Page:History of Utah.djvu/332



280 m THE VALLEY OF THE GREAT SALT LAKE.

they left behind them not a blade or leaf, the ap- pearance of the country which they traversed in countless and desolating myriads being that of a land scorched by fire.^^ They came in a solid phalanx, from the direction of Arsenal Hill, darkening the earth in their passage. Men, women, and children turned out en masse to combat this pest, driving them into ditches or on to piles of reeds, which they would set on fire, striving in every way, until strength was exhausted, to beat back the devouring host. But in vain they toiled, in vain they prayed; the work of destruction ceased not, and the havoc threatened to be as complete as was that which overtook the land of Egypt in the last days of Israel's bondage. "Think of their condition," says Mr Cannon — ''the food they brought with them almost exhausted, their grain and other seeds all planted, they themselves 1,200 miles from a settlement or place where they could get food on the east, and 800 miles from California, and the crickets eating up every green thing, and every day destroying their sole means of subsistence for the months and winter ahead." ^^

I said in vain they prayed. Not so. For when everything was most disheartening and all effort spent, behold, from over the lake appeared myriads of snow-white gulls, their origin and their purpose alike unknown to tho new-comers ! Was this another scourge God was sending- them for their sins? Wait and see. Settling uj)on all the fields and every part of them, they pounced upon the crickets, seizing and swallowing them. They gorged themselves. Even after their stomachs were filled they still devoured them. On Sunday the people, full of thankfulness, left the fields to the birds, and on the morrow found on the edges of the ditches great piles of dead crick- ets that had been swallowed and thrown up by the

" Autobiog. P. P. Pratt, 405; Smith's Rise, Progress, and Travels, 17. ^^Juv. Inst., ix. no. 2, 22.