Response to Jockers, Criddle, et al., Now Available

[_Uncle Dale]

...she married the guy who became the postmaster, so she continued to have a connection, and a pretty unique one in that her father was the postmaster and then she married the guy who replaced her father
...

As the lady said: "I was married in 1815, and the next year my
connection with the office ceased, excepting during the absences
of my husband."
http://www.solomonspalding.com/docs/Eich1879.htm

Remember that Pittsburgh was still a small town at the time -- and
the "post-office" of those times was a set of wooden pigeon-holes
nailed to the wall in the postmaster's own home.

The lady married a local businessman (involved in printing and some
publishing, as a rival to the Pattersons and Silas Engles) and about
a year later that husband became the postmaster. His wife had
been employed as a postal clerk, under her father -- but now the
younger, perhaps more energetic husband could handle all the daily
duties himself.

In 1816 the pigeon-holes would have been transferred to the husband's
house, and the wife would have retired to their kitchen and to the
sewing room, no doubt. If somebody came looking for a letter while the
husband was taking his bath, or walking the dog, or buying groceries,
then Mrs. Eichbaum would hand over the letter, and go back to her
domestic life -- no longer receiving any pay as an active postal clerk.

She knew about young Rigdon being a tanner -- which is interesting. Did the
young man show up at the post-office occasionally to call for his mail,
dressed in the smelly attire of an apprentice tanner?

But, our Mormon friends can find refuge in the sterling scholarship of
Sister Fawn M. Brodie -- who informs them that Rebecca was in no
position to know anything -- because she was merely an employee of
the Patterson brothers:

One woman, who had worked as mail clerk in Patterson's office between 1811 and 1816, stated that she knew Rigdon and that he was an intimate friend of Lambdin's, but that this was clearly untrue...
http://solomonspalding.com/Lib/Brd1945b.htm#pg429a

And to think that gullible people paid cold hard cash to get hold of
this historian's (?) misleading lies and downright sabotage of history!!

UD

[_Roger]

UD wrote:

And to think that gullible people paid cold hard cash to get hold of this historian's (?) misleading lies and downright sabotage of history!!

Wow. I've never seen you use the dreaded double exclamation points.

[_Roger]

That we have available from Dale's file. Whether it is present in Rigdon texts in the LDS vaults is another question.

Okay, I just wanted to make sure I am following this.

So from Dale's sample texts the word "expedient" does not show up at all for Rigdon?

And it shows up one time each for Cowdery and Spalding? When I look at Dale's chart I just see initials. How would we know if it showed up more than once? Let's say it showed up twice in Cowdery's sample, would we know that by looking at Dale's chart? Or we would just know that Cowdery used the word?

[_MCB]

I didn't look at those charts more than briefly. I just went to that file he linked to and searched for "expedient"

[_Roger]

Yeah, me too. So apparently we know they used the word, but we don't know how frequently they used it in the sample.

[_Roger]

UD wrote:

As the lady said:

So much for the idea that her testimony is "irrelevant" because she ceased to have a connection with the post office.

So what's the next line of attack?

[_Uncle Dale]

...Rigdon texts in the LDS vaults
...

I have never been granted permission to quote from the Stephen Post
collection of Rigdon papers (in the LDS Archives) nor from the Hess
collection of Rigdon documents (in the Lee Library at BYU).

Because of this impediment I cannot currently tell you folks whether
or not Sidney Rigdon used "it is expedient" in his post-Nauvoo years.
Probably he did.

As things now stand, the Rigdon base text I'm using is about 10% longer
than the Cowdery text -- so we should expect about that percentage
of additional "hits" for shared Book of Mormon vocabulary.

In other words, if Oliver Cowdery scores 900 matches with words in
a 1000 word Book of Mormon selection, and Sidney Rigdon scores
990 matches -- the two authors' respective degrees of overlap
with the Nephite record would be about the same.

