“I received your letter in regard to those plates, and will say in answer that they are a humbug, gotten up by Robert Wiley, Bridge Whitten and myself … We read in Pratt’s prophecy that “Truth is yet to spring out of the earth.” We concluded to prove the prophecy by way of a joke.”

W. Fugate, as quoted in Welby W. Ricks, The Kinderhook Plates; reprinted in The Improvement Era (Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, September 1962), 636.