Although the editors of the Histories volume of the Joseph Smith Papers do not discuss why the 1832 history was excised, we can speculate about who might have removed the leaves, and why. Because we know that the missing pages were kept in the office safe of Joseph Fielding Smith, it is unlikely that the leaves were removed simply in accordance with the archival practice of separating collections based on content. We can also surmise that one of the senior members of the Church Historian’s Office would have been responsible for the decision to keep the pages separate; it was probably Joseph Fielding Smith himself, but could possibly have been Earl E. Olson or A. William Lund. There are no available records of the reasoning behind the decision to keep the 1832 account from becoming widely known, but the history of denying researchers access to the account suggests some uneasiness about its contents.