Do the Nauvoo Land Deeds Prove Joseph Smith’s Polygamy?

By Jay Ball  ·  July 19, 2026

Before I beginWhy I am engaging this topic

By way of introduction, I feel I should lay out where I am coming from and why I have taken the effort to write on this at all.

As an engaged listener to Michelle Stone’s 132 Problems podcast on YouTube, I first became aware of Bill Reel’s “marbles in a jar” land-deed argument through her episode 119. I find it delightful when parties who disagree are willing to sit down in open conversation — especially over important things, where people are passionate and deeply invested, and yet still willing to let the discussion move into the public space, where a fuller picture can be weighed and a broader audience can make informed decisions for themselves. For that reason I was grateful to see Bill and Michelle come together on the Mormonish podcast to discuss the issue directly (Ep. 164). I had been impressed by Michelle’s arguments in her earlier episode, and, being someone who clearly stands in defense of Joseph Smith’s innocence against the accusation of polygamy, I was a little surprised by the strength of what Bill brought to the table in that exchange.

I was glad, too, to see Jeremy Hoop willing to engage Bill Reel and Radio Free Mormon, and I watched their discussion with interest. Bill again raised the land deeds, and it was clear that Jeremy was not really prepared for that particular thread — he deferred, saying the matter was best left to statisticians, and pointed the audience back to the earlier exchange between Bill and Michelle. I felt an inner awkwardness just listening, because I knew that, had the question been put to me, I would not have had any better answer than Jeremy did. That bothered me. I am no statistician myself, but I know I am capable of reasoning my way through a thing with someone, even if it takes me some space and time to wrap my mind around it. Deferring an argument to the professionals, when one might otherwise be perfectly able to reason through it, reminded me of the confirmation hearing in which Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson declined to say what a woman is on the grounds that she is not a biologist.

I am keenly aware that I am not, on paper, a good candidate to take on a problem like this. But it seems to me that Bill Reel deserves a better response than a shrug. And it occurred to me that in the age of AI, working through problems that involve math and analysis is no longer out of reach for someone like me. So I have taken this on as a personal challenge — to see what I might come up with by making honest use of the tools available. I take responsibility for what follows, while acknowledging plainly that I have leaned heavily on AI to do the research and much of the heavy lifting.

As I understand it, the question of whether Joseph Smith practiced plural marriage has long turned on affidavits, journals, sealing records, and personal testimony. Bill Reel has brought something newer to the table, and I find it genuinely intriguing: he looks at the public land deeds of Nauvoo, Illinois. His claim is that those property records carry a kind of statistical fingerprint of polygamy — that Joseph, acting as trustee for the Church, deeded city lots to a striking number of the very women independently named as his plural wives, and that the overlap is far too concentrated to be coincidence.¹ He has gone so far as to call the deeds a “smoking gun.”

I want to take that seriously rather than wave it away. So in what follows I have tried to do two things. First, to lay out Reel’s argument at its full strength, in the way he would put it himself. Then to walk carefully through the honest questions I think a fair reader — and Reel himself — should weigh before calling the deeds proof. I am not trying to declare a winner. I am trying to understand.

To beginBill Reel’s case, in one picture

Let me put it as plainly as I can, the way it first landed on me. Imagine Nauvoo as a great jar holding about 3,000 Latter-day Saint women. Now reach in and pull out only the women who were deeded a piece of land in their own name — no husband listed — during Joseph Smith’s last years, 1842 to 1844. That is a small handful: about 34 women.

Here is the question that matters to me. Joseph’s alleged secret wives were only a tiny slice of those 3,000 women — something like one in a hundred. So if land deeds had nothing to do with marriage, that little group of 34 should contain almost no wives at all. Maybe none. Maybe one, by luck.

Instead, about 12 of the 34 — more than a third — are women independently named, in other records, as Joseph’s plural wives.

I have to sit with that gap. Expected by chance: about one. Actually found: twelve. That is not the kind of coincidence I can simply shrug off — it is the same names showing up on two lists that are supposed to have nothing to do with each other. Flip a coin and get heads once, fine. Get heads twelve times when you expected tails, and you know something is going on.

Then comes the part I find hardest to explain away — the timing. It is not just that the names overlap; it is the order. Sarah Ann Whitney, seventeen, was sealed to Joseph in July 1842. About six weeks later she received a valuable deed — a lot one block from his house. Flora Woodworth, sixteen, followed the same path: sealed, then deeded a lot two months later. The sealing first; the property second. This is what you would expect if you believe that Joseph was quietly providing for a wife.

