# Oliver Cowdery Corpus — Manifest

Corpus of texts authored by Oliver Cowdery (1806-1850) for stylometric authorship analysis.
Assembled 2026-07-07. All files UTF-8 plain text; each begins with 3 `#` comment lines
(title, date, source URL / provenance), which should be stripped before analysis.

**Total: 19 documents, 44,332 words** (body text, excluding `#` header lines).

## Inclusion criteria
- Only texts signed by Oliver Cowdery, or (in one case, noted below) explicitly published
  "from the Editor" during his sole editorship and cross-confirmed as his by the following issue.
- Quoted material by other authors (certificates, historical documents, other people's letters)
  was removed where it formed discrete blocks; removals noted per file.
- Bracketed modern transcriber corrections (e.g. "opponants [opponents]"), page markers,
  and website navigation were stripped; original 1830s spellings retained.
- The 1839 "Defence in a Rehearsal of My Grounds..." was deliberately EXCLUDED as a
  probable 20th-century forgery (first attested 1906 reprint; no 1839 original known).

## Files

| File | Title | Date | Words | Source | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| cowdery_1834_letter1.txt | Letter I to W. W. Phelps | Sep 7, 1834 (M&A Oct 1834) | 1,710 | en.wikisource.org (Letters by Oliver Cowdery To W.W. Phelps .../Letter_I) | High — signed series |
| cowdery_1834_letter2.txt | Letter II to W. W. Phelps | Nov 1834 (M&A Nov 1834) | 3,129 | en.wikisource.org .../Letter_II | High — signed series |
| cowdery_1834_letter3.txt | Letter III to W. W. Phelps | Dec 1834 (M&A Dec 1834) | 1,286 | en.wikisource.org .../Letter_III | High — signed series |
| cowdery_1835_letter4.txt | Letter IV to W. W. Phelps | Feb 1835 (M&A Feb 1835) | 2,013 | en.wikisource.org .../Letter_IV | High — signed series |
| cowdery_1835_letter5.txt | Letter V to W. W. Phelps | Mar 1835 (M&A Mar 1835) | 1,930 | en.wikisource.org .../Letter_V | High — signed series |
| cowdery_1835_letter6.txt | Letter VI to W. W. Phelps | Apr 1835 (M&A Apr 1835) | 3,014 | en.wikisource.org .../Letter_VI | High — signed series |
| cowdery_1835_letter7.txt | Letter VII to W. W. Phelps | Jul 1835 (M&A Jul 1835) | 2,826 | en.wikisource.org .../Letter_VII | High — signed series |
| cowdery_1835_letter8.txt | Letter VIII to W. W. Phelps | Oct 1835 (M&A Oct 1835) | 5,102 | en.wikisource.org .../Letter_VIII | High — signed series |
| cowdery_1834_wacowdery_letter1.txt | Letter to W. A. Cowdery (Missouri persecutions) | Jan 23, 1834 (E&MS 2:16) | 795 | centerplace.org/history/ems/v2n16.htm | High — signed |
| cowdery_1834_ems_address.txt | Address to the Patrons of the Evening and the Morning Star | Sep 1834 (E&MS 2:24) | 2,770 | centerplace.org/history/ems/v2n24.htm | High — signed |
| cowdery_1834_wacowdery_letter2.txt | Answer to W. A. Cowdery (cholera, prophets, Baptist Register) | Sep 1834 (E&MS 2:24) | 4,004 | centerplace.org/history/ems/v2n24.htm | High — signed |
| cowdery_1834_ma_address.txt | Address (opening editorial, Messenger and Advocate) | Oct 1834 (M&A 1:1) | 1,155 | centerplace.org/history/ma/v1n01.htm | High — signed |
| cowdery_1834_michigan_letter.txt | Travel letter from Pontiac, Michigan Territory | Oct 20, 1834 (M&A 1:1) | 3,182 | centerplace.org/history/ma/v1n01.htm | High — signed |
| cowdery_1835_ma_valedictory1.txt | Address to the Patrons (first valedictory as editor) | May 1835 (M&A 1:8) | 1,241 | centerplace.org/history/ma/v1n08.htm | High — signed |
| cowdery_1835_frye_letter.txt | Letter to William Frye (Egyptian mummies and papyri) | Dec 22, 1835 (M&A 2:3) | 2,071 | centerplace.org/history/ma/v2n03.htm | High — signed; quoted physicians' and Chandler certificates removed |
| cowdery_1836_eastern_letter1.txt | First letter from the editor, eastern tour (Buffalo to New York) | Aug 3, 1836 (M&A 2:12) | 2,352 | centerplace.org/history/ma/v2n12.htm | High (contextual) — unsigned but published as "from the Editor" (Cowdery was editor/proprietor); confirmed as his by the intro to the second letter in M&A 3:1 |
| cowdery_1836_prospectus.txt | Prospectus for volume 3 of the Messenger and Advocate | Sep 1836 (M&A 3:1) | 813 | centerplace.org/history/ma/v3n01.htm | High — signed |
| cowdery_1836_eastern_letter2_salem.txt | Second letter, eastern tour (Boston, Salem, Bunker Hill) | Aug 24, 1836 (M&A 3:1) | 4,075 | centerplace.org/history/ma/v3n01.htm | High — signed; long quoted Salem-witch-trial documents (Cary/Aldin narratives, mittimus) removed |
| cowdery_1837_valedictory2.txt | Valedictory (closing second editorship) | Feb 1837, Monroe MI (pub. M&A 3:11, Aug 1837) | 864 | centerplace.org/history/ma/v3n11.htm | High — signed |

M&A = Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate (Kirtland, OH).
E&MS = The Evening and the Morning Star (Kirtland reprint-era issues, Cowdery editor).

## Caveats for stylometric use
1. **Residual short quotations.** Short inline quotations remain embedded in Cowdery's prose:
   KJV Bible phrases and verses throughout (especially Letters IV-VIII, which rehearse the
   angel Moroni's words — themselves largely composed of scriptural passages as retold by
   Cowdery), and brief quoted snippets from the "Baptist Register" in
   cowdery_1834_wacowdery_letter2.txt. Discrete multi-paragraph quoted documents were removed,
   but sentence-level quotes were left to avoid subjective surgery on the text. Analysts using
   n-gram or rare-word features may wish to apply a KJV filter.
2. **Joint composition possibility.** The eight Phelps letters were written with Joseph Smith's
   cooperation (Letter I's series was announced with Smith's "assistance"); scholarship treats
   the prose as Cowdery's, but the historical narrative content was informed by Smith.
3. **Transcription provenance.** Texts are from secondary transcripts (Wikisource; RLDS
   centerplace.org), not diplomatic transcriptions of the originals. Both are faithful to the
   period printings but may normalize incidental typography (long s, line breaks). Bracketed
   transcriber spelling corrections were removed, retaining original spellings. Punctuation
   idiosyncrasies (em-dash usage, quotation marks) may partly reflect the 1830s compositor
   rather than Cowdery's manuscript hand — standard caveat for printed-source stylometry.
4. **Excluded material:** the 1839 "Defence" (probable forgery); pieces signed jointly
   (e.g. Rigdon/Smith/Cowdery notice, M&A 2:11; "O. Cowdery & Co." house notices);
   unsigned editorials from his editorship windows (attribution plausible but not certain,
   and W. A. Cowdery — his brother Warren, who signed "W." or "ED." — wrote adjacent matter
   easily confused with Oliver's); minutes he signed only as clerk.
5. Word counts exclude the three `#` header lines in each file.
