According to Lucy, Joseph kept the seerstone on his person to keep track of the plates.
But he relates this incident...
Joseph Sr. heard enough to learn that the gang aimed at getting the “gold Bible,” as they called it. When he got back, Emma went off at once to fetch Joseph from Macedon. Joseph left the well, borrowed a horse, and hastily rode through Palmyra to the Smith farm. He reassured the family that the plates were safe but decided that now was the time to bring them home.
Why did he need to leave his job and ride home when he could have just checked his stone? And then there is the box. Bushman writes,
Lucy said he concealed them in an old birch log by cutting out a segment of bark, carving out the interior, depositing the plates, and replacing the bark. This interim hiding place also gave him time to have a box made. Lucy directed him to a cabinetmaker who had made furniture for Sophronia.
Who did Joseph go to for the box? Willard Chase! Bushman then writes,
The Smiths’ efforts to keep the plates secret were of no avail. The day after Joseph left for Macedon, his father learned that ten or twelve men working with Willard Chase were conspiring to find the plates, and had sent for a conjuror sixty miles away whom they believed could discover the hiding place. Brigham Young said the conjuror traveled the sixty miles three times that season. “The man I refer to was a fortune-teller,” Young said, “a necromance, an astrologer, a soothsayer, and possessed as much talent as any man that walked on the American soil, and was one of the wickedest men I ever saw.” The next morning Joseph Sr. walked over the hill east of the Smith farm to the Lawrence place and found Willard Chase, Samuel Lawrence, the conjuror, and a group of others laying plans. Joseph Sr. heard enough to learn that the gang aimed at getting the “gold Bible,” as they called it.
Joseph had gone to Chase for a box promising a share in the money made from the Golden Bible. Chase refused and offered to lock them up for Jo. Jo then said he couldn't be in on his new Gold Bible Speculation. So what Bushman writes makes no sense.
He then writes that Hyrum gave him a box that he kept them in. Bushman says nothing about Chase refusing to make the box for Joseph. Then,
To elude Chase and Lawrence, Joseph moved the plates from the hearth to the cooper’s shop in the yard where Joseph Sr. carried on his trade. He buried the box under a floorboard and hid the plates themselves in a pile of flax in the shop loft. That night Willard Chase and his sister Sally Chase with her green glass came with their friends to search. They rummaged around outside but did not come in. Lucy learned later that Sally Chase told the men the plates were in the coopering shop. The next morning, the Smiths found the floor torn up and the box smashed. To their relief, the plates were safely buried in the flax.
This box was smashed? This box?
Notice that the Church has to invent that there were actually THREE boxes... https://www.LDS.org/ensign/2001/01/take ... s?lang=eng
Bushman then writes,
Over a year later, David Whitmer met a group of incensed young men in Palmyra who claimed that before Joseph got the plates, “he had promised to share with them.” One of them, Samuel Lawrence, allied with Alva Beaman, a “rodsman” from Livonia, came to the Smith house to try to persuade Joseph to give them a share. 13 Joseph Knight, who was still at the Smiths’, said that “they Proposed to go shares with him and tried every way to Bargain with him. But Could not.” Whereupon Beaman held up his rods (sticks like dousing rods) until they pointed to the hearth where the plates were hidden.
In the Ensign they quote Martin Harris who was obviously confused about the box. He wrote,
"These plates were usually kept in a cherry box made for that purpose, in the possession of Joseph and myself.
And,
"When Joseph had obtained the plates, he communicated the fact to his father and mother. The plates remained concealed in the tree top until he got the chest made. He then went after them and brought them home. While on his way home with the plates, he was met by what appeared to be a man, who demanded the plates, and struck him with a club on his side, which was all black and blue. Joseph knocked the man down, and then ran for home, and was much out of breath. When he arrived at home, he handed the plates in at the window, and they were received from him by his mother. They were then hidden under the hearth in his father’s house. But the wall being partly down, it was feared that certain ones, who were trying to get possession of the plates, would get under the house and dig them out. Joseph then took them out, and hid them under the old cooper’s shop, by taking up a board and digging in the ground and burying them. When they were taken from there, they were put into an old Ontario glass-box. Old Mr. Beman sawed off the ends, making the box the right length to put them in, and when they went in he said he heard them jink, but he was not permitted to see them. He told me so.
This was the same Beman who was trying to get the plates from under the hearth? And Joseph did not get a box made while the plates were supposedly in the woods, he used the box in the picture above that he got from Hyrum who got it from Alvin Smith.
There are so many inconsistencies in these stories that it is hard to take any of it seriously.
