| 453 She then stated that she thought Joseph Smith was quite a different man in spirit and manner the last year or two that she knew him from what he was in the other time she had known him, from 1831 to 1842. In her language she said:
"He seemed entirely different; but I never knew or even heard that he had more than one wife."-The Saints' Herald, vol. 31, p. 339.
A reporter of the Pittsburg [Pittsburgh] Leader also interviewed this lady, and as a result the following appeared in the Leader for May 18, 1884:
It will be remembered by our readers that just previous to the commencement of the debate with Reverend Kelley on the Mormon question, Reverend W. R. Coovert stated to a Leader reporter that Sidney Rigdon, a former resident of Pittsburg [Pittsburgh], had stolen the manuscript of the Mormon bible, which had been written by a Doctor Spalding, of Ohio, as a romance, and which the latter had left with a publisher named Patterson, father of the editor of the Presbyterian Banner; that after stealing it he submitted it to Joseph Smith, of Palmyra, New York, who, in connection with Rigdon, published it and palmed it off as a revelation from God.
Learning that a daughter of Rigdon was living in Pittsburg [Pittsburgh] a reporter called on her yesterday, and at first she declined to say anything at all on the subject, but finally, on the scribe promising not to use her name-she is married-she said: "I have never had the honor of seeing this so-called Reverend Coovert, who of late had been so free in his use of dead men's names, but I understand he parts his hair in the middle of his head, a fact which, from what I have heard and read of him, is no surprise to me. Now, while I most emphatically decline to be drawn into any controversy over that story of Coovert, which, if there was any foundation for it, I can not, for the life of me, see why it was allowed to remain quiet for years after all the actors are laid in their graves. Yet I will say this, that my father, who had the respect of all who knew him, and at a time when he had but little hope of living from one day to another, said to the clergymen around him, of which there was a number belonging to various denominations. These were his words: ' As I expect to die and meet my Maker, I know nothing about where the manuscript of the Mormon bible came from.'"
The lady said further that she believed as firmly as she believed anything, that Joseph Smith (who was, she believed, at one time a good man) had a revelation, and that the Mormon bible was founded on that revelation. But she was satisfied the Reverend Coovert had never seen a copy of it and consequently did not know what he was talking and writing about.
On May 9, 1884, the building known as the Cock Pitt, Preston, England, in which the first missionaries held meeting in 1837, fell down.
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