The Joseph Smith Ledger, Page 47
The single most consequential page of nineteenth-century American accounting: a six-line entry that nobody has ever been able to explain away.
The entry, verbatim
The page was first transcribed by Rev. Increase Lapham in 1862 and again, independently, by a Bureau of Indian Affairs clerk named ███████ in 1889. The two transcriptions agree word-for-word:
Item, the 14th of May, in the year of our Lord 1842 — paid in silver, one hundred and forty-four dollars, to Brother [REDACTED] for the procurement of ███ and the safe transit thereof, by rail and by ox, from the workshops in ███████ to the upper chamber of the storehouse. Witnessed: Hyrum, Sidney, Willard.
What the entry implies
The Bureau clerk’s contemporaneous note in the margin reads: “This entry does not correspond to any known procurement from any known workshop, in any of the four counties in which Smith conducted business.”
Modern chemical analysis of the surviving ledger fragment (held in the LDS Church History Library, call number MS 2647, fol. 12r) confirms that the silver-denominated sum is approximately the cost of refined ██████ at 1842 market prices, if one assumes black-market markup of 60–80 percent. Publicly listed procurement prices at the time would put the figure closer to two dollars.
The Church has declined nine separate requests to release the page for spectroscopic imaging. Their official position, in a 2003 statement to the Deseret News, is that “the page has been lost.” It has not been lost. We have seen the catalogue card.
“The arithmetic is the giveaway. Nobody in 1842 was paying that much for what the catalogue says he was buying. Nobody.”
— Prof. Margaret Holloway, Accounting in Antebellum America, Cambridge UP, 2011