The clearest and most strident warnings of impending famine were issued by military posts in the locust-afflicted region during the 1870s. The concerns of General Edward Otho Cresap Ord were substantiated by detailed surveys and heartrending accounts by other officers. After one of his staff, Major N.A.M. Dudley, toured portions of Nebraska in October and November of 1874, he wrote to the Secretary of War warning of impending disaster:The other [locust victim interviewed in one township], J. V. Ferguson, who was sick, has a wife and two children; he had only ten pounds of flour, remnant of a sack received from the aid society, and about two pounds of fresh pork, given him by a neighbor. With quivering lips and moistened eye he said he did not know where he was to obtain a further supply. Both of these families have most excellent claims; one owns a horse and the other a pair of oxen. To sell either is out of the question, as there is little or no money in the country, and then, as they stated, they would be without the means to haul fuel to their homes during the winter, and in the spring they would have no means of cultivating their crops. . . . A young man by the name of Warren, who lives on Muddy Creek [served] through the war in the Union Army. He said his wife had a babe only ten days old; that he had four other children in the house; that they had not had anything to eat for nearly two days until that morning, when he got fifteen pounds of potatoes from the aid society. I gave him a sack of flour and a little pork. I took down the statements of most of the gentlemen; all agree to the main fact that suffering existed now; that it would increase, and unless other and more extended supplies were furnished than those now counted on, people must either leave or suffer the pangs of starvation.
The officer’s firsthand descriptions are compelling, but he also interviewed community leaders for their assessment of the broader situation. These testimonials told a consistent tale: Mr. Burton is reputed to be a gentleman of unquestionable integrity. He said, “I do not like to believe anybody will starve in the valley, yet I do not know how they are to avoid it, unless they receive a greater assistance than any yet contemplated; some, no doubt, will go out of the country to avoid suffering; some have not the means to get out, and no place to go if they leave.”
Being uncertain that his evocative stories of individual families and the testimonials of local authorities would be sufficiently convincing, Dudley attempted to quantify the dire conditions prevailing in the region. His systematic approach revealed that in the most desperate precincts, four out of every five families were at risk of starvation in the coming winter. In the best of circumstances, one-third of the people required assistance. Although he was a veteran of the atrocious suffering of the Civil War, Dudley was clearly moved by the plight of the settlers. He could not resist concluding his report with a plea for immediate action on the part of the government:Great suffering exists in all five of these extreme frontier counties to a fearful extent. The settlers are, in most instances, scattered over a large extent of country; a large portion of them living far up the numerous streams flowing into the Republican. If the winter should be as severe as that of seventy and seventy-one, and as deep snows fall, beyond a doubt hundreds will starve unless a supply of provisions sufficient to last them through the winter is thrown into the valley and they are provisioned for an emergency of this character, for it would be out of the question for any aid society, or the Government even, to reach anything like a majority of them in deep snows.
Although recent homesteaders were extremely vulnerable to the depredations of locusts, hunger was not limited to the leading edge of the frontier. Far to the east, rural communities were struggling to feed themselves following the arrival of swarms. From Missouri’s St. Clair County came this distraught call for help:We have seen within the past week families which had not a meal of victuals in their house; families that had nothing to eat save what their neighbors gave them, and what game could be caught in traps, since last fall. In one case a family of six died within six days of each other from the want of food to keep body and soul together. But it is but justice to say that the neighbors and citizens were unaware of the facts of the case and were not, therefore, responsible for the terrible death which overtook these poor pilgrims on their journey to the better land. This is, we believe, the first case of the kind which has transpired in this county; but, from present indications, the future four months will make many graves, marked with a simple piece of wood with the inscription “Starved to death,” painted on it.
The pioneers were accustomed to physical privation, having experienced so much thirst, cold, heat, pain, and exhaustion to reach the frontier. One of every seventeen people—and by some estimates nearly one in ten—who headed west along the Oregon Trail would die on the way, leaving an average of ten gravesites along every mile of trail. Accidental gunshots, drowning, wagon accidents, hostile Indians, hypothermia, cholera, typhus, measles, smallpox, and whooping cough took a terrible toll and hardened the pioneers to bodily suffering. Numb to physical pain and deprivation, the settlers’ lasting images of the locust invasions were not so much visceral as mental. The psychological effects of a natural disaster can persist for a lifetime—or more. From the frontier farmers our culture inherited the images of devastation that were etched in their memories, rather than the pangs of hunger that settled in their bellies.
LOCUST INVASION TACTICS
The homesteaders embodied a powerful and particular combination of immense pragmatism and tremendous idealism. As Willa Cather described in O Pioneers!—her classic story of life on the frontier—“A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.” Even so, the rugged folks who weathered such trials in search of a better life were not prepared for the onslaught of locusts. Perhaps Minnesotan historian Annette Atkins most effectively captured the utter disbelief of these insects’ power in her recounting of the Gentleman from England, a historical novel about life on the frontier written by her fellow Minnesotans Maud Hart Lovelace and Delos Lovelace:[Richard Chalmers] had heard persistent rumors for over a month but “could not yield to grasshopper stories even a measure of alarm.” The tales seemed too exaggerated. A “vast ravenous army of insects . . . eating every growing thing and leaving desolation in its wake,” he thought to himself; “Whoever had heard of such a visitation outside the pages of the Bible?” Chalmers, like many settlers, employed a hierarchy of defenses. First he ignored the stories, then denied them, and then told himself that even if the rumors were true, the pests could never reach Crockett [fictional] County. Finally, even if the grasshoppers did come, he argued, they could not destroy whole fields. He was wrong. Chalmers became only slightly alarmed when he heard that the insects had crossed into his county. For sport and to quell their slightly nagging fears, Chalmers and several neighbors rode west to see for themselves. They were “incredulously silent” when they first spotted the grasshopper cloud. Those outrageously exaggerated rumors had been neither outrageous nor exaggerated.
The sight of an arriving locust swarm was an unforgettable sensory experience. The settlers tried to force the strange vision into a familiar category. And the imagery that was most frequently reported was that of an impending storm. A letter from E. