Just across the creek on Brother Kimball's unoccupied lot stood an old gnarled oak tree. Ten feet from the ground a large limb shot straight out, making a good gallows on which to hang beeves, and father used it for that purpose. The first ox that he slaughtered he hung the hide, flesh side out, on that limb; and it attracted dogs from the Fort, and wolves from the mountain. Father set two steel traps at the root of the tree, and during the first night caught a large grey wolf in one trap, and Ira Eldredge's spotted mastiff in the other. About midnight we heard their terrible fighting; but in the morning the wolf was gone. He had chewed his own leg off below the knee. After liberating the mastiff, I went to the fort, and got Ham Crow to come with his dogs and run the wolf down. We caught the ugly brute in the mouth of Red Butte Canyon; and Brother Crow added the carcass to his scant store of provisions, and grateful for it. By the time the grass began to grow the famine had waxed sore. For several months we had no bread. Beef, milk, pig-weeds, segoes, and thistles formed our diet. I was the herd boy, and while out watching the stock, I used to eat thistle stalks until my stomach would be as full as a cow's. At last the hunger was so sharp that father took down the old bird-pecked ox-hide from the limb; and it was converted into most delicious soup, and enjoyed by the family as a rich treat. As the summer crept on, and the scant harvest drew nigh, the fight with the crickets commenced. Oh, how we fought and prayed, and prayed and fought the myriads of black, loathsome insects that flowed down like a flood of filthy water from the mountainside. And we should surely have been inundated, and swept into oblivion, save for the merciful Father's sending of the blessed sea gulls to our deliverance. The first I knew of the gulls, I heard their sharp cry. Upon looking up, I beheld what appeared like a vast flock of pigeons coming from the northwest. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon. My brother Franklin and I were trying to save an acre of wheat of father's, growing not far from where the Salt Lake Theatre now stands. The wheat was just beginning to turn yellow. The crickets would climb the stalk, cut off the head, then come down and eat it. To prevent this, my brother and I each took an end of a long rope, stretched it full length, then walked through the grain holding the rope so as to hit the heads, and thus knock the crickets off. From sunrise till sunset we kept at this labor; for as darkness came the crickets sought shelter, but with the rising of the sun they commenced their ravages again. I have been asked "how numerous were the gulls." There must have been thousands of them. Their coming was like a great cloud; and when they passed between us and the sun, a shadow covered the field. I could see the gulls settling for more than a mile around us. They were very tame, coming within four or five rods of us.