How (Not) to Make the Desert Blossom as the Rose
In the Salt Lake Valley in the spring of 1848, crickets and grasshoppers emerged en masse. The voracious locusts ate the tender plants of grains and vegetables that the Mormon settlers had just planted, along with anything else they encountered. The settlers tried to beat back the insects, to little avail, and began to despair that they would have nothing to eat that year.
Before long, birds flew in and gorged themselves on the locusts. The Mormons were particularly fascinated by the seagulls who lived along the shores of Great Salt Lake, that regurgitated the insects that they had just eaten, then ate more. The Mormon settlers interpreted the arrival of the birds and, in particular, the gulls as a godsend. In honor of the birds who had saved their crops, Utah would later name its state bird the California gull. A notable monument in downtown Salt Lake City pays tribute to the seagulls.
There was ample reason for the settlers to fear starvation. They were in an arid environment and inexperienced at irrigation. The first few years were lean, and diaries indicate that some were so hungry that they resorted to boiling rawhide for something to eat. But there was never any question that they would feed themselves by farming.
Farming was also important to the peoples of the prehistoric Fremont culture period, whose ruins lie under every contemporary city along the Wasatch Front. Together with the Ancestral Puebloans of the Four Corners region and the Hohokam of the Southwest US, these societies built permanent villages, irrigated fields, and stored grain. Archaeologists have no clear answers for what caused these societies to vanish, but the timing lines up with a long-term climatic change that resulted in more arid conditions around 1000 AD. When Shoshonean peoples migrated into the eastern Great Basin around 1200 AD, the Fremont period was coming to a close. Farming continued--including the "Three Sisters" crops of maize, squash, and beans--but the Shoshonean peoples, Athabaskan speaking peoples to the south, and any remnants of the Fremont and Ancestral Puebloan cultures were not sedentary. They made their livelihoods from a mix of hunting game, cultivating and harvesting wild plants, and growing some domesticated crops. Bands, clans, and cliques of Utes, Goshutes, Paiutes, and Shoshones would range through their respective territories throughout the year until it was time to return to an annual winter camp.
The presence of Europeans on the continent could be felt long before Spanish explorers found their way to the Great Basin in the 18th century. The introduction of domesticated animals sent ripples throughout the region.
One could tell a thorough history of the US West using just animals: sheep, horses, bison, cattle, beaver, fish. Diné people began to adapt their woolworking for domesticated Spanish sheep around the end of the 16th century, forming a new way of life and a sheep variety, the Churro, in the process. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in what is now New Mexico led to Pueblos' capturing of a large herd of Spanish horses. These domesticated horses led more Native American peoples throughout the West to adopt horseback culture--bands of eastern Utes and Northern Shoshones, as well as Comanches. Kiowas influenced these cultures, though to them and other Plains Indians, the bison was central, more so than to Great Basin Indians. The history of disappearing bison herds, once numerous all across the continent, traces a line through the dispossession and attempted elimination of Native Americans through the late 1800s. Meanwhile, in the Intermountain West, horses became indicators of wealth and status. Because they were useful for warfare as well as hunting, horseback Utes and Shoshones gained political power in the region.
The early 1800s saw the introduction of the animal that would replace the centrality of the bison in the West: cattle. But before Mormon settlement, cattle were just passing through on their way to Oregon or California. Still, the cattle that traveled the Oregon Trail numbered in the millions. This vast migration impacted the continent's sensitive, arid regions, trampling grasslands and fouling water sources. Plant species like Russian thistle also came along for the ride. Likewise, the iconic (but toxic) kochia tumbleweed is not native to North America.
By the late 1820s, mountain men fur trappers made their way to the Interior West. While the waterways of the Great Basin were a trickle compared to the rivers that supported the larger trapping operations in the Northeast, French and Angloamerican explorers did find plenty of beaver in the region. The Hudson's Bay Company took an interest in the Intermountain West, though it was mostly concerned with protecting its furring operations in Oregon from the likes of the upstart Rocky Mountain Fur Company, based in St. Louis. To that end, it adopted a "fur desert" policy, aiming to deplete beaver populations in the Intermountain West to the point of collapse and discouraging any westward expansion in fur trapping. As it turned out, this happened without the help of the fur desert policy. Fur trappers spent little more than a decade in the region before trapping out most of the beaver while also saturating the market and making the enterprise unprofitable. The Rocky Mountain Fur Company may not have lasted long, but reports from its explorers influenced the decisions of future settlers, including the Mormons.
Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders decided to find a new home by following a mountain man route, via Wyoming's South Pass, into the Salt Lake Valley. It was an oasis zone in the otherise arid Great Basin, fed by several perennial streams that ran through the Wasatch Mountain's canyons. The snowpack that accumulates over the winter and melts over the summer feeds these streams, which flow into Great Salt Lake, which contributes moisture to the snowstorms that fall in the mountains--a localized water cycle. Mormon settlers were pleased with the valley, noting the timber in the hills as well as hot springs near the lake. They were rightfully impressed, as it fit their desire for isolation while being fairly buffered from the more inhospitable extremes nearby.
