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Pomeroy Tucker

Two books written by contemporaries of Joseph Smith are Origin, Rise, and Progress of Mormonism, (1867) by Pomeroy Tucker and History of the Pioneer Settlement of Phelps and Gorham's Purchase, (1851) by Orasmus Turner. These are better source documents than the affidavits of Howe, because there words are not edited or possibly modified by a compiler. These testimonies are also less damaging that the earlier affidavits, but they still have their shortcomings.

"Tucker depicted superstitious and unscrupulous Smiths by merely requoting the 1833 statements apparently without so much as reinterviewing the Hurlbut contacts still alive. Tucker was aware of at least three of these, named in his preface as references: Joseph Capron, Barton Stafford, and WIllard Chase. Such sloppy methods were evidently not completely applauded. A dozen years later Abagail Jackway told William H. Kelley, `I have heard Willard Chase say Tucker never even asked him for what he knew, and Chase lived next door to him, too.'" (Anderson 1970, 304)

Hugh Nibley has given us the following analysis of Tucker. "Twenty-three years after the death of Joseph Smith and thirty-seven years after Smith had left Palmyra, a citizen of that town brings out a book telling most intimately of the mind and doings of Smith at the time of the writing of the Book of Mormon.