Grass Hoppers and Frost

Brother Brigham called for members with coal mining experience to go up Parley’s and work a recently discovered coal strike. Compared to the well-watered eastern United States, trees are scarce in arid Utah. Coal was needed to keep Great Salt Lake City fueled over the winter. So up Parley’s went these brothers and sisters, many of them recently arrived Welsh converts like Edmund and Margaret Rees. The Rees family was among the first nineteen families to settle that first winter, Utah. Margaret was the first white woman to endure that first Coalville winter. It’s cold in those mountains. It’s even colder when you live in a dugout.

Even when they built a more permanent dwelling, there was little rest:

Coal mining was hard physical work. Men worked twelve-hour shifts after sometimes walking or riding a horse several miles to and from the mine portal. Men performed manual labor with pick and shovel…The mines closed on Sundays, which were the only break in a long week for the men.”…In addition to the heavy manual labor of mining, hanging over the workers heads was the constant prospect of being laid off, not to mention the hazards of working in a mine.

Margaret’s work load was heavy since Edmund was away earning wages in the mine. Then Edmund died on June 27, 1867.

Family history records: “This left Margaret with 6 children to raise and feed in this strange land”. The history of Coalville observes:

Because of so many fatal accidents, Coalville was different from other towns because it had a greater share of widows than the average Utah settlement…The widows and their children struggled along until the sons got old enough to work. Widows wanted to be independent and self sufficient, but there were few ways for women to earn money in that time. Because many widows were reluctant to ask for help unless absolutely necessary, farmers made a practice of leaving certain portions of their fields unharvested so the widows could gather their own wheat, without actually having to ask. Businessmen helped out by offering employment to sons of widows when they had jobs the boys could fill.

Now Margaret not only faced cold but other threats to the survival of herself and her children:

Fifty years after the first settlers arrived, someone asked the old-timers present to write down what they best remembered about the early days. The grasshoppers and the frost stood out most in their memories as being the most difficult to cope with.

The grasshopper was the dread Rocky Mountain locust:

The Rocky Mountain locust (Melanoplus spretus) was the locust species that ranged through almost the entire western half of the United States (and some western portions of Canada) …Sightings often placed their swarms in numbers far larger than any other species of locust, with one famed sighting having been estimated at 198,000 square miles (513,000 km²) in size (greater than the area of California), weighing 27.5 million tons, and consisting of some 12.5 trillion insects – the greatest concentration of animals ever recorded, according to The Guinness Book of Records.

Rees family history records:

Margaret had ten acres of wheat planted. It was a fine crop and she was proud of it. It meant food for her family that winter. One night Margaret heard a rushing noise, something like an airplane makes overhead today. She wondered what it was and went outside, followed the sound until she located it in her wheat field. It was grasshoppers. At daybreak she went out to the patch again only to find that every green blade of grain was eaten off.

She walked back to the house thinking how she would tell her husband forgetting for the moment that he was dead. The children were still asleep. She sat down on a bench outside the door and broke down and cried. What would they do for the winter’s food? Hearing a noise, she looked up to see an approaching four—mule team driving up. It was remnant of Johnston’s army. They stopped and asked if she had any milk to sell. She did have a cupboard full of milk in pans, heavy thick cream and fresh butter and eggs. The men were bighearted Irishmen. They heard her story and for every pan of milk that she set out they threw her down a sack of provisions and when they left she had enough food for the winter. She had prayed and the Lord did provide.

The Lord provided even more:

Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page