The fact that Justice Neely said Joseph Smith was a "Glass looker" fits very well with the published version of the legal proceedings. Hugh Nibley and other Mormon apologists became strangely silent after these documents were discovered.
The fact that Justice Neely said Joseph Smith was a "Glass looker" fits very well with the published version of the legal proceedings. Hugh Nibley and other Mormon apologists became strangely silent after these documents were discovered.
While most Mormon scholars accepted the evidence which Wesley Walters discovered, an overzealous supporter of Joseph Smith decided to resort to forgery in an attempt to discredit the documents. In 1986 Ronald Vern Jackson, a Mormon researcher who wrote the book The Seer, Joseph Smith, appeared on the Mormon Church’s television Station, KSL-TV with the startling claim that Justice Neely’s bill had been altered. He claimed that the name “Josiah Stowell” originally appeared on the document, but that these words had been changed to “Joseph Smith.” Although Mr. Jackson did not directly state it, the implications were clear-Walters had found a genuine bill referring to Josiah Stowell and that he had deliberately altered it to discredit the prophet Joseph Smith! Jackson professes to believe that Mark Hofmann was not alone in creating forgeries. In an introduction to his publication of the Mark Hofmann Interviews, Jackson wrote that he had “very incriminating evidence that others were involved!” He also declared that “It was a conspiracy to rewrite L.D.S church history and Mark Hofmann was but a pawn that was sacrificed to save the King. There are those who would love to disgrace the L.D.S. church by proving it’s history to be a sham. And Mark Hofmann was the tool through which they were going to do it.” He also stated that “Mark Hofmann was just the tip of the iceberg,...” In an advertisement for his publications, we find the following:
“So incriminating is his [Jackson’s] evidence, information and documentation in this case, not only of Hofmann, and his Associates, but of the ‘Wider’ Co-conspiratorial Ring, that several attempts have been made on his life!” We understand that Mr. Jackson has hinted that the King of Mormon document forgery is a minister who lives in the Midwest. Since Wesley P. Walters pastors a church in Illinois and is deeply involved in research on Mormon history, it seems reasonable to believe that Jackson is hinting that he is the “King.”
In any case, Wesley P. Walters made these observations about Ronald Jackson’s charges:
“Recently, Ron Jackson, a pro-Mormon historian from Bountiful, Utah, appeared on KSL-TV in Salt Lake City and claimed that the 1826 justice of the peace bill had been altered. He claimed that when this writer was lecturing in Salt Lake City in 1976, a friend had inadvertently picked up some of this writer’s notes and kept them. Accompanying the notes, he claimed, was a reproduction of the trial bill as it originally read. Jackson said that instead of reading the people ‘vs. Joseph Smith the glass looker,’ it originally read, ‘vs. Josiah Stowell the glass looker.’
“The reproduction bearing the name Josiah Stowell and purportedly obtained from this writer’s notes shows signs of forgery. Someone has obliterated parts of ‘Joseph’ and in a sloppy hand tried to change this to read ‘Josiah.’ He has left the ‘S’ of ‘Smith’ but obliterated the remainder and placed the name ‘Stowell’ into that space. The final ‘ell’ in Stowell appears to have been taken from the name Darnell, which appears further down in the same manuscript, and inserted as the final letters of Stowell. Moreover, the letter ‘a’ in Josiah and the ‘o’ in Stowell do not match the way these letters are formed in the rest of the document, and the crossing of the ‘t’ is quite different.” (Personal Freedom Outreach Newsletter, April-June 1986, p. 2)