Mr. Roberts further expresses the firm conviction that the works of Josiah Priest and Ethan Smith "were either possessed by Joseph Smith or certainly known by him, for they were surely available to him" (BMS, Pt. I, I, 5f.). At one point Mr. Roberts tries to support Joseph's knowledge of the Ethan Smith book by observing that Ethan had published his book in Vermont, which was Joseph's home. Joseph, however, had left Vermont nearly ten years before Ethan's book was put into print, and Roberts must be charged here with overstating his case. Nevertheless, there is a strong probability that Joseph had access to both books. Oliver Cowdery, a cousin of Joseph's and his associate in the production of the Book of Mormon, lived in Poultney, Vermont, at the time the Rev. Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews was published, and his step-mother was a member of the Rev. Smith's congregation. Cowdery could easily have supplied Joseph with the family copy of the work. Furthermore, Priest's Wonders was one of the volumes contained in the Manchester rental library, some five miles from Joseph's home, and the circulation records show it was repeatedly charged out from 1826 to 1828. This fact shows that the topics in Priest's book were certainly known in Joseph's neighborhood. This reinforces Mr. Roberts' point that even without these works being directly available to Joseph Smith, Jr., the ideas in those books were a part of a fund of "common knowledge," or what was thought to be "knowledge,'' that circulated at social gatherings, the general store, the post office, and similar public places. We might add that the local Palmyra newspaper, to which the Smiths subscribed, also published articles on the topic of the Hebrew origin of the Indians and employed many of the same arguments to support the idea as those found in "almost hand-book form" in the Rev. Ethan Smith's work.