The inevitable catastrophes and accidents of travel robbed them of their substance.  Hostile savages stampeded their cattle, or openly attacked and plundered the trains.  But on they went, never swerving from the course.  These later companies needed no chart nor compass to guide them over the desert; the road was plain from the marks of former camps, and yet more so from the graves of friends and loved ones who had started before on the road to the earthly Zion and found that it led them to the martyr’s entrance to heaven, graves that were marked perhaps but by a rude inscription cut on a pole or a board.  And even these narrow lodgings had not been left inviolate; the wolves of the plains had too often succeeded in unearthing and rending the bodies.  Every company thus made the course the plainer; each of them added to the silent population of the desert; sometimes half a score were interred at one camp, and of one company over a fourth were thus left beside the prairie road.  Now we traverse the self-same track in a day and a night, reclining on luxurious cushions of ease, covering fifty miles while dining in luxury; and we avert the ennui of the journey by berating the railway company for lack of speed.

Relief trains were continually on the way between the valley of the Salt Lake and the Missouri; and the remnants of many a company were saved from what appeared to be certain destruction by the opportune arrival of these rescuing parties.  Such relief came from those who were themselves destitute and almost starving.  Brigham Young with a few of the chief officials of the Church, and aids, returned eastward on such an errand of rescue within a few weeks after first reaching the valley.  The region to which the early settlers came was in no wise a typical land of promise; it did not flow spontaneously with milk and honey.

Drought and unseasonable frosts made the first year’s farming experiments but doubtful successes, and in the succeeding spring the land was visited by the devastating plague of the Rocky Mountain crickets.  They swarmed down in innumerable hordes upon the fields, destroying the growing crops as they advanced, devouring all before them, leaving the land a desert in their track.  The people scarcely knew how to withstand the assault of this new foe; they drove the marauders into trenches there to be drowned or burned; men, women and every child that could swing a stick, were called to the ranks in this insect war; and with all their fighting, the people forgot not to pray for deliverance, and they fasted, too, for the best of reasons.

And as they watched, and prayed, and worked, they saw approaching from the north and west a veritable host of winged creatures of more formidable proportions still; and these bore down upon the fields as though coming to complete the devastation.  But see! these are of the color that betokens peace; they are the gulls, white and beautiful, advancing upon the hosts of the black destroyers.  Falling upon the people’s foes, they devoured them by the thousand, and when filled to repletion, disgorged and feasted again.  And they did not stop till the crickets were destroyed.  Again the skeptic will say this was but chance; but the people accepted that chance as a providential ruling in their behalf, and reverently did they give thanks.