The Kinderhook plates
Six engraved brass plates were dug from an Illinois mound in 1843 and shown to Joseph Smith. Three local men had made them to see what he would do. A laboratory settled it 137 years later.
Why this verdict
Confirmed as a coordinated hoax: three men made and planted the plates, one confessed in 1879, and metallurgical analysis of the surviving plate in 1980 established nineteenth-century brass etched with acid.
- Period
- Region
- Reading time
- Sources
01The claim
As presented in 1843: that six bell-shaped brass plates bearing unknown characters had been excavated from a burial mound near Kinderhook, Illinois, constituting an ancient American record.
As established: that Robert Wiley, Wilbur Fugate and Bridge Whitton manufactured them and planted them, specifically to test whether Joseph Smith would claim to translate them.
02Where it came from
The three men made the plates from a piece of brass, etched characters with acid, aged them, and buried them in a mound where a dig was planned. The plates were brought to Joseph Smith in Nauvoo. A contemporary account records that he offered a partial identification — that they contained the history of a descendant of Ham — though whether he attempted a revelatory translation or a comparison against material he already had is disputed within Latter-day Saint scholarship.
03What the record shows
✓ CONFIRMED — It happened. The documents exist.
The confession came first. Wilbur Fugate wrote in 1879 describing the manufacture in detail, naming his two collaborators and the method, and stating the purpose plainly. A confession alone might not settle it; a confession that predicts what a laboratory will later find is stronger.
In 1980 the Chicago Historical Society permitted destructive analysis of the one surviving plate. Work at Northwestern University found it to be brass of a nineteenth-century composition — copper and zinc in proportions produced by rolling, not by any pre-Columbian metallurgy in the Americas — and found the characters etched by acid, with etching residue consistent with the technique Fugate had described a century earlier.
The entry is CONFIRMED rather than DEBUNKED because of what distinguishes it from Piltdown: three people planned it together, executed it together, and one of them documented the arrangement. That is coordinated action by multiple parties, established as fact, which is what this archive's rubric requires.
04What it cost
The plates have had a long second life in argument about Joseph Smith's claims, used by critics as evidence of a failed translation and by defenders as evidence of a cautious one. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has published on the episode and treats the plates as a nineteenth-century fabrication, which is where the evidence sits. For this archive the interest is narrower: a hoax designed as a test, whose designers were candid about it, and which took a materials laboratory to close because a confession was not thought sufficient.