Sitting in the classroom and listening to this lecture in 1789 was a young student, Ethan Smith, who would be graduated the following year. Upon leaving Dartmouth, Ethan founded and built the First Congregational Church in nearby Haverhill, New Hampshire, and served as its first pastor for nine years before moving to Hopkinton, New Hampshire and thence to the pastorate of the Congregational Church in Poultney Vermont, about 1820. While in Poultney in 1823 he wrote and published the most unusual of his several religious books. This volume, View of the Hebrews; or the Ten Tribes of Israel in America, instantly became a very popular volume across New England and the frontier. The first edition sold out quickly, and a second edition with revisions was published in 1825.

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Against the negative evidence for the Indians' Hebraic origins propounded by his former professor John Smith, Ethan argued, "If the Indians are of the tribes of Israel, some decisive evidence of this fact will ere long be exhibited". Ethan's basic theory of the degradation of lofty Hebrew to primitive Indian culture was summarized well in his 1825 second edition.

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Ethan developed this line of speculation even further in a tantalizing way. He discussed rumors of discovery of Hebrew-lettered parchment fragments that were subsequently lost. He discussed a tale told by an old Indian that his ancestors had had an old book which they had long since lost the ability to read, so they buried with an Indian chief.

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This lost-book hypothesis was all Joseph needed to add the final dimension to his story of the Moundbuilders. The fantasies arising through his dissociations had tormented him since the age of seven. Thanks to the archaeological speculations in his local newspapers, he had already begun to frame these fantasies around an imaginary culture of the Moundbuilders buried in his neighborhood. As a teenager Joseph had repeatedly recited this combination of elements to his family around the evening fireplace. Now Ethan Smith would hand him the final dimension that would increase the importance of his work by several orders of magnitude. As though building an Indian tepee, Joseph would lash together the solid pillars of Ethan's book into a rigid frame and drape the buffalo hides of his dissociated fantasies over it to create an imposing unified structure-something so impressive and different from its component parts that neither could be recognized.

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But Ethan Smith's book alone probably would not have been sufficient to have given Joseph the zeal to pursue a religious basis for his emerging project. There had also been in his teenage environment a powerful evangelical movement. The tent meetings, hellfire-breathing preachers, and crazed, born-again revivalist converts were a major part of the social scene of upstate New York in the 1820s.

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Several of Joseph Smith's biographers have suggested that certain aspects of The Book of Mormon appear to resemble material that was a part of its author's own environment and experience. Thus, the concept has developed that the book is an amalgamation of overlapping themes of personal significance to Joseph Smith, Jr. However, several less-than-obvious themes arising from his inner conflicts are probably of greater significance than many of those already outlined.

Some of the themes apparently drawn from Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews have already been described in Chapter 4. Among these is the mission of Anglo-Americans to convert the Indians to Christianity in the "latter days" and to bring them to a knowledge of their Hebraic origins, thereby bringing about the millennium.

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A second thematic source of material seems to have arisen out of the bitter anti-Masonic movement that swept upstate New York in the late 1820s. This fervor seems to have had its origins in the mysterious murder in 1826 of William Morgan, a Mason who was then in the process of printing an exposé of Freemasonry. (As will be described in Chapter 7, Morgan's widow would later become one of Joseph's plural wives.) Many of the popular anti-Masonic phrases and perceptions appear to have been given life in The Book of Mormon in the form of the secret band of "Gadianton robbers" with their satanic rituals, murderous activities, and secret laws and oaths, all working to subvert the legitimate social order.

Several other minor sources of thematic material for The Book of Mormon seem to have arisen from various other corners of Joseph's social environment, including that of American patriotic lore. A reference to the "God of Nature" in 1 Nephi 5 is possibly a paraphrase from the first sentence of the United States Declaration of Independence. Frequent references to a "land of liberty" and to the undemocratic nature of rule of kings reflect a more American nationalist viewpoint than a Hebraic one. And it seems somehow appropriate that "King Lib" should have destroyed the plague of serpents and led his people to happiness and prosperity.

The American frontier makes its appearance in spirit and substance, for example, in the imagery of hearts hardening "like unto a flint." Over and over, heroes in The Book of Mormon escape into the refuge of the wilderness, where their lives are enriched by a fresh start. The idea of being "wanderers in a strange land" was quite a familiar concept to Joseph Smith's family and thousands like them in the America of the 1820s.