The Spalding base text is considerably shorter than the Rigdon and
Cowdery base texts -- so we should always expect Spalding to be
lagging a bit behind those other two writers when it comes to word
matches with the Book of Mormon text.

Thus -- when Solomon Spalding scores a higher vocabulary overlap
with any particular excerpt from that book, it means that his wording
is significantly more like the Book of Mormon than Rigdon and Cowdery.

It appears that the BYU scholars will continue to hold their Smith base
text close to their own vests. So long as we apostates and Gentiles
do not have access to the Smith compilation Bruce used in his recently
reported study, we cannot attempt to fact-check his work --sigh!--

UD

[_Uncle Dale]

...So what's the next line of attack?

Probably that Rigdon never went to the Pittsburgh post-office,
because letters addressed to him at that address had not been
picked up.

If that is the case, what are we to make of the fact that the local
newspaper advertised a letter waiting for Rigdon at the Manchester, NY
post-office at the end of 1830?

Will Mormons say that Rigdon never passed through Manchester because
the letter was not picked up within four weeks of its delivery there?

Mormons might also cite reports of Solomon Spalding's hernia, to argue
that he could never have traveled the two dozen miles from his home
to that post-office. So Rebecca must have been telling lies, when she
said that Solomon made it into Pittsburgh to the post-office now and
then. Actually -- there was a functioning post-office in Amity, where
he was living in 1814-1816, but there was evidently a fee for the use
of its service. Would Spalding have traveled to Pittsburgh once a month,
just to avoid paying out a dollar or two at the Amity office?

At the time Solomon moved to Pittsburgh, there was a one-time-only
notice of a letter waiting for a "John Spalding" at the Pittsburgh
post-office. Art Vanick cites this oddity as evidence for Solomon's
brother John having transported Solomon and family to Pittsburgh,
and I'm inclined to agree with that conclusion.

Solomon's final illness killed him -- in 1816, the frigid year when volcanic
dust cut off the sunlight. He evidently was sleeping by the roadside,
away from his home in Amity, prior to the onset of that last sickness.
Perhaps he had caught a wagon-ride into Pittsburgh, in order to pick
up his mail, and was late in finding a return ride back home that night.

UD

[_Roger]

UD wrote:

It appears that the BYU scholars will continue to hold their Smith base text close to their own vests. So long as we apostates and Gentiles do not have access to the Smith compilation Bruce used in his recently reported study, we cannot attempt to fact-check his work --sigh!--

Reminds me of Bruce's reluctance to share the Book of Mormon addresses to the dot clusters on his PCA chart. The separation was the important thing. Don't trifle us with specifics.

Your spreadsheet just shows shared words vs. non-shared words, right? There's no way at this point to give weight to certain words that are used more frequently?

It just struck me that expedient is all over the page you listed. I wonder if we could find other pages where a particular word or phrase seems overabundant and then see if patterns emerge based on heavy word usage. I would bet if that is possible we would not see patterns neatly corresponding to Nephite authors.

[_Uncle Dale]

...Your spreadsheet just shows shared words vs. non-shared words, right? There's no way at this point to give weight to certain words that are used more frequently?
...

I have a spreadsheet that tabulates a range of chapters in Alma --
and from its data an investigator could compare one Alma chapter
to another, for degree of vocabulary overlap with Rigdon, Cowdery
and Spalding. But that's really not so useful.

Craig Criddle has a massive spreadsheet which includes every single
Book of Mormon chapter across the top, as heads of columns --
and every single word in the book down the side, as row headings.
However, he has no cross-index for any of the 19th century writers.

We need to enlist a database expert, who will set up an on-line '
database, which could be searched for 1830 Book of Mormon words, along with
the vocabulary of Smith, Cowdery, Pratt, Rigdon and Spalding.

Although the database itself might be a complex thing, the user
interface would simply be a data-entry box, similar to what we
see in a Google search window.

I would not be surprised if Ben already has such a tool at his disposal.

UD