■  “I will tell you a wonderful thing that happened after Joseph had found the plates. Three of us took some tools to go to the hill and hunt for some more boxes of gold or something, and indeed we found a stone box. We got quite excited about it and dug quite carefully around it and we were ready to take it up, but behold by some unseen power the box slipped back into the hill. We stood there and looked at it and one of us took a crowbar and tried to drive it through the lid and hold it but the bar glanced off and broke off one corner of the box. Sometime that box will be found and you will see the corner broken off and then you will know I have told the truth again.” (Martin’s death-bed statement - signed as witnesses Clarkston, Utah, July, 1875 - John Godfrey, Ole A. Jensen and James Keep)

■ “I never saw the golden plates, only in a visionary or entranced state. I wrote a great deal of the Book of Mormon myself, as Joseph Smith translated or spelled the words out in English. Sometimes the plates would be on a table in the room in which Smith did the translating, covered over with a cloth. I was told by Smith that God would strike him dead if he attempted to look at them, and I believed it.” (Anthony Metcalf, Ten Years Before the Mast, n.d., microfilm copy, p. 70–71; quoted in Dale Morgan, Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History, Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1986).

■ “Harris was told that it would arouse the most terrible divine displeasure, if he should attempt to draw near the sacred chest, or look at Smith while engaged in the work of decyphering (sic) the mysterious characters.” (1827 — Account of Martin Harris given to the Rev. John A. Clark, as related in his 1842 book Gleanings by the Way, W.J. & J.K. Simon, pp. 222ff). [Microfilm copy]

■ John H. Gilbert, who participated in printing of the Book of Mormon. said: "Martin was something of a prophet: He frequently said that 'Jackson would be the last president that we would have; and that all persons who did not embrace Mormonism in two years would be stricken off the face of the earth.' He said that 'Palmyra was to be the New Jerusalem, and that her streets were to be paved with gold.' Martin was in the office when I finished setting up the testimony of the three witnesses, (Harris — Cowdery and Whitmer) I said to him, 'Martin, did you see those plates with your naked eyes?' Martin looked down for an instant, raise his eyes up, and said, 'No, I saw them with a spiritual eye.'" (Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, Vol. 1, 1958, introduction. This is a photomechanical reprint of the first edition [1830] of the Book of Mormon. It also contains biographical and historical information relating to the Book of Mormon.)