The Seagull Miracle and Its Skeptics

Somewhere in late May or early June of eighteen forty-eight, a plague of Mormon crickets descended on the pioneer fields in the Salt Lake Valley. The settlers called them crickets. They were actually a flightless katydid, black and enormous, moving across the ground in waves. The previous winter had been brutal, the crops were already behind, and a complete loss would threaten the survival of four thousand people who had no practical way to return east.

The traditional account holds that after fervent prayer, flocks of California gulls appeared and ate the crickets, drinking water and returning to eat more over a period of days. The crops were saved. The gulls were seen as a miracle. The California gull became the state bird of Utah. A monument to the seagulls stands in Temple Square, not far from where you are now.

What Utah Historical Quarterly published in nineteen seventy complicated this story. Historians examining contemporaneous journals found that no written account from eighteen forty-eight describes a miraculous intervention. The crops that year were also damaged by late frosts and drought. The gulls were real, and real gulls did eat real crickets, but the scale and timing of the miracle in the traditional account grew with each retelling. The canonical version, complete with the image of devout prayer preceding the birds' arrival, does not appear in any document written in eighteen forty-eight.

This is not unusual in the history of origin stories. What it tells you is that the pioneer community, facing genuine hardship and genuine uncertainty, needed a story about protection, and that story solidified into fact over the decades. The gulls showed up. The crops survived, partially. The rest is a monument in Temple Square.