The sect was founded in the state of New York, while Mr. Rigdon resided in Ohio, several hundred miles distant. Mr. Rigdon embraced the doctrine through my instrumentality. I first presented the Book of Mormon to him. I stood upon the bank of the stream while he was baptized, and assisted to officiate in his ordination, and I myself was unacquainted with the system until some months after its organization, which was on the 6th of April, 1830, and I embraced it in September following. Again, in 1840, in a work entitled "Late Persecutions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints," referring to the persecutions in Missouri, in the course of which he also gave an account of the rise and progress of the doctrine of the Church, Elder Pratt says, relative to this Spaulding story: There is one story, however, which I will notice, because some religious journals have given some credit to it. It is the story of Solomon Spaulding writing a romance of the ancient inhabitants of America which is said to be converted by Mr. Sidney Rigdon into the Book of Mormon. This is another base fabrication got up by the devil and his servants to deceive the world. Mr. Sidney Rigdon never saw the Book of Mormon until it had been published more than six months; it was then presented to him by the author of this history. [35] From another source there is also an emphatic denial of Sidney Rigdon's connection with the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. This is the statement of Mr. Rigdon's son, John W. Rigdon. This gentleman wrote a somewhat extended biography of his father, Sidney Rigdon, which he placed in its manuscript form in the Church Historian's office, at Salt Lake City, where it is now on file. Mr. John W. Rigdon's account of his father's connection with the Book of Mormon agrees with the statement of Elder Pratt; and then, near the close of his narrative, he relates his own experience in connection with Mormonism, and his attempt to learn the truth from his father respecting the latter's early connection with the Book of Mormon. John W. Rigdon tells of his own visit to Utah, in 1863, where he spent the winter among the Mormon people. He was not favorably impressed with their religious life, and came to the conclusion that the Book of Mormon itself was a fraud. He determined in his own heart that if ever he returned home and found his father, Sidney Rigdon, alive, he would try and find out what he knew of the origin of the Book of Mormon. "Although," he adds, "he had never told but one story about it, and that was that Parley P. Pratt and Oliver Cowdery presented him with a bound volume of that book in the year 1830, while he (Sidney Rigdon) was preaching Campbellism at Mentor, Ohio." What John W. Rigdon claims to have seen in Utah, however, together with the fact that Sidney Rigdon had been charged with writing the Book of Mormon, made him suspicious; and he remarks: