History
Gunnison Island was named after John W. Gunnison, an American explorer and surveyor of the Great Salt Lake valley in 1849.
In the mid-1890s, a few enterprising individuals decided to harvest and sell the abundant guano that the nesting birds left behind as fertilizer. The mining activity caused the pelicans to temporarily abandon Gunnison Island as a nesting site, though the gulls remained despite the human company.
Because of the difficulty of obtaining the guano, however, and its tendency to dissolve in the rain and wash back into the Great Salt Lake, the guano industry was abandoned about ten years after it began.
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