We used to have parades on July 24th in the Morridor (and my California stake when I was six.) The parades were festive each year.
The children dressed up as pioneer children, seagulls, and crickets. It was fun and games to us back then. While teaching us a lesson on early Mormon history.
How much that has to do with reality, is now become another Mormon narrative on how the myth became legend. Some facts based on what a historian was able to extract of the myth ...
"The Miracle of the Gulls":
It begins in 1848, after the Mormons had successfully endured their inaugural winter in the Salt Lake Valley. The fiercely determined band of pioneers had prepared fields of grain the previous autumn so that they would be ready to grow the following spring. At first, it appeared their savvy agricultural efforts would be rewarded. But, so the story goes, their luck changed for the worse.
Susa Young Gates, in her 1930 biography of her father, Brigham Young (second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and first governor of the Utah territory), chronicled this tribulating event in Mormon history:
"Just as the crops were giving promise of a much needed harvest, swarms of crickets hovered over the ploughed lands like a devastating army, darkening the earth for miles around, eating off every blade of grass and every growing thing."
According to Gates, the pioneers tried everything to drive away the crickets, but to no avail. Eventually they resorted to a "three-day fast and prayer," which yielded miraculous results.
"And behold, a miracle! Rising from the borders of the lake appeared myriad snow-white gulls. From whence they came and what was their purpose, the pioneers could not determine. Settling upon fields, black with the millions of crickets, the gulls seized them and swallowed them as if unable to fully gorge themselves. When their crops were full, the birds would hop over to a ditch, bank or convenient hillock and disgorge themselves, and then return again to feed upon the countless crickets. The people stood in awe at this direct answer to their prayer."
Alas, the Mormons were saved by the seagulls' ravenous appetite for (and intermittent repulsion of) cricket meat.
As a result of this and other, similar accounts of seagull salvation, the California seagull has evolved into a revered Utah symbol. Various monuments have been constructed in its honor, including one at Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City. The "sea gull" was adopted as Utah's official state bird in 1955 through an act of the state Legislature. Salt Lake City even once hosted a minor league baseball team nicknamed the "Gulls," until the team moved to Calgary in 1985 and became the "Cannons."
Behold, a Seagull Skeptic!
This is a great story. You're gonna love it.
Back in the 1980s, Utah archaeologist David Madsen would stop by his father's house once in awhile to visit and chat. His father, renowned Utah historian Brigham Madsen, was enjoying the outset of a fairly energetic retirement at this point in his life, still immersed in research and various writing projects. One day, the two were talking about the seagull story we've all heard since birth, and it got the elder Madsen wondering.
"He started looking into it," David recalls, "and he couldn't find hardly any written evidence that there was anything like what was claimed to be this seagull miracle."
While he did come across utterances of cricket infestations from Mormon diarists, Brigham didn't find quite the same desperation and despair over crickets that the typical, modern-day seagull story describes. Moreover, there was very little evidence that seagulls played a significant role in resolving any cricket problem. Though there are accounts of seagulls and other birds eating the crickets, many journals from the time didn't even mention seagulls.
But perhaps the biggest problem with the "miracle" is a very practical one. In fact, it's so simple that I can't believe it never occurred to me: Crickets are food, too.
"A lot of Native American foragers were eating insects of one kind or another," David points out. "And there's a whole array of ethnographic and ethnohistorical data on how they were doing that—how they were capturing them, how they were preparing them, how they were eating them."
In other words, the original Salt Lake Valley residents would have viewed a cricket invasion as a bountiful blessing, not a plague. Actually, a cricket harvest would be especially facile and plentiful compared to just about any other food source in the West. To illustrate, Madsen uses a colorful comparison: "I estimate that if a whale fell out of the sky, you could get more calories just eating the crickets than you could cutting up that whale."
The Mormons were not uninformed about the insect-foraging strategies of Native Americans. Pioneers from that era commonly noted the locals' use of insects as a food source, and the more open-minded and/or pragmatic pioneers would even partake in a buggy meal every now and again. But ethnocentric attitudes toward agrarianism strongly influenced the early Mormons' reaction to the crickets—one Mormon pioneer described them as appearing to be possessed by "a vindictive little demon." Eating bugs was at best a last resort for the picky Mormons, but at least they had a pretty solid backup plan if their crops did fail.
Given all this evidence, the Madsens had discovered an alternate seagull story—one so firmly entrenched in history and science that they were beyond the point of believing the classic tale. So to set the record straight, they co-wrote an essay titled, "One Man's Meat Is Another Man's Poison: A Revisionist View of the Seagull 'Miracle,'" and they sent it off to Utah Historical Quarterly for publication.
At first, it appeared their savvy academic efforts would be rewarded. But, so the story goes, their luck changed for the worse.
"They refused to publish it," David remembers, "and not because it wasn't scholarly or anything, but because—and I think this is the quote: 'It's too fun-poking.'"
Obviously, the Madsens disagreed. But David had a hunch as to why the state's self-proclaimed "premier history journal" rejected the piece: "I guess it just ran too counter to the accepted story."
In his 1998 Against the Grain: Memoirs of a Western Historian, father Brigham (who died in 2010 at the age of 96) goes a step further in speculating why the essay was spurned. "We had first submitted this quite serious and scientifically oriented article to the Utah Historical Quarterly as a relevant narrative for Utah readers," he wrote. "But the reviewer, a professional Utah historian and a solid member of his Mormon faith, disapproved it on the grounds that it would be inappropriate for Mormon readers and that, besides, the title was an attempt to be 'cute.'"
The Madsens had to resort to printing their seagull story in the fall 1987 edition of Nevada Historical Society Quarterly. The publication ran it as their lead article. Despite this, there were no ensuing calls to bulldoze the Seagull Monument in Temple Square, and the "sea gull" was retained as Utah's official state bird. However, when minor league baseball returned to Salt Lake City in 1994, the new team abandoned the nickname "Gulls" and became the "Buzz" instead."
https://www.cityweekly.net/utah/a-seagull-story/Content?oid=3613991Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/24/2018 04:59PM by Amyjo.