Criddle and associates give little attention to primary historical sources that contradict their theory and instead lend undeserved credence to historical sources of questionable reliability. For example, they write that, around 1826 or 1827, “Rigdon is reported to have collaborated with ‘two or three different persons’ in adjacent places to create the Book of Mormon” (p. 480). In a footnote on page 489, they state, “In Bainbridge [Ohio], Rigdon reportedly became involved in what appears to be ‘automatic writing’: using a séancelike process to create the Book of Mormon.” The authors’ description seems to suggest that this report is historically credible. In fact, the source is an obscure article published in 1880 in The New Northwest, an Oregon paper, and they insist that the article provides “evidence pointing to Bainbridge as the likely location for production of the [hypothetical] 1827 version of the Book of Mormon” (p. 489). The article reported the claims of O. P. Henry, who said that his mother “lived in the family of Sidney Rigdon prior to her marriage in 1827,” more than fifty-three years earlier.

There was in the family what is now called a “writing medium,” also several others

in adjacent places, and the Mormon Bible was written by two or three different

persons by an automatic power which they believed was inspiration direct from God,

the same as produced the original Jewish Bible and Christian New Testament. Mr. H.

believes that Sidney Rigdon furnished Joseph Smith with these manuscripts, and that

the story of the “hieroglyphics” was a fabrication to make the credulous take hold of the

mystery; that Rigdon, having learned, beyond a doubt, that the socalled dead could com-

municate to the living, considered himself duly authorized by Jehovah to found a new

church, under divine guidance similar to that of Confucius, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed,

Swedenborg, Calvin, Luther or Wesley, all of

whom believed in and taught the ministration of spirits.

The text of the Book of Mormon, according to this report, was not to be attributed to Solomon Spalding, or even to Sidney Rigdon, but was purportedly dictated by several unnamed individuals: one in the Rigdon family and several others at undisclosed locations. This cohort of multiple unnamed writers in Bainbridge and elsewhere dictated the text through a process that Mr. Henry informs us his mother considered “automatic” writing—the same process, we are helpfully informed, by which the “Jewish Bible and Christian New Testament” were given. Oddly, neither Mr. Henry nor his venerable mother (the former associate of unnamed spirit mediums for whom he speaks) has any knowledge of Rigdon’s authorship of the text, but Mr. Henry tells us what he certainly “believes” to be true, and no doubt would like to prove—that Rigdon, wanting to form a new religion, by some means gathered up the now-missing written fruit of these varied and scattered dictations (which were “automatically” produced by unnamed individuals) and somehow conveyed them to Joseph Smith Jr., who eventually published them as the Book of Mormon. For lack of a better term, we may as well call this variant of the automatic writing explanation the multi-medium theory of Book of Mormon origins. The writer of this 1880 article, interestingly enough, did not claim that Rigdon himself engaged in automatic writing to produce the Book of Mormon, but that others did so. The writer went on to speculate that Rigdon thereafter made such writings available to Joseph Smith. This would make Rigdon a go-between rather than an author himself. Despite its late date, complete lack of any contemporary or confirmatory evidence, its second- or thirdhand nature, and its invocation of unnamed actors, this theory nevertheless seems to undermine rather than support Criddle and associates’ case for Rigdon as a Book of Mormon author. Shortly after the appearance of the above article, an editorialist for the Deseret News found the attempt to explain away the Book of Mormon as a product of spiritualism a little amusing. “If this new theory,” he observed, “should be caught up by preachers and editors, desperate for some plausible pretense to account for the Book of Mormon, they will have to drop forever the hackneyed and thoroughly riddled old fable called the Spalding theory.” Dale Broadhurst, a recent enthusiast of the Spalding-Rigdon theory, does not share that point of view. “Evidently it did not occur to the LDS critics, that Sidney Rigdon’s ‘automatic writing’ might be accounted for by mental illness, more readily than by recourse to the spiritualist ‘medium business.’” However, it is not clear that the claim of “mental illness,” whatever one means by that term, does any more to explain the Book of Mormon than does automatic writing. And, whatever Rigdon’s mental problems, the 1880 account nowhere describes him as an author at all, but merely as a conduit of others’ work to Joseph Smith. Broadhurst and Criddle’s team will have to seek elsewhere for historically credible evidence making Rigdon a Book of Mormon author. And without a historically plausible reason to posit Rigdon as author, a stylistic analysis of his known works with the Book of Mormon is pointless. Stylometry cannot hope to detect Rigdon’s role as a courier for anonymous automatic writers.