Ethan Smith, a Congregational clergyman who served as pastor to churches in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, quoted both Adair and Boudinot as well as a variety of American and European sources in his 1823 book View of the Hebrews; or the Tribes of Israel in America. He added descriptions of Mexican antiquities and the mounds and fortifications of North America—what Fawn Brodie would later describe as “all the items of three generations of specious scholarship and piecemeal observation on this subject.” The first edition of Ethan Smith’s book appeared in 1823, but its popularity required a second, expanded edition two years later.

By the time the second edition appeared, dozens of passages from View of the Hebrews were appearing in another book, The Wonders of Nature and Providence, Displayed, published in New York and written by Josiah Priest, an uneducated harness-maker and peddler of chap- books. Two prominent members of the state had also been at work on a book exploring Indian origins.

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The debate between the two theories continued into Joseph Smith’s day. This is evident from a comment which was made by a reviewer of the 1823 edition of Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews. The review from the Utica (N.Y.) Christian Repository suggested that a second edition of Smith’s book should separate the Indian traits which are strictly Jewish from those which might be considered patriarchal in order to make the case for Israelite origin stronger.

Few tried to reconcile the two theories, however. Thorowgood, Eliot, and Ethan Smith, for example, were excited by the millennial implications of discovering the ten tribes in the American Indians but were forced to discount the possibility of an earlier migration from Babel, since they based their arguments about the ten tribes on 2 Esdras 13:41, which says the ten tribes traveled to a far country “where never mankind dwelt.” Ethan Smith interpreted this passage as a reference to America, “a land where no man dwelt since the flood.”

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90. “To establish any connection at all between the books of the two Smiths,” argued Brigham Young University religion professor Hugh Nibley in 1959, “it is absolutely imperative to find something perfectly unique and peculiar in both of them” (“The Comparative Method,” Improvement Era, Nov. 1959, 848). The theory that the Indians were degenerates who destroyed their more civilized brethren rather than the prevalent theory of two distinct races constitutes, so far as can be determined, an original idea with Ethan Smith. The Book of Mormon differs with Smith regarding the ten tribes but parallels him on other features. Apparently Oliver Cowdery, Joseph’s scribe, had a step-mother who attended Ethan’s church in Poultney, Vermont, and may have even become acquainted with Smith himself. See Wesley P. Walters, “The Use of the Old Testament in the Book of Mormon” (M.A. thesis, Covenant Theological Seminary, 1981), 97-98, 212-14; and David Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1985), 5-8.