Miracle of the Gulls — Seagulls Devour the Cricket Plague, Saving the 1848 Pioneer Harvest

In the spring and early summer of 1848 in the Salt Lake Valley, Mormon pioneers who had arrived in July 1847 planted thousands of acres (reported as roughly 3,000–4,000 acres) of corn, wheat, beans, pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, and melons — their first full attempt at a harvest. April and May frosts damaged some crops, and beginning around May 22, 1848, enormous hordes of Mormon crickets descended and began systematically devouring fields. Diarist John Steele later described the crickets as numbering in the “thousands of tons.” For more than a month farmers tried every defensive measure they could think of with little success.

Facing possible starvation the pioneers “prayed and fought and fought and prayed.” Eliza R. Snow recorded the stress of the period in her journal, noting frost and the ravages of the crickets. Then, by early June — and explicitly in a June 9, 1848 letter to Brigham Young — large flocks of California gulls (seagulls) arrived from the Great Salt Lake and began consuming the crickets. Witnesses reported the gulls eating until full, disgorging and returning to eat again, and continuing through the day, dramatically reducing the cricket infestation and allowing the crops to be saved. Historians and later commentators (including Orson F. Whitney and accounts compiled in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism) recounted the event as a providential deliverance that preserved the pioneers’ harvest and contributed to their survival that winter.

Named contemporary witnesses and chroniclers associated with the event and its later retellings include Brigham Young, John Steele, Thomas Bullock, Eliza R. Snow, and Orson F. Whitney; the episode has been discussed in later scholarship and compilations by Richard W. Sadler and William Hartley (and in published editions of pioneer journals such as the Thomas Bullock journal edited by Will Bagley). The event is commonly known as the “Miracle of the Gulls.”

Fuller account of this event (as retold in Orson F. Whitney, History of Utah, Vol. 1 (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon & Sons, 1892), 384-385.):

The crickets came down by the million, and in clouds so dense as to darken the air, they settled upon the fields and began to devour the crops. The people fought them with fire, with water, with spades and shovels, and with every means in their power, but all to no purpose. The fields were being swept bare. Then, when all hope seemed lost, the gulls appeared. They came in vast flocks from the Great Salt Lake, and settling upon the fields, began to devour the crickets. They would eat until they were gorged, then disgorge and eat again, continuing this until the pests were destroyed and the crops saved.