Rather than settling a wilderness, the Mormons entered a dynamic and peopled place with its own history and politics. In fact, the decision to colonize the Salt Lake Valley, near the hypersaline Great Salt Lake, rather than the valley by Utah Lake was a political decision. Timpanogos Utes had a significant, year-round presence on the shores of Utah Lake, especially at the mouth of the Provo River. The Salt Lake Valley, which fell closer to Shoshone territory, was shared among several peoples--it was more neutral.
In 1846, Mormon leaders indicated that they would respect the territorial claims of the Native Americans and pay tribute for occupying their land. But that policy quickly changed. At a meeting with Shoshone leader Sagwitch in July of 1847, the apostle Heber C. Kimball declared, "The land belongs to our father in heaven." Mormon leaders refused to pay tribute. As with all settler-colonial projects, Mormon settlement began to vacate the region of its history. Their religious claim to the land took precedence over the occupancy and stewardship of the valley's Indigenous peoples. The second part of Kimball's statement was, "And we calculate to plow and plant it." As I've written, agriculture was an important way of establishing ownership of land, and Mormons were couched firmly in that tradition.
When locusts descended on their crops in the spring of 1848, Mormons interpreted the insects as a threat to their nascent colonial project. When the seagulls arrived, they interpreted it as a sign of God's blessing--not just with regard to that year's crops, but to their agricultural project as a whole. Humans had dominion over nature, according to Christian tradition; civilization was threatened by wild nature. The seagulls were a sign that the land did belong to their father in heaven, and a civilized people like the Mormons would transform it from a desert wilderness to make it blossom as the rose, as the Bible verse reads. Mormon settler Anson Call suggested that the cricket's body "may be the habitation of a vindictive little demon." The following winter, the settlers organized a competition for the extermination of animal predators, termed "wasters and destroyers." Their targets were not just bears, wolves, mountain lions, and wildcats, but even minks, "ravens," owls, and magpies. They reportedly killed about 800 wolves (probably including coyotes) and thousands of birds. Everything that existed before their arrival was wilderness and needed to be cleared away. Indigenous people were not considered far removed from these "wasters and destroyers," especially as Natives began to steal livestock. The process of taming the "wild land" included doing something about the "wild men" who lived on it. According to Brigham Young, "There is little left here (abating the white population), save the naked rocks and soil, naked Indians and wolves. The first two we can use to good advantage, the last two are annoying and destructive to property and peace."
It borders on sacrilege--and not just to Utah's LDS church members--to state that the "Miracle of the Gulls" was an ordinary event. But it was. Grasshoppers and crickets emerge in large numbers every few years, like cicadas. Birds take advantage of the bounty--not just seagulls, but many other types as well. It is also normal for birds to regurgitate the chitinous exoskeletons of the insects, since they cannot digest them.
There is also the important fact that the locusts are edible. After a hard winter, the Mormon settlers were hungry. Food arrived--and lots of it--but the settlers did everything they could to bury, drown, and burn the insects. By contrast, the local Utes, Shoshones, and Goshutes took advantage, storing the protein-rich crickets for winter. However unpleasant the locusts appeared to the Mormons, the prospect of subsisting from the land like the Natives added to their distaste. Decades later, the apostle Erastus Snow would say of the locusts, "The savages had learned in their destitution to profit by these visitations... Had it not been for the providential appearance of the gulls, we would have been brought to the same necessity--to gather up the crickets and salt and dry them to subsist on."
From these meager and uncertain beginnings, Utah's settlers would go on to develop enough agricultural production to sustain a large increase in population. They did not have to subsist on crickets. However, the abundance and diversity of wild game and edible plants, which had been cultivated and managed by Indigenous people, diminished significantly. Ungulate populations faced pressure from settler hunts as well as settler livestock. Mormons' cattle and sheep grazed on seed grasses and other edible plants, contributing to the dire circumstances that local Shoshones, Goshutes, and Utes faced. Ute leader Ouray recounted, "Long time ago, Utes always had plenty. On the prairie, antelope and buffalo, so many Ooray can't count. In the mountains, deer and bear, everywhere. In the streams, trout, duck, beaver, everything... White man came, and now Utes go hungry a heap. Game much go every year--hard to shoot now."
Mormon settlers, following the colonization of Utah Valley and the Timpanogos War of 1850, also virtually destroyed the most productive fishery in the Intermountain West, at the mouth of the Provo River. In 1855, settlers faced another lean year, as another significant reemergence of locusts once again ate their crops. Mormon leaders again compared the insects to devils, though they reasoned this time that the locusts were like a biblical plague, sent to punish the church members for their sins. With much of their crops gone, the Mormons depended in large part upon the lake's native trouts. To spawn, trout swam upstream from Utah Lake into the Provo River, where they could easily be caught. Settlers pulled bushels of fish out of the shallows with little effort. But this unrestrained harvest of fish meant that the next generation of trout would be much smaller. The Timpanogos had once hosted bands from hundreds of miles around the region for a springtime fish harvest, but their home had now been colonized and the fish destroyed. The federal Indian agent had already noted, years prior when Fort Utah had been established, that the settlement "has not only greatly diminished their formerly very great resource of obtaining fish out of Utah Lake and its source... but has already driven away all the game." By the 1860s, the territorial government began trying to put regulations in place to protect the fish. By the 20th century, nearly all of Utah's native fish species had gone extinct.
