[Elphaba]

Originally Posted by its_Chet

. . . the locals wanted the gold and were willing to suspend disbelief long enough to get it if possible).

The locals did not suspend disbelief at all--their actions were perfectly in keeping with the religious beliefs in the Palmyra area, including those that Joseph shared.

According to D. Michael Quinn, a scholar in Mormon history,

“Joseph Smith’s family was typical of many early Americans who practiced various forms of Christian folk magic.”

(Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, pg. 30.)

Briefly, folk magic was a combination of Christianity and the occult; however, the occult had a very different meaning in Joseph’s time, and was the fairly benign practice of spells, incantations, divining rods, etc. It did not have the evil connotation we give it today and I am not suggesting Joseph‘s, and the other folk magic practitioners’ belief in the occult was an evil thing.

One of the folk magic beliefs, and one that Joseph practiced, was that of using “peepstones,” to look for buried treasure, commonly called “money digging,“ at the time. The person would put a rock up to his eye and it would show the person where the treasure was buried. Some of Joseph’s neighbors considered him adept at using the peepstones.

In fact, Joseph met Emma because of Joseph Stowell's belief that Joseph could “see things invisible to the natural eye” via a peepstone. (Lucy Mack, quotes in Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, pg. 48.) Stowell had hired Joseph to come to his property to find the treasure, and since Palmyra was a good distance away from Stowell's property, Joseph boarded with the local family of Isaac Hale, who was Emma’s father. (Joseph eventually convinced Stowell to stop looking for the treasure.)

One of the reason the “locals,“ many of whom believed in Joseph’s magical abilities, insisted that Joseph share the Golden Plates with them is because he had previously insisted he could see buried treasure, but when they tried to dig for it, Joseph claimed the treasure had receded into the earth. (Believers in folk magic commonly believed buried treasure was protected by magic, and that no earthly person could touch it; thus it moved when someone tried to uncover it.)

According to Wiki (which is accurate in this case):

Shortly thereafter the empty box was discovered and the place ransacked by Smith's former treasure-seeking associates. . . .

None (edit: All) of the people who tried to steal the plates were Joseph's former associates, and they did not suspend belief in anything. They all believed Joseph had uncovered buried treasure via folk magic.

Elphaba