Mrs. Ellen E. Dickenson, a great-niece of Spaulding, who has painstakingly investigated the history of the much-discussed manuscript, visited D. P. Hurlbut at his home near Gibsonburg, Ohio, in 1880 (he died in 1882), taking with her Oscar Kellogg, a lawyer, as a witness to the interview.* She says that her visit excited him greatly. He told of getting a manuscript for Mr. Howe at Hartwick, and said he thought it was burned with other of Mr. Howe's papers. When asked, "Was it Spaulding's manuscript that was burned?" he replied: "Mrs. Davison thought it was; but when I just peeked into it, here and there, and saw the names Mormon, Moroni, Lamanite, Lephi, I thought it was all nonsense. Why, if it had been the real one, I could have sold it for $3000;** but I just gave it to Howe because it was of no account." During the interview his wife was present, and when Mrs. Dickenson pressed him with the question, "Do you know where the 'Manuscript Found' is at the present time?" Mrs. Hurlbut went up to him and said, "Tell her what you know." She got no satisfactory answer, but he afterward forwarded to her an affidavit saying that he had obtained of Mrs. Davison a manuscript supposing it to be Spaulding's "Manuscript Found," adding: "I did not examine the manuscript until after I got home, when upon examination I found it to contain nothing of the kind, but being a manuscript upon an entirely different subject. This manuscript I left with E. D. Howe." With this presentation of the evidence showing the similarity between Spaulding's story and the Mormon Bible narrative, we may next examine the grounds for believing that Sidney Rigdon was connected with the production of the Bible. * A full account of this interview is given in her book, "New Light on Mormonism" (1885). ** There have been surmises that Hurlbut also found the "Manuscript Found" in the trunk and sold this to the Mormons. He sent a specific denial of this charge to Robert Patterson in 1879. CHAPTER VIII. -- SIDNEY RIGDON The man who had more to do with founding the Mormon church than Joseph Smith, Jr., even if we exclude any share in the production of the Mormon Bible, and yet who is unknown even by name to most persons to whom the names of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young are familiar, was Sidney Rigdon. Elder John Hyde, Jr., was well within the truth when he wrote: "The compiling genius of Mormonism was Sidney Rigdon. Smith had boisterous impetuosity but no foresight. Polygamy was not the result of his policy but of his passions. Sidney gave point, direction, and apparent consistency to the Mormon system of theology. He invented its forms and the manner of its arguments.... Had it not been for the accession of these two men [Rigdon and Parley P. Pratt] Smith would have been lost, and his schemes frustrated and abandoned."*