76 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



among the Mormons as there is among other people. We have 

 seen some instances of it, at any rate. 



You see, then, that the drouth and the frosts they have man- 

 aged to conquer, to some extent. There is almost always 

 some enemy that is very difficult to conquer ; and they have 

 had two enemies there : one is the crickets, and the other the 

 grasshoppers, or the " hoppers," as they call them. The crick- 

 ets, which came first, they have little trouble from now. They 

 are large, black insects, almost as long as your finger, which 

 came down from the mountains in vast numbers. They came 

 even the first year the Mormons commenced their work there, 

 and they would have eaten up almost the whole of their crops, 

 if they had not turned out in full force, to destroy them. For- 

 tunately, these insects do not fly, and the Mormons dug ditches 

 around their crops, and the women and children stood with 

 mauls and killed the crickets as they fell into the ditches. In 

 this way they destroyed myriads of them. Now occurred a 

 curious thing, that they deem a miracle. When these crickets 

 were so very numerous, there came a bird, in immense num- 

 bers, and made war upon them. They call the bird a kind of 

 gull. I have never seen one, but I think it is a gull, or some 

 bird of a similar character. They came, as I said, in immense 

 numbers, and covered the fields. And it seems as though they 

 were made to destroy these insects, for not only would they eat 

 them greedily, Dut as soon as they were filled, they would throw 

 up what they had eaten, and eat again ! They would stand 

 from morning till night killing those crickets. This is vouched 

 for by many persons ; and in their books they refer to it as a 

 miracle. As there was no flock of crickets when I was there, 

 and the birds do not come except when the crickets are there, 

 I did not succeed in securing a specimen. The Mormons con- 

 sider it a kind of sacred bird. One of the most intelligent of 

 their number said to me, when I told him I wanted to get one 

 of these birds, " You could not do anything that would be a 

 greater outrage to the feelings of the old Mormons, who came 

 into this valley first, than to kill one of those birds." 



But they have, as I said, another enemy, — the " hopper," — 

 which they cannot get into these ditches, because they fly in 

 such numbers as really, at times, to darken the sun, like a cloud 

 passing between the sun and the earth. Some facts will show 



