1823. Earlier that evening, according to what Martin Harris later told Palmyra minister John A. Clark, Joseph had acted as seer for a local treasure-seeking expedition.44 It had been an especially propitious night for treasure hunting. The moon was full and the evening marked the autumnal equinox,45 but as usual, the seekers returned home empty-handed. Lucy, who by this time was attending Palmyra’s Western Presbyterian Church and may have begun to have misgivings about her husband’s involvement in magic, did not mention the digging that occurred on this astrologically significant night. Instead, she related that her family stayed up late into the evening “conversing upon the subject of the diversity of churches that had risen up in the world and the many thousand opinions in existence as to the truths contained in scripture.”46 Not an unlikely topic for a late Sunday night conversation, but Lucy probably minimized the intensity of this discussion since young Joseph’s reaction was more pronounced than usual.
Lucy noticed that seventeen-year-old Joseph seemed withdrawn as if in deep contemplation. He was quiet but not unaffected. Whatever he may have felt about his part in the treasure hunt, it was undoubtedly his parents’ religious turmoil that most stirred him, in the words of his mother, “to reflect more deeply than common persons of his age upon everything of a religious nature.”47 Joseph more than any of his siblings well understood the religious quandary in which his parents found themselves. There was much that he could say, but in the swirl of emotional debate, who would hear him? Besides, he was just a youth with little standing or authority in such matters. More than anything, Joseph’s silence likely resulted from his ambivalent feelings and the high emotional price of choosing sides. Very little was resolved when the Smiths finally retired for the night.
As Joseph lay in his bed, likely troubled by his family’s religious conflicts, he may [p. 44]have prayed for deliverance—perhaps asking God to soften his parents’ hearts. He may have asked that God would give him the words to convert his father, but he knew that words alone were not sufficient to persuade. Joseph Sr.’s intellectualized approach to the Bible and Universalistic beliefs seemed like impassible barriers to Joseph Jr. From his failed attempt to persuade him in 1820/21, Joseph knew that his father resisted visionary experiences. Joseph’s line of authority with his father was his gift of seeing. Perhaps for the good of the family and his father’s future welfare, Joseph might call upon that influence to bring his father to repentance and give his family the religious harmony they so badly needed. These were desperate thoughts, but in Joseph’s mind, the situation would have called for decisive action.
He would later claim that his mind was preoccupied only with thoughts of his unworthiness before God and that he began to pray “to Almighty God for forgiveness of all my sins and follies, and also for a manifestation to me that I might know of my state and standing before him.”48 Shortly an “angel” appeared at his bedside, declaring that his sins were forgiven and that God had a special work for him to perform. This messenger proceeded to tell Joseph about a history of the ancient inhabitants of America written on gold plates and hidden in a nearby hill.
As with his first vision, Joseph’s evolving accounts of his 1823 encounter with the angel make it difficult to recover the core story. [Of the claimed "first vision"] Most noticeably, his accounts differ from those of his family and friends because he concealed the story’s original folk-magic appeal. He also added material intended to serve later purposes. In 1834-35, through his assistant Oliver Cowdery, who at that time would be writing a series of open letters to Mormons who had been expelled from “Zion” (Independence), Missouri, Joseph had the angel quote long passages from the Bible about the gathering of Israel in the last days. In 1838 the angel would paraphrase Malachi 4:5 concerning the coming of Elijah, alluding to Smith’s and Cowdery’s 1836 reception of priesthood keys from this Old Testament prophet. The manner in which Smith introduced later priesthood concepts into his 1823 interview with the angel makes one wonder if he ever viewed the vision as an empirical event. Indeed, it is difficult to treat as historical an experience which Joseph himself so freely recast. His willingness to change this and other visions in order to meet later needs prompts one to wonder whether the visions were invented to serve utilitarian purposes. I will treat Smith’s visions in terms of the evolving stories he told people about them rather than as actual events. When the anachronistic material is removed—the terms “angel” and “Urim and Thummim” and the reference to Elijah returning to reveal the “priesthood”—a story not unlike the folkloric accounts of treasures and spirit guardians emerges.
On the morning of his sleepless night, Joseph went out to work in the fields with his father and Alvin who were cutting wheat to be stored for the winter. Alvin, observing [p. 45]that Joseph stopped working and seemed preoccupied about something, urged him to work more diligently. Joseph Sr. soon noticed that Joseph had stopped again; observing his exhaustion, he sent him back to the house.
Joseph left but would not make it home. Instead, as he recalled, “in attempting to cross the fence out of the field where we were, my strength entirely failed me and I fell helpless on the ground and for a time was quite unconscious of any thing.”49 It was here, midway between his father in the field and his mother in the house that Joseph decided to make his midnight musings reality. The transformation had not come easily. Joseph had suffered a great deal of anguish and struggle. He hesitated, knowing that he would be plunged deeper into deception and fantasy but saw it as the only way.
He would later claim that he waked to the appearance of the same messenger who “again related unto me all that he had related to me the previous night, and commanded me to go to my father and tell him of the vision and commandments which I had received.”50 In Lucy’s version, the messenger asks Joseph why he had not told his father of the plates, to which Joseph responded: “I was afraid my father would not believe me.” But the messenger assured Joseph that his father would “believe every word you say to him.”51 Perhaps there is an element of truth in these accounts. Joseph hesitated until he felt prompted to proceed with his plan. Confirmation perhaps came as a “burning in the bosom,” which he would later describe as a method of receiving revelation.52
When Joseph returned to his father and brother, he told them an amazing but not entirely unfamiliar story. In relating it, Joseph did not stray far from his father’s belief in hidden treasures and guardian spirits. Unlike the “vision” Smith would later narrate for an audience that would be unreceptive to folk-magic, the earliest accounts identify the heavenly messenger as a “spirit” who visited Joseph three times in a “dream.” About June 1829, Martin Harris told people in Rochester that Joseph had been “visited by the spirit of the Almighty in a dream, and informed that in a certain hill … was deposited a Golden Bible” and that “after a third visit from the same spirit in a dream, he proceeded to the spot.”53 Reporting the activities of the first Mormon missionaries in Ohio under the direction of Oliver Cowdery, the Painesville Telegraph for 30 November 1830 would report: “The new gospel they say was found in Ontario Co., N.Y. and was discovered by an angel of light, appearing in a dream to a man by the name of Smith.”54
Locating treasures through dreams was not uncommon in Smith’s day, and thrice-repeated dreams were especially significant.55 In 1786 Silas Hamilton, a prominent leader of Whitingham, Vermont, recorded twenty-one instances of people from various locations throughout New England claiming to have located mines and [p. 46]other valuable deposits through dreams. In one instance, a “Mr. Barns of Gilford [New Hampshire] … dreamed three times in one night about said hogshead of money.”56 In her 1835 book, Traits of American Life, Sarah Josepha Hale published a late eighteenth-century legend about a Deacon Bascom, one of the founders of Newport, New Hampshire. One night the deacon was visited three times in a dream by a man clothed in black who told him where to find a silver mine under a large stone. When he proceeded to the spot and found the stone, he hesitated to uncover the treasure. After much anguish, he concluded that the dream was inspired by the devil and would bring ruin to his children, so he returned home.
http://signaturebookslibrary.org/joseph-smith-04/