Where did the gold plates go?
What happened to the gold plates?
After Joseph Smith completed the translation, the angel Moroni took custody of the plates. Joseph said that Moroni required them to be returned, so they were not preserved as a museum artifact or left available for public examination. Their purpose was to provide tangible evidence of the ancient record and to support the testimony of the witnesses who saw and handled them.
The stone box that had held the plates was later reported by David Whitmer to have broken apart and been washed down the hill. That report concerns the container, not the plates themselves. The plates’ final physical location is not revealed in scripture or in a definitive historical record; the faithful conclusion is that they remained under divine custody after their return to Moroni. The Lord emphasizes the witnesses’ testimony rather than the continued possession of the plates (Joseph Smith—History 1:59; 1 Nephi 5:18-19; Ether 5:4).
At length the time arrived for obtaining the plates, the Urim and Thummim, and the breastplate. On the twenty-second day of September, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven, having gone as usual at the end of another year to the place where they were deposited, the same heavenly messenger delivered them up to me with this charge: that I should be responsible for them; that if I should let them go carelessly, or through any neglect of mine, I should be cut off; but that if I would use all my endeavors to preserve them, until he, the messenger, should call for them, they should be protected.
18. That these plates of brass should go forth unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people who were of his seed. 19. Wherefore, he said that these plates of brass should never perish; neither should they be dimmed any more by time. And he prophesied many things concerning his seed.
And in the mouth of three witnesses shall these things be established; and the testimony of three, and this work, in the which shall be shown forth the power of God and also his word, of which the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost bear record—and all this shall stand as a testimony against the world at the last day.
During the course of excavating for a cistern near Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1847, a gold plate was discovered three or four inches in length, averaging about three-fourths of an inch in width, about one-eighth of an inch in thickness, with the edges scalloped. In the face of it was beautifully set another plate of the same material, and fastened together by two pins, running through both. This latter plate was full of ancient raised characters, beautifully engraved upon its surface; the whole exhibiting fine workmanship. The plate was examined by Dr. Wise, a learned Rabbi of the Jewish synagogue in Cincinnati, an editor of a Hebrew paper there, who pronounced the characters to be mostly ancient Egyptian. (Millennial Star, Vol. 19, p. 103, facsimile of plate on p. 632.) Padre Gay mentions (Historia de Oaxaca, Vol. 1, cap. 4, p. 62) that the Mexican Indians "sold to some European antiquarians very thin plates of gold, evidently worked with the hammer, which their ancestors had been able to preserve, and on which were engraved ancient hieroglyphs." (Saville, The Goldsmith's Art in Ancient Mexico, 1920, p. 175.) "Their graves (Indians of Colombia) contained plates of gold and tablets of earth (clay) with various curious characters which probably had among them conventional significance." (Geografia y Compendio Historico del Estado Antioquia en Columbia, Paris, 1885, p. 517.) Although most of the articles of gold have found their way into the melting pot, there are still some which have been preserved to the present time, as for example, in the Field Museum, Chicago, and the British Museum, London. Elder Melvin J. Ballard describes some plates he saw thus: "Brother Pratt and myself saw in a museum in Lima, Peru, a stack of gold sheets almost identical with the size of the Book of Mormon sheets, approximately eight inches long and seven inches wide, as thin as paper. The whole stack was nearly an inch thick, not a thing upon either side but just gold sheets, prepared for just such work as the plates of the Book of Mormon." (Deseret News, April 30, 1932.) Bibliography John A. Widtsoe and Franklin S. Harris, Jr., Seven Claims of the Book of Mormon: A Collection of Evidences (Independence, MO: Zion's Printing and Publishing Co., 1937), 32-37
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