QUESTION:

“Mr. Salisbury, at one time I had a conversation with you in which you were kind enough to mention a testimony which your grandmother, Catherine Salisbury gave to you in regard to the fact that the Prophet did possess the plates on which the Book of Mormon was translated. I wonder if you would be kind enough to tell us now on what occasion it was that she told you this story? Where were you living at that time and why did she relate this to you?”

MR. SALISBURY:

“Mr. Ball, I was then in my 45th year, as I remember it, and County Surveyor of Hancock County, Illinois, and I was visiting my grandmother at her home in Hancock County, near Fountain Green, when I asked her for some recollections of her brother, the Prophet Joseph Smith. Catherine Smith Salisbury then told me that while dusting up the room where the Prophet had his study she saw a package on the table containing the gold plates on which was engraved the story of the Book of Mormon. She said she hefted those plates and found them very heavy like gold and also rippled her fingers up the edge of the plates and felt that they were separate metal plates and heard the tinkle of sound that they made.”5