86 Sioux City Academy of Science and Letters. 
Joseph Smith came to the towns of South Bend and 
Harmony, in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, prob- 
ably prior to 1880, before he claimed to have discovered 
the plates of the Book of Mormon. He had with him a 
brother, probably Hyrum Smith, and Martin Harris, and 
another man. Harris was the man who helped Smith 
translate the Book of Mormon and furnished the money 
to print it. Joseph Smith there rented a two-story board 
house of Joseph McKewon, an uncle of E. W. Skinner. 
He had with him a stone which he claimed had some 
supernatural qualities, and its size was not equal to that 
of a man’s fist. Smith would take this into a dark room, 
put it into his hat, and then hold the hat over his face 
and claimed he could then see where gold could be found. 
He carried this stone with him, and consulted it often, 
and he had his brother, Harris and the other man dig for 
the gold in the places the stone indicated along the sides 
of the mountains. Some of the places were at the back 
end of the farms of Israel Skinner and Joseph McKewon, 
Sr., Mr. E. W. Skinner’s grand-parents. Smith did not 
do any digging himself, and no gold was actually found. 
He married his wife there; her name was Emma Hale; 
he lived there possibly two years. One of Mr. Skinner’s 
relatives prepared a manuscript history of Smith’s career 
there for publication at a time when his life was being 
written up, but for some reason it was never published. 
From another personal source (J. C. C. Hoskins, of 
Sioux City, Iowa), one acquainted with Joseph Smith’s 
sister in Vermont, and the locality where he was born, 
we learn that as late as 1842 there was a man in that 
region who claimed to have a divining stone which 
enabled him to locate lost goods or treasure. It was 
about the size of one’s fist, like a meteorite or smoky 
quartz, and the owner would fix his gaze upon it intently 
for a long time, and he claimed the color of the stone 
cleared up, and he could then see in it a picture of the 
object searched for, and its location, and he allowed no 
one to touch it or come very near it. This stone had pre- 
sumably been known for a long time there, and Joseph 
Smith had probably heard his parents tell of it, or may 
have heard of it as a child in Vermont. I record these 
