What a Forger Does to a Historical Record

The Hofmann case is recorded in this atlas for what it did to the source record of a living religion. His forgeries entered scholarship: the Salamander Letter and its siblings were cited, anthologized and argued over by historians of Mormonism before forensic examiner George Throckmorton and his colleagues demonstrated in 1986, through the microscopic cracking of the artificially aged ink, that the corpus was fake. Documentary history of the Latter Day Saint movement has worked in his shadow since, with provenance research on any sensational find now assuming a Hofmann until proven otherwise, a discipline the earlier Michigan Relics affair had taught the church in cruder form generations before.

The frame matters, and the atlas states it explicitly: Hofmann's documents are not debated artifacts of Mormon history, they are debunked fabrications, established as such by forensic examination and by his own confessions in the 1987 plea agreement that spared him a capital trial. He pleaded guilty to two counts of second degree murder and to fraud, and remains imprisoned in Utah. Linda Sillitoe and Allen Roberts's Salamander remains the standard account of the case. Nothing he made tells us anything about Joseph Smith's world; what it documents is the market for religious history itself, and how expertly want can be supplied.