Joseph's familiarity with the theory of the Hebraic origin of the Indians seems, however, to have come chiefly from a popular book by Ethan Smith, pastor of a church in Poultney, Vermont. This book, View of the Hebrews; or the Ten Tribes of Israel in America, was published in 1823, a second edition in 1825. Ethan Smith had managed to collect all the items of three generations of specious scholarship and piecemeal observation on this subject, and had added to them Caleb Atwater's accurate descriptions of the Ohio mounds and Alexander von Humboldt's glowing account of the architectural ruins of Central America.

Ethan Smith's theory of the origin of the Indian mounds was exactly the same as that which formed the heart of the Book of Mormon story: "Israel brought into this new continent a considerable degree of civilization; and the better part of them long laboured to maintain it. But others fell into the hunting and consequently savage state; whose barbarous hordes invaded their more civilized brethren, and eventually annihilated most of them, and all in these northern regions!"

It may, in fact, have been View of the Hebrews that gave Joseph Smith the idea of writing an Indian history in the first place. "If the Indians are of the tribes of Israel," Ethan Smith said pointedly, "some decisive evidence of the fact will ere long be exhibited." And he described in great excitement the discovery of an ancient Hebrew phylactery bound in leather, which had allegedly been unearthed in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He reported also a provocative legend, said to have come from an Indian chief, that the red men "had not long since a book which they had for a long time preserved. But having lost the knowledge of reading it, they concluded it would be of no further use to them; and they buried it with an Indian chief."

Joseph Smith knew this legend, for he quoted it in his church newspaper in later years as evidence of the historical accuracy of the Book of Mormon, although he was careful to use as a source Josiah Priest's American Antiquities, which had reprinted Ethan Smith's account in 1833, three years after the Book of Mormon was published. It may never be proved that Joseph saw View of the Hebrews before writing the Book of Mormon, but the striking parallelisms between the two books hardly leave a case for mere coincidence.+

Both books opened with frequent references to the destruction of Jerusalem; both told of inspired prophets among the ancient Americans; both quoted copiously and almost exclusively from Isaiah; and both delineated the ancient Americans as a highly civilized people. Both held that it was the mission of the American nation in the last days to gather these remnants of the house of Israel and bring them to Christianity, thereby hastening the day of the glorious millennium. View of the Hebrews made much of the legend that the "stick of Joseph" and the "stick of Ephraim" — symbolizing the Jews and the lost tribes — would one day be united; and Joseph Smith's first advertising circulars blazoned the Book of Mormon as "the stick of Joseph taken from the hand of Ephraim."

Ethan Smith had excitedly described copper breastplates, taken from the mounds, which had two white buckhorn buttons fastened to the outside of each plate, "in resemblance of the Urim and Thummim," the ancient magic lots that miraculously blazed on the ephod of the high priest of ancient Israel. And this reference Joseph elaborated into the fabulous magic spectacles with which he translated the golden plates.

View of the Hebrews, however, was only a basic source book for the Book of Mormon. The themes that Joseph borrowed he elaborated with a lavish fancy. This can be seen particularly in the story of Quetzalcoatl, whom Ethan Smith described as "the most mysterious being of the whole Mexican mythology," the white, bearded Aztec god who taught his people their prized peaceful arts and for whose return the Aztecs were hoping when Cortes appeared. Ethan Smith described Quetzalcoatl as "a type of Christ," but Joseph saw in the legend evidence that Christ Himself had come to the New World. The occasional crucifixes found in the mounds gave further weight to this theory, since it was not until years later that scholars proved them to be French and Spanish in origin.

Jesus said: "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice." These other sheep, Joseph said in his Book of Mormon, were the Lamanites and the Nephites, whom Jesus had visited some time in the early weeks following his final ascension. Christ's coming to America, he wrote, had been preceded by cataclysmic destruction which annihilated great portions of the population, and by three days of darkness, which brought the remainder to their knees in anguished repentance. The dramatic appearance of Jesus then made such an impact upon the devastated people that the red and white tribes accepted his gospel and lived together as brothers for several generations, before Satan's wiles began again to split them asunder.

Thus, where View of the Hebrews was just bad scholarship, the Book of Mormon was highly original and imaginative fiction.

Thirty-five years after the Book of Mormon was published, an old antiquarian in Ohio who had spent years in trying to prove that the Indians were descended from the Hebrews pretended to have discovered in a mound several stone plates with the Ten Commandments inscribed in Hebrew. After his death investigators discovered that he had laboriously chipped the stone himself, copying the characters from a Hebrew Bible which he had neglected to destroy. Between this pathetic petty deception and the Book of Mormon lies the difference between a painfully cramped imagination and an audacious and original mind. Joseph Smith took the whole Western Hemisphere as the setting for his book and a thousand years of history for his plot. Never having written a line of fiction, he laid out for himself a task that would have given the most experienced novelist pause. But possibly because of this very inexperience he plunged into the story.

Sagacious enough to realize that he could not possibly write a history of the Lost Ten Tribes, he chose instead to describe only the peregrinations of two Hebrew families, headed by Lehi and Ishmael, who became the founders of the American race. He began the book by focusing upon a single hero, Nephi, who like himself was peculiarly gifted of the Lord. This device launched him smoothly into his narrative and saved him from having bitten off more than he could chew.

+Joseph published the story of the long-buried book in the Times and Seasons, Nauvoo, Illinois, Vol. III (June 1, 1842), pp. 813-14. He was then editor. Ethan Smith is listed as the original source, although Priest is listed as the author of the entire article. In the issue of June 15, 1842 Joseph quoted a long extract from Alexander von Humboldt, which had been reprinted in Boudinot's A Star in the West. Such extracts indicate that he was very familiar with the literature supporting the hypothesis of the Hebraic origin of the Indians. The scholarly Mormon historian B. H. Roberts once made a careful and impressive list of parallels between View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon, but for obvious reasons it was never published. After his death copies were made which circulated among a limited circle in Utah.