34. John Lyman Smith, 1828-1898

Journal entry describing the episode of the crickets and seagulls, May 1848.

John Lyman Smith was born 17 November 1828. His older brother was George A. Smith and his father, John Smith served as a Patriarch of the Church. He was a first cousin to the founding prophet, Joseph Smith. He was baptized in Kirtland, Ohio in 1836, and moved thereafter with his family to northern Missouri, where he experienced firsthand the violence directed against his people. Following the Mormon expulsion from Missouri, his family settled across the Mississippi River from Nauvoo, Illinois on the west side where his father was called to preside over the area called Zarahemla. In 1843 they moved to Macedonia, Illinois, and thus experienced the Nauvoo era as a teenager. In July of 1845 he married Augusta B. Cleveland.

When the Church moved west so did they. They left Nauvoo on 8 February 1846 and they would be among the first Latter-day Saints in the Salt Lake Valley, arriving on 25 September 1847. The next year, when food was so scarce, he recorded the coming of seagulls which ate the crickets then destroying their crops. His record of this event, in May 1848, is one of the few contemporary accounts to have survived. His journal is open to the page in which he recorded this wonder.

John Lyman Smith would serve his Church and community in a variety of capacities. He was elected to the Utah Territorial Legislature in 1853 and was admitted to the bar in 1855. He worked in the Historian's Office with his brother George A. Smith, and was called on a mission to Europe in 1855-57 and again from 1860-64. Following these missions he settled in southern Utah where he served as a Justice of the Peace, a patriarch, and a temple worker in the St. George Temple. He died 24 February 1898 in St. George, Utah.