Oliver Cowdery

In order to link Rigdon and Joseph Smith, the authors claim that Oliver Cowdery was responsible for bringing Rigdon and Joseph Smith together. They make their argument for this claim in chapters 8, 9, and 10 (pp. 209–308). Noting significant gaps of information or limited sources on portions of Oliver Cowdery’s life, they suggest that Cowdery may have been ashamed of his past and therefore deliberately concealed much of this information (p. 210). Those who work with historical sources, however—in family history, for example—realize that this is a common problem in tracing the history of individuals that is far from unique to Oliver Cowdery. Nonetheless, the authors prefer to see conspiracies everywhere: “One must also question why pro-Mormon historians do not seem to have been particularly concerned with uncovering who this man was,” they complain. They also fault Latter-day Saint scholars for making “so slight an effort to fill the void” (p. 210). But their complaints are misconceived. There is a substantial literature on Oliver Cowdery of which the authors show little or no awareness and with which they make little attempt to engage.

Cowdrey, Davis, and Vanick paint Oliver Cowdery as a none too smart dupe of Sidney Rigdon who “was simply too credulous for his own good” and “too weak to resist the sly manipulations of Joseph Smith’s overpowering personality. In short, Oliver was a convenient stooge to machinations that were, at first, largely over his head—things that, when he finally began to perceive what was really happening, he was powerless to stop or withdraw from without considerable risk” (p. 211). While this is the proposed view, it is dramatically inconsistent with the actual Oliver, who appears to have been a man of exceptional intelligence and ability both as an elder of the church and as a non-Mormon lawyer.

Mistaken Identities

In November 1830, Oliver Cowdery, Parley P. Pratt, Peter Whitmer Jr., and Ziba Peterson visited western Ohio on their way to Missouri to fulfill a mission to the Lamanites. Local Ohio newspapers took note of the missionary visit and some of their activities. On 30 November 1830, the Cleveland Herald printed an article on Mormonism; the writer—probably the editor, John St. John—had noticed the name of Oliver Cowdery in some of the newspaper descriptions of the missionaries’ activities.

On reading the name of Oliver Cowdry, in support of the divine authenticity of the work, whatever faith we might have been inspired with on reading the certificate, was banished, for we had known Cowdry some seven or eight years ago, when he was a dabbler in the art of Printing, and principally occupied in writing and printing pamphlets, with which, as a pedestrian Pedlar he visited the towns and villages of western New-York and Canada.

In what may be an echo of this earlier article, the Lockport Balance in New York printed another piece in 1832 on Mormonism. The author, probably the editor Orsamus Turner, portrayed the Book of Mormon witness, without further explanation, as “an itinerant pamphlet pedlar, and occasionally, a journeyman printer, named Oliver Cowdry.” In 1849, Turner published a local history of western New York in which he described early settlers and pioneers of the region. In a short sketch for the town of Albion, New York, near Lockport, he recalled, “In 1823 it [“the fine lands in the immediate neighborhood of Albion”] had sufficiently advanced to indicate the necessity of a press and newspaper, and Oliver Cowdery, (who has been the pioneer printer in at least a half dozen localities,) took a part of the old battered ‘small pica’ that had been used in printing the Lockport Observatory, and adding to it indifferent materials from other sources, commenced the publication of the ‘Newport Patriot.’”

If correct, these two newspaper articles and Turner’s 1849 recollection would place Oliver in New York around 1822 or 1823, working there as a “pioneer printer” and “journeyman printer,” a veteran of various publishing ventures that included commencing a paper in Albion in 1823 and writing and publishing pamphlets in western New York and Canada, which he peddled and sold in those locations. The authors favor these sources because they would, if accepted, place Oliver in New York—where they could more easily connect him with their hypothetical Gold Bible conspiracy.

Unfortunately for the authors, though, there is no supporting evi­dence for the claim that Oliver was involved in printing before December 1829, when he provided some assistance in the preparation of the Book of Mormon for publication. In a letter to Joseph Smith in December 1829, Oliver wrote: “It may look rather strange to you to find that I have so soon become a printer.” The clear implication in this private letter to Joseph Smith is that printing was a new experience for him. Moreover, it can be clearly shown that it was Franklin Cowdery, Oliver’s uncle, and not Oliver Cowdery, who began publication of the Newport Patriot in 1822.

It is true that, during the Kirtland period and after his excommunication in 1838, Oliver engaged in a few printing ventures, but there is no support for this kind of activity before 1829. Second, a family source, Oliver’s half-sister Lucy Cowdery Young, said that when Oliver, who had previously lived in Vermont, “arrived at the age of twenty he went to the State of New York where his older brothers were married and settled.” This would be around 1826. During that time, she said, he clerked in a store and after two years went to Manchester, where he taught school. While Cowdrey, Davis, and Vanick assert that Lucy was mistaken about this, no evidence refutes her recollection. The authors also undercut their own theory in their characterization of Oliver’s health, describing him as weak, not very intelligent, and a “poor, consumptive, wheezing ‘little man’” (p. 211) with an often fragile constitution. Yet it is this same individual who is supposed to have traveled on foot across the length and breadth of western New York and Canada, writing, printing, and peddling pamphlets, all at the tender age of 16! This seems unlikely.

