The Kinderhook plates are a set of six small, bell-shaped pieces of brass with unusual engravings, created as a hoax in 1843, surreptitiously buried and then dug up at an Indian mound near Kinderhook, Illinois. The plates were forged by three men from Kinderhook as a prank on the local Latter Day Saint community. According to Latter Day Saint belief, the Book of Mormon is a record of the ancient Judeo-Semitic inhabitants of the Americas, originally translated by the founder of the movement, Joseph Smith, from golden plates engraved in the language of reformed Egyptian. Latter Day Saint residents of Kinderhook sent the plates to Smith in Nauvoo for translation, where Smith said they were of ancient origin and translated a portion of them. In 1980, scientific testing confirmed the hoax, and that the plates were a modern creation. Within the Latter Day Saint movement, Smith's translation was never accepted in the canon of scripture, but was generally considered authentic. Background Latter Day Saints had been expelled from Missouri in the late 1830s, and settled in and around modern day Nauvoo, Illinois. By 1842, there was a congregation of around 100 members a couple miles south of the village of Kinderhook. Two residents of Kinderhook, a farmer named Wilburn Fugate and a merchant named Robert Wiley, were proselytized by missionaries using the Parley P. Pratt missionary tract A Voice of Warning, that used the phrase, "Truth would spring up out of the earth". Fugate and Wiley decided to "prove the prophecy by way of a joke", and enlisted the help of village postmaster and blacksmith Bridge Whitton to create a set of six small plates of brass. In an 1879 letter to James T. Cobb, Fugate wrote of their creation: "Bridge Whitton cut them (the plates) out of some pieces of copper; Wiley and I made the hieroglyphics by making impressions on beeswax and filling them with acid and putting it on the plates. When they were finished we put them together with rust made of nitric acid, old iron and lead, and bound them with a piece of hoop iron, covering them completely with rust." The purpose in creating the hoax has been debated. It is frequently presented as being a trap for Joseph Smith, to expose his translating abilities. Local recollections indicate that the creators of the hoax never expected the plates to be delivered to Smith for