"This Present Calamity Will Pass Off": Jedediah M. Grant's Promise to Henson Walker Fulfilled by the Seagulls (1848)

Henson Walker was born March 13, 1820, in Manchester, Ontario County, New York, and was reared on the Michigan frontier, where he became a skilled hunter. Baptized in 1840, he moved to Nauvoo after his wife Martha died in 1843, living there with his father-in-law and becoming well acquainted with Joseph Smith — as a member of the Nauvoo Legion he took part in the rescue effort when the Prophet was kidnapped that year. He was married in the Nauvoo Temple to Elizabeth Foutz on April 10, 1846, and joined the first pioneer company in the spring of 1847 as one of its hunters, though still weak from a severe fever and leaving his wife near death.

That summer, in the new valley, the crickets came. Black hordes descended from the mountains in May and June 1848, devouring the young crops faster than the settlers could fight them — Walker's young family faced the real prospect of starvation in a land with no market to fall back on. As the crickets came thicker than ever, Walker was stopped by a promise delivered by Jedediah M. Grant: "this present calamity will pass off."

Walker and his family stopped fighting the crickets and waited on the promise. That evening the miracle of the gulls occurred — flocks of white seagulls from the Great Salt Lake swept into the fields, gorged themselves on the crickets, drank from the streams and ditches, disgorged, and returned again and again until the fields were cleared. "I wept for joy, as I saw how miraculously we had been saved from starvation," Walker said of that evening.

Walker went on to serve as presiding elder and then bishop of Pleasant Grove, its first mayor when the city was incorporated, and a missionary over the Scottish Mission and twice in the Northern States, before his death in Pleasant Grove on January 24, 1894. His firsthand record of Grant's promise and the gulls' arrival stands among the clearest personal testimonies of the Lord's intervention in the first summer of the Salt Lake Valley — a prophecy given in the crisis and a witness who wept for joy when he saw it fulfilled.