You do not need fancy math to feel the weight of it. One name matching could be chance. Twelve names matching — with deeds landing right after the sealings — is a pattern. And a pattern that specific, that repeated, and that well-timed does not happen by accident. That is Reel’s core point, and I think it is a fair one: the deeds and the wives are not two separate stories. On his reading they are the same story, written once in a marriage record and again in a property record.

Part 1Reel’s argument, stated fairly

Reel begins with a specific, checkable data set. Between 1 January 1842 and 27 June 1844 — the day Joseph was killed — he identifies 34 deeds in which a woman received a Nauvoo lot with no husband listed alongside her.² Out of those 34, a substantial share went to women who appear on independent lists of Joseph’s alleged plural wives.

His early presentations put that share at “at least 75%,” drawn from an initial sample of roughly 15 deeds. On his later, expanded count of 34 deeds, the number he himself gives is 12 alleged wives out of 34.³ Either way, his point holds its shape: that is a great deal of overlap for something that is supposed to be random.

To make it vivid, Reel reaches for the marbles in a jar. Suppose Nauvoo held about 12,000 people; assume half were Latter-day Saints, and half of those were women — roughly 3,000 LDS women. If Joseph had about 34 wives, then the chance of any single deed landing on a wife is 34 out of 3,000, a little over one percent. Picture a jar of 3,000 marbles with only 34 of the “wife” color; drawing one is unlikely, and drawing a dozen should be astronomically unlikely.⁴ That, he argues, is why the deeds cannot be chance — and therefore point to polygamy.

To his credit, Reel is careful about his scope. He limits the window to 1842–1844 for a reason he considers principled: that is when Joseph controlled the property as trustee-in-trust, and it is the period in which the plural marriages are alleged to have occurred. He does not expect polygamy-linked deeds before 1842 or after Joseph’s death, so he does not count those years.²

Read this way, Reel is not merely claiming that wives and deeds correlate. He is claiming that Joseph deeded property to specific young women shortly after being sealed to them — provision attached to the union, cause and effect rather than coincidence.

Part 2How strong is the statistic? Four honest questions

The timing cases are one thing. Reel’s broader statistical claim — the marbles-in-a-jar “proof” — is another, and here I have had to slow down and be honest with myself. None of the following is a knockout blow. I offer each not as a refutation but as a question I think Reel would need to answer to carry the argument from suggestive to conclusive.

1. The headline ratio depends on the sample. The famous “75%” came from Reel’s first, small batch of about 15 deeds. When the data set grew to 34, the alleged-wife share he himself reports settled at 12 of 34 — roughly 35%.⁷ Run the comparison the other way and the overlap looks looser still: of Joseph’s roughly 50 alleged wives, fewer than a quarter appear on any deed at all.⁸ None of this makes the pattern vanish. But it does mean the precise number leans heavily on which deeds you count — a caveat I think any careful presentation owes its reader.

2. Are all the “marbles” really the same size? The jar illustration assumes every Nauvoo woman was equally likely to receive a deed. In truth, some were far likelier than others. Single, widowed, or financially needy women were exactly the people Joseph is documented to have helped with grants of land. If those women were more likely to be deeded property to begin with, then drawing several of them from the “jar” is not as improbable as an equal-chance model implies.⁹ This strikes me as a legitimate question, and one Reel’s framing does not yet answer.

3. The denominator is uncertain. The “3,000 women” figure rests on a flat population of 12,000. But Nauvoo grew explosively across exactly these years — from roughly 4,000 people in 1842 to about 12,000 by 1844.¹⁰ A single fixed number for the whole window is imprecise, and the assumptions stacked on top of it (half Mormon, half of those women) only compound the uncertainty. This does not prove Reel wrong. It means the exact probability he calculates should be held loosely.

4. The window was chosen where the answer was expected. Critics raise what is called the “Texas sharpshooter” concern: shoot the barn first, then draw the target around the bullet holes. By limiting the analysis to 1842–1844 — the very years where polygamy is expected — the argument may quietly build its conclusion into its setup.¹¹ Here, though, I think Reel has a reasonable reply, and fairness requires stating it: he scopes to the years Joseph actually controlled the deeds and to the period when the marriages are alleged. That is a defensible reason to draw the window where he does. So I take this as a caveat to weigh, not a refutation.

