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"Tucker depicted superstitious and unscrupulous Smiths by merely requoting the 1833 statements apparently without so much as reinterviewing the Hurlbut contacts still alive. Tucker was aware of at least three of these, named in his preface as references: Joseph Capron, Barton Stafford, and WIllard Chase. Such sloppy methods were evidently not completely applauded. A dozen years later Abagail Jackway told William H. Kelley, `I have heard Willard Chase say Tucker never even asked him for what he knew, and Chase lived next door to him, too.'" (Anderson 1970, 304)

Hugh Nibley has given us the following analysis of Tucker. "Twenty-three years after the death of Joseph Smith and thirty-seven years after Smith had left Palmyra, a citizen of that town brings out a book telling most intimately of the mind and doings of Smith at the time of the writing of the Book of Mormon.

• 1) Now since the author of the book is an editor by profession, I find it very strange that he should have waited so long to tell the public what it had been clamoring to hear for decades.
• 2) He prefaces his book with a purely fanciful drawing depicting an angel and devils as neither Smith nor his followers ever described them, yet he labels the picture `Smith's account of the finding of the golden plates.' Here is a plain fabrication.
• 3) Then he describes young Smith as a totally uninteresting tramp whose every characteristic disgusts him¦and yet goes on to depict himself, an ambitious and important young man, as spending his days observing Smith's every move and receiving all his secret confidences.
• 4) He describes the Smith family as cynical and cunning, but makes them the simple dupes of a pewter-coin joke that could not have fooled the village idiot.
• 5) He describes them also as outspoken atheists constantly parading their atheism in public; yet none of the public in question when requested to think of all the bad things they could about the Smiths, ever mentioned their atheism¦far from it, superstition was their charge.
• 6) While Tucker was intimate with the Smiths for some 14 years, he tells none of the countless first-hand experiences that he should have had with them, but instead offers as proof of their villainy their `subsequent behavior,' which he did not observe.
• 7) Tucker tells of a wonderful cave, but can give no certain information about it, though he lived very near to it for 42 years.
• 8) True, he insists that nobody was particularly interested in the mysterious doings at the cave, but that only makes me more suspicious, since the whole country was talking about Smith and his gold plates, it is inconceivable that he, who took the pains to write a whole book about Joseph Smith, simply wasn't interested enough in the cave to look it over himself or have somebody else do it.
• 9) He has the lazy Smiths running a full-scale Army C.P. at the cave, with extensive digging and construction work, changes of guard and all the rest, on land that did not belong to them, but with never a word of protest from anybody.
• 10) In fact he insists that no one opposed Smith's operations at any time or had the slightest intention of harming him, even while reporting the most vicious slanders and adding his own against the Smiths.
• 11) He describes Joseph Smith as brewing and executing one evil plot after another, while he, a public-spirited man and witness to all this depravity, raised no word of protest until forty years after.
• 12) Finally we have seen in the career of Tucker and his unguarded expressions of passion what we think is ample indication of a motive and will to malign the Smiths." (Nibley 1961, Myth Makers, 73-74)