Imagine that your name is Lovina Gibson Andrus. You’re five years old, and you live in Salt Lake Valley. The year is 1849, so, naturally, you spend your summer days smashing crickets with a wooden mallet.

Yes, this is the infamous year when the sky turned black as swarms of crickets flew in to eat the Mormon settlers’ new crops.

Thomas Kane said that Mormons called these bugs “black philistines.” And early settler Anson Call described them as having “an eagle-eyed staring appearance that suggests the idea that it may be the habitation of a vindictive little demon.” Bill Hartley wrote that some Mormons jokingly described the bugs as “a cross between the spider and the buffalo.”

And they were eating the crops! So, the settlers desperately set about trying to destroy them.

To the Mormons, the crickets looked like a plague. But to the Native Americans around them, the crickets looked like food!

For centuries, indigenous people have used crickets and other bugs, such as grasshoppers, as a food source—not only because they’re packed with protein and carbs, but because they’re sweet! Native Americans would roast and then grind them into meal for cakes. Settlers called it “desert fruitcake.”

If the Mormon settlers had been a little more open-minded about where they got their nourishment, we would call this sudden windfall of winged sugar “The Miracle of the Crickets,” and rail against the seagulls for snatching up the bounty.

But did the “Miracle of the Seagulls” actually happen? Head over to episode 109 (Spotify, Apple, Sunstone) of the Sunstone Mormon History Podcast to get the inside scoop on what really occurred the summer of 1849 (or was it 1851?) and why the Mormon pioneers were so resistant to eating those “vindictive little demons.”