The opening line of James H. Hart's notebook entry, as transcribed by Edward L. Hart in BYU Studies 36, no. 4 (1996-97), reads:
August 21st, 1883, Richmond, Mo. I met David Whitmer and his son David and had a pleasant conversation with them.
The BYU Studies article uses this opening sentence as the illustrative example showing how Hart progressively expanded his shorthand notebook entries first into Deseret News dispatches and then into a long iambic-pentameter poem ("An Interview with David Whitmer"). Edward L. Hart observes that Hart, "sometime editor of the Bear Lake Democrat (which changed its name later to the Southern Idaho Independent) and associate editor of the Paris Post, was a skilled journalist and employed a form of Pitman shorthand to take down verbatim his interviews with Whitmer, often putting portions in quotation marks. While his memory was still fresh after the interviews, he transcribed his shorthand notes into his journal. Subsequently, Hart expanded the interviews by providing background setting and write-ups to his hometown newspapers, and then sent news to the Deseret News."
The BYU Studies article notes that on Hart's return visit to David Whitmer (the second interview, I39), Hart showed him what he had written, and Whitmer "fully endorsed it as a correct expression of his sentiments."
The full notebook text of the August 21, 1883 entry — beyond the opening sentence quoted in BYU Studies — is reproduced in:
The substantive content of the notebook entry is preserved in the Deseret Evening News dispatch of 4 September 1883 (see sister document I35), which Hart wrote from his shorthand notes within days of the interview, and which David Whitmer himself later "fully endorsed" as accurate.