Another Claimed Spalding Story: "The Frogs of Wyndham&a

[_DonBradley]

Fellow Celestial Beings,

One of the testimonies that Solomon Spalding wrote multiple stories comes from his daughter Matilda Spalding McKinstry who recalled in 1880 that her father had written for her, and used to recite to her, a story he called "The Frogs of Wyndham."

Being curious about the accuracy of this memory, I searched for uses of the title "The Frogs of Wyndham" not associated with Spalding's name, and found that Matilda McKinstry's report is highly suspect.

"The Frogs of Windham" was the name used for a story first related in print by Samuel Peters in his A General History of Connecticut in 1781. Peters' narrative concerns a comical incident of the French and Indian War. Basically the story, in my retelling, is as follows:


The inhabitants of Windham, Connecticut heard, during the middle of the night, a terrible noise, as of a mighty army approaching on the town's main road. They leaped from their beds and fled in terror. But at length some, concluding that they could not escape, approached their unseen enemies with an offer of surrender. The response they heard from the French was "Wight, Helderkin, Dier Tete," which they understood as an offer of treaty. But upon attempting to further negotiate the terms, they discovered that these particular Frenchmen were in fact frogs. The anticipated treaty was never concluded.

The story was sometimes reprinted in periodicals, such as the very late review of Peters' History in the April 1810 issue of The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review:[/i]:
link here

That the story was widely known is attested by a mention in the 1831 American Comic Annual of "the far-famed frogs of Windham" link here
and by other late-18th century and early 19th-century mentions of the tale (e.g., link here ).

Regardless of the origin of the story, Solomon Spalding could have written his own version. But it is at least equally likely that he merely recited the existing story in his own words (as I did above), and/or that he possessed a written copy of the published account. It's also quite likely that McKinstry conflated a printed version she had acquired or seen with her father's oral telling of the narrative during her childhood. Spalding was from Connecticut and had no doubt heard the tale. And the term "The Frogs of Windham" was attached to Peters' story, but apparently not till around the 1850s, decades after McKinstry recalled her father having written a story of the same name. It thus seems likely that Spalding's tellings of the story were oral recollections, and that McKinstry got the idea of a recorded version titled "The Frogs of Windham" from later encountering a reprint of the Peters narrative.

The alleged Spalding story "The Frogs of Windham" is of little direct bearing on the origin of the Book of Mormon (unless it was the inspiration for Joseph Smith's claim to have found "something like a toad" in Cumorah's stone box). But the fact that Matilda McKinstry likely attributed to her father a written story similar to one her father had told her is relevant in assessing how well she recalled her father's manuscripts.

Don

[_CaliforniaKid]

Thanks, Don; I do think you're correct about this.

[_DonBradley]

Thanks Celestial Kingdom.

I probably won't publish much on Spalding, so I wanted this observation to go on record somewhere so that others might be able to make any use of it that they can. And I also wanted to put it out there for possible critique or extension by Uncle Dale and/or anyone else who may have further infromation or insight.

Don