With Indigenous people growing hungry, Brigham Young established three Indian farms beginning in 1851, with the goal of teaching Indians to farm. The federal government reinforced the efforts in 1855, establishing reservations of a sort. Horseback Indian bands were especially resistant to farming, since a sedentary life where men did work that was traditionally assigned to women would have meant surrendering their wealth and status for the sake of these strangers' culture. Some Shoshone people took up farming, but for the most part, Indigenous people tried to fit the farms into their traditional, mobile way of life rather than settling down. By the 1860s, the farms were considered a failure, and the Mormons and the federal government began looking to remove Indians to the Uinta Basin, on the far side of the Wasatch Mountains.
The Mormons and government agents blamed the failure of the Indian Farms on the Indigenous people. After all, in their minds, the settlers were offering a plainly superior way of life. As Brigham Young said to a council of Utes, "We want you to learn to raise grain and cattle and not have to go and hunt and be exposed to other Indians, but build houses, raise grain and be happy as we are."
The fantasy that Indians lived in a state of nature, merely picking up available food like an animal would, was necessary to the Mormons' worldview. At least one settler imagined that he could teach the Timpanogos--known to neighboring Native bands as the Fish Eaters--how to fish. This worldview validated their cultural superiority and their superior claim to Indigenous land--and perhaps helped them to gloss over the struggles that they themselves faced as they tried to master irrigation. Brigham Young's Indian policy began to take a consistent shape in the wake of the Timpanogos War and the Walker Wars of the 1850s, frequently paraphrased as, "It is cheaper to feed them than to fight them." The Mormons imagined that "feeding them" was a charitable act. When their "civilizing" project failed, as many expected, it was because, in Brigham Young's words, "They prefer idleness and theft." A federal Indian superintendent reasoned that, "They have not been sufficiently taught that their subsistence depends upon their own labor." The prescription, then, for Indigenous people's failure to take up sedentary farming was starvation and suffering.
The idea that Utah was a desert waste that has blossomed as the rose remains powerful. But it is somewhat at odds with the Mormons' original impressions of the Salt Lake Valley. Yes, they viewed the land (incorrectly) as an untouched wilderness, but they appreciated the abundance of this oasis. It was much later, in a process that historian Jared Farmer calls the "desertification of Zion," that Utahns "reimagined Utah's land of lakes as a desert." This narrative better suited the narrative of civilization and agriculture--the creation of something from nothing. But Farmer also points to the degradation of Utah Lake in particular as a factor in this modern construction of the Wasatch Front as a desert. As the Provo River and Utah Lake became less valuable as a fishery, due to the settlers' ignorance of how to sustain the native trouts and suckers and their later, misguided attempts at restocking the waterways with German carp, these precious water sources became industrial waste sites. By the turn of the twentieth century, Utah Lake was rapidly earning its contemporary reputation--turbid, polluted, lifeless. Ironically, further degradation of the non-human world has only served to reinforce the idea that the "rose" of civilization is only found in human industry.
Mormons selected the Wasatch Front for its special and valuable characteristics, then set out to remake it. Regardless of intentions, their mode of living largely destroyed the land and waters that could support an abundance and diversity of game, fishes, and plant life. I decided to write this history by using the Miracle of the Gulls to draw out how Mormons viewed the alignment of Providence and civilization against diabolical nature. But I also felt it might open minds to alternate possibilities. There is no undoing of history, but we are capable of learning from it. Crickets did not come from heaven or hell. They came from the same place as seagulls, and the same place as bears and elk. And the same place as humans.
References:
David B. Madsen and Brigham D. Madsen, "One Man's Meat is Another Man's Poison: A Revisionist View of the Seagull 'Miracle,'" Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 30 no 3 (Fall 1987): 165-181.
Jared Farmer, On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
David Rich Lewis, Neither Wolf nor Dog: American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Sondra Jones, Being and Becoming Ute: The Story of an American Indian People (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019).
Victor Sorensen, "The Wasters and Destroyers: Community-Sponsored Predator Control in Early Utah Territory", Utah Historical Quarterly 62 no 1 (1994).
Jennifer Susan Ott, "Clearing the Country: A History of the Hudson's Bay Company's Fur Desert Policy," Dissertation, University of Montana, 1997.
Read more:
A Short History of Water in the US West
The Agrarian Foundations of the Western Water Crisis (1620 - 1902)
The 100th Meridian: Where "Free Land" Requires "Free Water" (1862 - 1923)Free-for-All in the Uinta Basin (1879 - 1920)
Race to the Bottom -- The Law of the River
The Sinful Rivers We Must Curb
Our Last Major Water Resource -- The Central Utah Project
The Case of Uphill Flowing Water
Water for City and Country in the Late 20th Century