Joseph Smith's Seer Stone

Joseph Smith's Seer Stone was a divining object that connected Joseph Smith's youthful treasure seeking with his later work dictating the Book of Mormon. The narrative distinguishes this chocolate-colored, egg-shaped stone, which Smith found while digging a well, from other peep stones he encountered or possessed. First used to search for hidden wealth, it later became his means of receiving lines of scripture when the divinely endowed spectacles associated with the Gold Plates were no longer available to him.

Identity and Early Use

The account places Smith's money digging in the unsettled religious culture of the Second Great Awakening, when the border between accepted religion and superstition could be indistinct. He learned practices of divination from his father and pursued reports of buried treasure around Palmyra. A nearby girl, Sally Chase, had a small greenish peep stone, which she used by placing it at the bottom of an upturned hat while the viewer blocked out the light. After Smith persuaded his parents to let him visit her, he looked into the hat and saw a vision of another stone, white and luminous, buried beneath a small tree. He dug at the indicated location and recovered it. The account presents this as the first of at least three peep stones Smith would possess, not as the later chocolate-colored stone used in translation.

The chocolate-colored stone had a separate history. Smith found it in 1822, twenty-four feet underground, while digging a well with Sally Chase's father. The account later identifies it as Smith's favorite peep stone. This distinction matters: the stones belong to a recurring practice, but they are not described as one unchanged object. The later stone's significance rests particularly on its role in Smith's translation work.

Treasure Seeking and Public Scrutiny

Smith's use of peep stones made him a regional scryer. Property owners paid him to locate buried treasure, and by 1825 the Pennsylvania farmer Josiah Stowell had hired him to travel to the Susquehanna Valley in search of a silver lode rumored to have been worked by the Spanish centuries earlier. Stowell paid him fourteen dollars a month, along with room and board—a substantial wage compared with what workers on the Erie Canal earned each month. The stone's reported power thus became part of a paid service, not merely a private curiosity.

The 1826 trial, People of the State of New York v. Joseph Smith, brought that work into public and legal view. Affidavits and other documents disclosed details of Smith's money digging; the court found him guilty of being a disorderly person and an imposter. The account says he had failed to locate Stowell's silver mine and, across the six years in which he had worked as a money digger, had not unearthed other actual treasure. A dissatisfied client had filed the claim that led to the case. The trial and resulting adverse publicity ended Smith's professional career as a diviner, and he told his critics he would abandon scrying. That declared break proved temporary: the same kind of object would soon serve a different purpose.

Use in Dictating the Book of Mormon

After Moroni told Smith about the Gold Plates, Smith began deciphering their text with Joseph Smith's Interpreters. Martin Harris acted as scribe, and the two completed 116 pages before pausing. Moroni retrieved the plates and spectacles, and Smith allowed Harris to borrow the manuscript. Harris lost it, leaving Smith distressed and the work apparently interrupted. In September 1828, after prayer and contrition, Smith received the plates again, but the spectacles did not return with them.

Smith then relied on the chocolate-colored stone he had found in the well. He put it in an upturned hat, bent his face into the darkness, and dictated the lines that appeared to him, with the Gold Plates nearby. The procedure echoed the method he had learned through Sally Chase's stone: conceal the light, look into the hat, and receive information through a vision. The object that had belonged to a practice of locating hidden things was now used to produce a written account of a sacred text. Emma Smith served as scribe at the beginning of this renewed phase, with others sharing the task later. Smith dictated at an average pace of about 3,500 words a day, finishing by the end of June 1829.

Changing Meaning and Narrative Significance

The stone's importance lies partly in this change of function. In Smith's early work, it promised access to material wealth concealed underground; the trial exposed the failure of that promise in the case of Stowell's silver and the other treasure claims described in the record. During the later translation, the stone was not presented as locating a mine but as the instrument through which Smith dictated scripture. The narrative connects the episodes without treating the two outcomes as identical: the earlier public failure ended his paid divining career, while the stone's subsequent use became part of the account of the Book of Mormon's production.

That continuity also makes the translation method concrete. Smith did not simply consult a stone in the abstract: he placed it inside an upturned hat, excluded outside light, and dictated while the plates lay nearby. The repeated physical arrangement links his earlier divination to the later religious work, even as its stated object changed from buried treasure to scripture. After completing the manuscript, Smith approached the publisher of the Wayne Sentinel and sought 5,000 copies at $1.25 each; the publisher demanded $3,000 in advance, a sum Smith could not raise himself. The text records that Smith sought divine guidance and that God directed Martin Harris to pay the printing bill. The stone's role therefore belongs to a larger sequence: a material tool used in divination became central to the dictated text whose publication Smith then sought to finance.