Was There a "Miracle" of the Seagulls?

By Bill McKeever

Located east of the Assembly Hall on Temple Square is a golden monument recognizing the 1848 "miracle of the seagulls." LDS tradition tells how tens of thousands of seagulls miraculously appeared to devour millions of crickets that were attempting to destroy the crops of the Mormon pioneers who had arrived a year before.

However, because this event receives virtually little attention at the time it supposedly happened, some students of Mormon history have concluded that this account may be nothing more than folklore. For instance, David H. Bailey noted in his review of Samuel W. Taylor's book The Kingdom or Nothing that Taylor "blandly points out that nowhere in the journals of John Taylor or Parley P. Pratt, or in other reliable sources for that time, is mentioned any instance of a spectacular crop rescue by cricket-eating seagulls."

To this Bailey states, "Thus it appears that this favorite anecdote of Church history may well be apocryphal" (Sunstone 1:3/85, Summer 1976). Samuel Taylor was the grandson of third LDS President John Taylor.

In his book Heber C. Kimball: Mormon Patriarch and Pioneer, biographer Stanley B. Kimball drew the same conclusion as Samuel Taylor. Said Kimball,

"The now-famous cricket scourge and the seagulls which had eaten the crickets and saved some of the crops had occurred during the preceding May and June. Curiously, despite the miraculous nature of this event in current Mormon thought, it was not commented on much at the time and was hardly mentioned in the First General Epistle of the First Presidency of April, 1849. Cricket and grasshopper plagues were common terrors for many years in Utah" (pp.188-189).