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.
Read more about this topic: Gunnison Island
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)