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An Interview With Martin Harris

Published in the Iowa State Register (Des Moines), August 16, 1870

(While Martin Harris was traveling from Kirtland, Ohio, to Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1870 with Edward Stevenson, he was interviewed by a non-Mormon reporter. Although this testimony which was printed in the Sunday morning edition of the Iowa State Register is similar to many other statements made by this witness, it is the only known statement by one of the elelven witnesses in which an estimate is given of the weight of the plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated.)

A witness to the Book of Mormon.-The main facts, or the fiction, as the case may be, relative to the discovery of the golden plates from which was translated the present, Book of Mormon, are doubtless as familiar to many of our readers as to ourselves. None of us can claim to have been an eye witness, and few have heard the incidents connected therewith related by those who claimed to have been there, to have seen and handled the tablets of gold, and afterwards, under the divine commission, to have assisted in the translation of the mystic characters inscribed upon them.

A few days since we acknowledged a call at our sanctum, from Martin Harris, who was on his way from Ohio to take up his residence at Salt Lake City, to spend the remainder of his days with the "chosen people." Mr. Harris was now in his 88th year, though still quite vigorous and sprightly, and he is Mormon, soul and body. He, as he claims, and as Mormons claim, together with two others, Oliver Cowdry deceased, and David Whitmer, now an apostate living in Missouri, were the divinely appointed witnesses to the Book of Mormon. The old gentleman evidently loves to relate the incidents with which he was personally connected, and he does it with wonderful enthusiasm.

In September, 1828, as the story goes, Joseph Smith, directed by an angel, proceeded to a spot about 4 miles from Palmyra, New York, and upon the point of a hill, extending northward, dug up a very solid stone chest within which were the tablets of gold, inscribed with the characters which no man could read. Joseph Smith was the first to handle the tablets, and Martin Harris, one of the appointed witnesses, the second. Mr. Harris describes the plates as being of thin leaves of gold, measuring seven by eight inches, and weighing altogether, from forty to sixty lbs. There was also found in the chest, the urim and thummim, by means of which the writing upon the plates was translated, but not until after the most learned men had exhausted their knowledge of letters in the vain effort to decipher the characters.