Underneath all four sits the old caution that correlation is not causation. Even a strong association between deeds and alleged wives would not, by itself, prove marriage; some shared background factor could be driving both. And yet this is precisely where Reel’s timing cases press back on me, because a deed that follows a documented sealing by six weeks is no longer “mere association.” The four questions above bear on the aggregate percentage. To my mind they do not dissolve Whitney and Woodworth.¹²

Part 3About the statistician

Several of the questions above were sharpened by a professional statistician, John Kidd, who teaches statistics at Utah Valley University and holds a PhD in biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.¹³ His observations are worth weighing on their merits: he argues that Reel reached for the wrong probability tool (a hypergeometric distribution, which accounts for how many deeds were actually drawn, is the correct model), that the equal-chance assumption is the deepest flaw, and that calling any statistic a “proof” asks more of statistics than it can give.

Two pieces of context about Kidd are worth putting on the table — not as a verdict on his objectivity in any direction, but as facts a reader can weigh for themselves.

• Kidd’s critique was given as an interview on Michelle Stone’s podcast, 132 Problems. Stone had written to professors seeking one willing to review Reel’s argument, and Kidd responded.¹⁴
• Separately, Kidd is a co-author of a statistical study on the Joseph Smith question — “No Children for Joseph Smith?” (Rick Bennett, 2026) — which models the probability that Joseph had no children with his plural wives. I note it here purely as a matter of record; the reader can consult it and decide whether it has any bearing on how they read his statistical comments.¹⁵
• Kidd himself is careful about his limits. He says plainly, more than once, that he has not studied Joseph Smith’s polygamy and offers “no opinion one way or another” on the history; his critique is methodological, not historical.¹⁶

His statistical points stand or fall on their own logic, independent of where they were aired or who invited him. His most-quoted verdict — “I find the approach interesting… but I didn’t find the reasonings as convincing as they were portrayed to be”¹⁷ — is a judgment about a method, not a ruling on the history, which he expressly declines to make. I take no position here on his objectivity in either direction; I set the context out simply so the reader can weigh it.

Part 4What the deeds can — and cannot — show

So where does this leave me?

The pattern is real, and the timing cases deserve a serious answer. I do not think it will do to dismiss the deeds as meaningless. That a dozen alleged wives received property from Joseph is a fact; that at least two of them — Whitney and Woodworth — received valuable deeds within weeks of a documented sealing is a sharper fact still, and it is untouched by the statistical objections, which aim at the aggregate model rather than the individual sequence. If I am going to defend a monogamist Joseph honestly, I have to engage those cases directly rather than reframe them away.

But the aggregate “proof” asks more than the numbers alone can bear. The precise percentage shifts with the sample; the marbles are not all the same size; the population denominator is fuzzy; and calling a statistical result a “smoking gun” asks statistics to do something it was never built to do. These are fair questions, and until they are answered I can only call the aggregate argument suggestive corroboration, not a standalone proof.

A measured verdict, then, as best I can reach one: the land deeds are real supporting evidence — not nothing — but not a self-contained demonstration either. They corroborate; they do not, on their own, conclude. It is worth noting that even scholars who firmly affirm Joseph’s polygamy have generally not leaned on the deeds, treating them as circumstantial rather than decisive¹⁸ — which cautions me against overselling the argument in either direction.

The deeds are one thread in a much larger tapestry. The debate over Joseph Smith’s marriages ranges across affidavits, contemporaneous diaries, sealing records, and courtroom testimony — each contested, each with its own defenders and critics. Whatever one finally concludes about the deeds, that broader conversation stands on its own footing. I have tried here only to take one much-discussed argument and reason through it honestly — strong where I find it strong, open where I find it open. I offer it in that spirit, and I welcome correction from anyone willing to reason through it with me.