A better explanation is that the sources above represent a case of mistaken identity in which the two editors confused Oliver with Franklin Cowdery. Franklin was a pioneer printer who engaged in numerous publishing ventures in New York from 1817–48, which included the Moscow Advertiser and Livingston Farmer (1817), the Olean Hamilton Recorder (1819–20), the Angelica Allegany Republican (1820–22), the Angelica News Record and Allegany Patron of Industry (1822), the Newport Patriot (1824–25), the Geneva Ontario Chronicle (1828–29), the Geneva Chronicle (1829), the Albion Orleans Mercury (1832), the Cuylerville Telegraph (1847–48), the Rochester Genesee Olio (1847), and, in Ohio, the Oberlin Evangelist (1847). In 1852, Turner quoted an old resident of Allegany who remembered that, in 1820, “the pioneer printer in so many different localities—Franklin Cowdery—had moved a rude press, and a few fonts of battered type, from Olean, where he had published the Hamilton Recorder, and had started the first paper in Allegany county, the Angelica Republican.” “It was a pretty hard place for newspaper publishing,” Franklin recalled,

I had to take my pay in all manner of traps—just what I could get. I feasted upon fat venison; it hung around my domicil in the shape of saddles, quarters, and hams; and I had maple sugar in profusion; the great trouble was to get something the paper and ink maker would take in payment. . . . To print for a livelihood there, was up-hill work—rather less lucrative than hunting and trapping. And so little intercourse was there with the business world, that the highways were often so bad getting over, that paper had to be carried on horseback; and ink manufactories so distant, that typo made his own printing ink, composed mostly of linseed oil, lamp black, and rosin; during the three years he luminated the woods of Cattaraugus and Allegany.

One historian of New York printers noted that there was a “general opinion” that “Franklin Cowdery, was poorly qualified to speak for the printers. . . . He had complained constantly about the public patronage and his own meager support.” With Oliver’s notoriety as one of the Three Witnesses of the Book of Mormon and as one of the early missionaries to Ohio, it would have been easy to mistake one Cowdery for the other. The authors speculate that on occasion from 1822 to 1827 Oliver may have worked for Franklin in several of these printing ventures, but there is no evidence for this.

It is not enough, though, to get Oliver Cowdery to New York in 1822. They also want to place him in or near Palmyra where he can conspire with the Smith family in the early 1820s. In order to bolster this claim, they cite an 1869 history of Vermont by Robert Parks and an 1849 history of New York by Orsamus Turner. 1n 1869, Parks recalled, “‘We well remember this same Oliver Cowdery when in our boyhood. . . . He attended school in the District where we reside[d] in 1821 and 1822. He then went to Palmyra, N.Y.’” (p. 237). Cowdrey, Davis, and Vanick take this rather dogmatically to mean that Oliver left Wells, Vermont, and arrived in Palmyra in late 1822 or 1823, but there is no reason to interpret Parks’s statement so narrowly. Oliver did go to Palmyra after he left Vermont. Writing almost fifty years after the event, Parks could easily mean by “then” anything from 1823 to 1829.

In another mid-nineteenth-century history of New York, Orsamus Turner wrote a brief sketch of early Mormonism. As a young man, Turner began his apprenticeship in late 1818 with Timothy Strong at the Palmyra Register. He appears to have spent 1821 and 1822 in Canandaigua, where he finished his apprenticeship working for James Beamis. After this, during a brief return to Palmyra, Turner heard of a printer position in Lockport about one hundred miles away. He then moved there and purchased the Lockport Observatory in August 1822. Turner’s brief discussion of early Mormonism is a mixture of hearsay and personal recollection and is filled with sarcasm and permeated with a tone of ridicule. Turner admitted that he did not take Mormonism seriously, treating it “lightly—with a seeming levity.” Still, his own personal recollections, where they can be shown to be such, are valuable in that they tend to confirm and flesh out details about the Smith family residence in Palmyra. As Richard L. Anderson explains, however, “Turner’s personal recollections of Joseph Smith of necessity refer to the period prior to the late summer of 1822 and are probably no later than 1820, the latest date of Palmyra memoirs in his writings.” Dan Vogel, while admitting that it was possible for Turner to have occasionally visited Palmyra after that time, claims that “much of what Turner writes, particularly about events subsequent to his departure from the area, is from the standpoint of a distant observer.

Eager to put Cowdery in Palmyra by 1822, Cowdrey, Davis, and Vanick uncritically accept all of Turner’s statements, including passing remarks about Cowdery, as events observed. But this is obviously problematic. For example, Turner said that after the death of Alvin Smith, “the mantle of the Prophet which Mrs. and Mr. Joseph Smith and one Oliver Cowdery, had wove of themselves—every thread of it—fell upon their next eldest son, Joseph Smith, Jr.” The Spalding Enigma transfigures this comment, along with Turner’s 1832 Lockport Balance article, into firsthand testimony for Oliver being in Palmyra in 1823 (p. 243). But Turner was living in Lockport in 1823 when Alvin died—approximately a hundred miles away—and there is simply no evidence that he was present in Palmyra, even less that he was lurking at Alvin’s deathbed when Alvin passed away. There is no basis upon which to assert that Turner’s comments on Alvin’s death were based upon anything more than distant hearsay. The same can be said of his comments about Oliver. In fact, while Turner describes firsthand experiences with Joseph Smith, he never gives any indication that he had so much as met the Book of Mormon scribe. Based upon this dubious foundation, Cowdrey, Davis, and Vanick then embark on a series of bewildering speculations and irrelevancies as they opine where Oliver may have been and what he might have been doing. Maybe he was dousing with Walters the magician over in Sodus or Palmyra or wherever. Maybe he was scribing for William Morgan on his exposé of Freemasonry. This kind of thing can be fun, of course. Stacking each unproven assumption upon the previous unproven assumption, the authors construct an ugly theoretical caricature of Cowdery, a veritable castle in the clouds, but it has no foundation and the picture is a mirage. It is their wish list, not history. Those seeking to know the historical Oliver Cowdery will have to look elsewhere.