THE year 1848 wasn’t
the only year that Mormon pioneers had problems with crickets in their farm
fields. The summer of 1884 was also a bad one for the pesky insects in the
Weber County community of Uintah, in Utah.
“The
crickets are making sad havoc with the potatoes, corn and other plants in the
neighborhood of Uintah,” the Ogden Herald newspaper of July 5, 1884 reported. “The
red pests have come from the hills in great swarms and are chewing the
vegetation to the ground wherever they appear.”
-Twenty-one
years later in the north end of Ogden, grasshoppers were a huge problem for
farmers.
“Farms are
invaded by pests” was a July 19, 1904 headline in the Ogden Standard-Examiner.
One man reported 100 cases of raspberries lost to the insects. The wheat fields
were also being devastated.
Even the
southern part of Box Elder County was also reported as being affected by the
grasshopper invasion.
One
desperate farmer advised mixing arsenic, sugar and bran with water to sprinkle
on the insects to try and exterminate them.
-Neither
time did the seagulls come to the rescue. However, regarding the famed 1848 seagull
miracle, it appears that most of the pioneers did NOT initially view that as a
miracle. It was only later and after Brigham Young returned from the east (as
he was absent during the first insect invasion) that settlers looked back and
saw it as a divine blessing.
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