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Notes & Sources

1. Bill Reel presents the land-deed argument — including the “smoking gun” framing — on his show and in the fullest catalog form on Mormonism LIVE ep. 098, “Gold Gifts, Deeds, & Harsh Measures” (mdpodcast.org/2022/10). A written compilation of his list appears in the critical resource A Careful Examination, which reproduces the ~75% figure with the caveat “As reported by Bill Reel (would like to validate this)” (faenrandir.github.io — contemporary evidence). ↩
2. Reel’s parameters — 34 deeds to women with no husband listed, dated 1 January 1842 to 27 June 1844, and his rationale for the window (Joseph’s control of the property and the period polygamy is alleged) — are quoted in his own words in 132 Problems ep. 119 (132problems.org/119). ↩
3. Reel’s early “at least 75%” figure came from an initial sample of about 15 deeds; his own expanded count gives 12 alleged wives out of 34 husbandless-deed women. Both figures are documented in 132 Problems ep. 119 (with Reel’s original clip) and ep. 120 (132problems.org/120). ↩
4. Reel’s math, reconstructed from his clips: Nauvoo ~12,000 → ~6,000 Latter-day Saints → ~3,000 LDS women; a single deed landing on a wife is 34/3,000 ≈ 1.1%; he then models 12 alleged-wife deeds as (34/3,000) raised to the 12th power. Quoted in 132 Problems ep. 119 and in the bonus interview with John Kidd (132problems.org — Kidd interview). ↩
5. Sarah Ann Whitney was sealed to Joseph Smith in late July 1842; the deed to her (6 September 1842, $1,000, a lot roughly one block from Smith’s home) follows by about six weeks. The sequence is corroborated by the Joseph Smith Papers editorial note on the Whitney deed (josephsmithpapers.org) and detailed in Mormonism LIVE ep. 098. ↩
6. Flora Ann Woodworth: a sealing in spring 1843 and a $1,000 deed about two months later (May 1843). Documented in Mormonism LIVE ep. 098 and discussed in 132 Problems ep. 120. ↩
7. Michelle Stone’s tally, drawn from Susan Easton Black’s 7-volume compilation Nauvoo Land Deeds (deeds 1839–1859), puts the figure at 12 of 34 husbandless-deed women (~35%). Because Stone is a defender arguing a case, and the compilation is not a public data set, this figure is best treated as the better-sourced number but still worth an independent spot-check. See 132 Problems ep. 120. ↩
8. Stone also notes that of the roughly 50 women on the broadest published list of Joseph’s alleged wives (Wikipedia’s list; scholars such as Todd Compton and Brian Hales count fewer, around 33–35), only about 12 appear on any deed — under 25%. 132 Problems ep. 120. ↩
9. This is the point statistician John Kidd calls his “main reason to be skeptical”: the marbles-in-a-jar model “assumes that every single one had an equally likely chance… that’s probably not valid,” because single, widowed, or needy women were likelier to receive land grants. Kidd interview, 132problems.org. ↩
10. Stone cites academic work on Nauvoo’s growth — roughly 100 people in 1839, ~4,000 in 1842, ~12,000 in 1844, ~11,000 in 1845, averaging perhaps ~8,000 across the window — and Kidd independently credits these figures. 132 Problems ep. 119; Kidd interview. ↩
11. The “Texas sharpshooter” concern is raised by both Kidd and Stone. Kidd: “if I go out to… a barn and shoot it a bunch of times and then walk over and draw the target around it, I look really good. But that doesn’t mean that I actually hit the point.” Kidd interview, 132problems.org. Reel’s scoping rationale (see note 2) is the reasonable counter-point. ↩
12. Kidd walks through the standard correlation-vs-causation cautions (smoking/cancer; ice-cream sales and boating accidents). Notably, neither Kidd’s statistical critique nor Stone’s historical rebuttal directly neutralizes the Whitney and Woodworth timing; Stone reframes the teenage deeds through a proposed dowry custom rather than addressing the post-sealing sequence head-on. Kidd interview; 132 Problems ep. 120. ↩
13. John Kidd: statistics faculty at Utah Valley University (since 2021); undergraduate and master’s at Utah State; PhD in biostatistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Biographical details from the interview itself. ↩
14. Kidd’s critique was recorded as an interview on Michelle Stone’s podcast, 132 Problems: Revisiting Mormon Polygamy (bonus episode). Stone describes how it came about: “I sent out lots of requests to professors to be willing to talk to me. And John Kidd responded.” ↩
15. Kidd is a co-author of the statistical study “No Children for Joseph Smith?” by Rick Bennett (Wheat & Tares, 11 May 2026), with Dr. Joseph Stanford (OB/GYN, University of Utah), Mark Tensmeyer (JD), and Dr. Amanda Hendrix-Komoto (Montana State University). It builds statistical models estimating the probability that Joseph Smith had no children with his plural wives. Cited here purely as a matter of record regarding Kidd’s prior engagement with the subject; this article draws no inference from it about his views or objectivity, and leaves any relevance for the reader to judge. ↩
16. Kidd, in the interview: “this is not something I’ve studied… I don’t know one way or another” regarding Joseph Smith’s polygamy. He frames his contribution as purely methodological. ↩
17. Kidd’s summary verdict, and his remark that “the probabilities that the assumed model [is] correct are very, very low.” Kidd interview, 132problems.org. ↩
18. Stone points out that leading researchers who affirm Joseph’s polygamy — e.g., Mark Tensmeyer, Don Bradley, Brian Hales — do not cite land deeds as evidence; Hales’s per-wife evidence lists for Whitney, Woodworth, and Helen Mar Kimball contain no deed entry, and Tensmeyer has called deeds-to-wives “questionable, circumstantial evidence.” 132 Problems ep. 119. (Included here as fair context; it counsels against overselling the deed argument, not against Joseph’s polygamy as such.) ↩