Posted by:
elderolddog
(
)
Date: August 05, 2023 05:40PM
Will Bagley documented a locust event in the mid-1850s, when the ravages caused by the blessed seagulls were very severe. Rationing was in place, and the saints were getting by on grass and thistle soups.
There were no flocks of seagulls those years. But the church doesn't seem to want this part of the seagull sage told...
"AS 1855 DREW TO A CLOSE, all was not well in Brigham Young’s Great Basin Kingdom. A plague of locusts that had been developing since the previous year became a crisis— an apostle estimated that grasshoppers had destroyed one-fifth of Utah’s crops by July 1854— and the following winter was bone dry. An even worse grasshopper infestation returned in the spring of 1855. By late April the Deseret News reported that the pestiferous creatures were “threatening to destroy all vegetation as fast as it appears.”
"By mid-May, the party that accompanied Governor Young to the capital at Fillmore “found nearly all the wheat eat up by the Grass hoppers all the way from Salt Lake City,” a distance of 150 miles. The territory “seems to be one entire desolation,” Apostle Heber C. Kimball wrote to his son in England at the end of May 1855, “and, to look at things at the present time, there is not the least prospect of raising one bushel of grain in the valley this present season. Still,” he added hopefully, “the grasshoppers may pass away, so as to give us a chance to sow wheat late, and also some corn.”
"By July, when not a drop of rain had fallen, a full-blown drought developed, creating suffocating clouds of dust. The parched canyons, north and south, began to burn. Embittered Utes told Andrew Love of Nephi that “the Mormons cut their timber & use it & pay them nothing for it, & they prefer burning it up.”
"Kimball’s hopes that late plantings could produce a crop proved optimistic. “There are not more than one-half the people that have bread,” the apostle reported glumly the next spring, “and they have not more than one-half or one-quarter of a pound per day per person.” Famine stalked the territory. Even Kimball and Brigham Young put their families on rations. Young himself had to “say something with regard to the hard times” as 1856 began. “I do not apprehend the least danger of starving, for until we eat up the last mule, from the tip of the ear to the end of the fly whipper, I am not afraid of starving to death.”
"At the same meeting, Jedediah Grant, Young’s counselor in the First Presidency, took the same bold tack: he was “glad that our crops failed. Why? Because it teaches the people a lesson, it keeps the corrupt at bay, for they know that they would have to starve, or import their rations, should they come to injure us in the Territory of Utah.”
"But during that grim winter and spring of 1856 thousands of desperately worried Utahns were already surviving on grass and thistle roots as they watched their livestock starve."
http://user.xmission.com/~research/central/handcart.pdf(first page of this 16-page monograph on the handcart disaster)
These pioneers do deserve some praise for getting through some pretty hard times, which they did on their own unless they were miraculously hearing ghawd cheering for them high up in the owner's private seats...