On 10 May 1843, Harrison S. White, a young man living in , wrote a letter to JS in , Illinois, seeking information about employment in Nauvoo. White, who does not appear to have been a member of the , likely heard about JS and Nauvoo because St. Louis was connected to Nauvoo by trade and transportation routes along the . White informed JS that he had been unsuccessful in mercantile pursuits in St. Louis and asked JS to notify him of any clerking opportunities in Nauvoo. He also requested a Nauvoo newspaper, perhaps in search of employment advertisements. Because Nauvoo was a growing city, White may have assumed that employment was readily available. This may have been a common assumption, as JS, the most well-known citizen of Nauvoo, received similar inquiries from others in 1843 about work. However, the influx of British converts to Nauvoo had created an underemployed labor class.

White mistakenly addressed the letter to JS in Nauvoo, . This may have been a simple addressing error; alternatively, it could have meant that White did not know where was located or that he associated the Latter-day Saints with Missouri, where church members sought to establish in the 1830s before being expelled from the state. Postal stamps on the letter indicate that it was postmarked in on 12 May and, perhaps because of the addressing mistake, was then sent to , Illinois. It was forwarded from Warsaw on 18 May 1843 and likely arrived in Nauvoo, approximately twenty miles north of Warsaw, shortly thereafter. No response from JS has been located, and there is no record of White moving to Nauvoo.