In the library

Oliver Cowdery

He wrote down most of the Book of Mormon as it was dictated, signed the Testimony of Three Witnesses, was thrown out of the church in 1838, and came back a decade later with nothing left to gain by it.

Cowdery is the closest thing the founding period has to a second author. He arrived as a schoolteacher in April 1829 and served as principal scribe for the bulk of the translation, which means his handwriting is the medium through which most of the Book of Mormon reached paper. He was later called the second elder of the church.

The witness, and the copy

He signed the Testimony of Three Witnesses in June 1829 — the statement describing an angel and the plates. He also made the printer's manuscript by hand so the original would not have to leave the family's keeping, and that copying is why every witness name on the surviving document is in his handwriting.

He married into the family too: in December 1832 he married Elizabeth Ann Whitmer, sister to David, John, Jacob and Peter Jun. Four of the eleven witnesses were his brothers-in-law.

Out, for ten years

The high council at Far West, Missouri excommunicated him on April 12, 1838 — one day before it excommunicated David Whitmer. He left Mormonism entirely and practised law in Ohio and Wisconsin for the next decade. He was not quiet, and he was not far away, and in all that time no one produced a retraction from him.

Back, and then gone

In November 1848 he was rebaptized at Mosquito Creek near Council Bluffs, Iowa, by the apostle Orson Hyde. He came back as an ordinary member — no office restored, no position waiting. In January 1849 he took his family to Richmond, Missouri, where the Whitmers were living, and he died there on March 3, 1850.

David Whitmer — still excommunicated, and still in Richmond — recorded what Cowdery said to him near the end:

Brother David, be true to your testimony to the Book of Mormon.

Oliver Cowdery's last words, as recorded by David Whitmer in An Address to All Believers in Christ (1887)

It is a strange sentence for one estranged man to say to another, and it is the reason Cowdery's decade away is worth more than the decade he spent inside.