In his editing for the 1837 edition, Joseph Smith deleted 48 examples of the phrase “it came to pass”, of which 42 were marked for deletion in the printer’s manuscript. One of these (in Alma 14:1) was never implemented, but the other 41 were. Of course, Joseph Smith left unchanged the vast majority of nearly 1,500 original examples of “come to pass”. (This count includes variants like “it had come to pass” and “it shall come to pass” in addition to the very frequent “it came to pass”.) In most instances, the deleted examples are extraneous occurrences of this very frequent clause. For most cases of deletion, there were two or more examples of “it came to pass” in close proximity; in some cases, nothing new had “come to pass”; in other cases, there was a syntactic repetition of “it came to pass”.
In this example from 1 Nephi 10:17, the second “it came to pass” was removed because of redundancy: the original sentence began with “it came to pass” (at the beginning of verse 17) and then repeated “it came to pass” following a long after-clause and an intervening parenthetical clause. The purpose of the repeated “it came to pass” was to bring the reader back to the original topic.
Despite the seeming overuse of “it came to pass”, the critical text will restore every one of the 47 examples that were deleted in the 1837 edition. Examples of this same kind of overuse can actually be found in the original Hebrew of the book of Genesis, but not in the English of the King James Bible (where unnecessary examples of “it came to pass” were ignored in the translation). For further discussion, see pages 35–37 of Royal Skousen, “The Original Language of the Book of Mormon: Upstate New York Dialect, King James English, or Hebrew?” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 3/1 (1994): 28–38. For a complete analysis of all 48 of the deleted examples of “it came to pass”, see come to pass in volume 3.
Summary: Restore all the examples of “it came to pass” that were deleted for the 1837 edition.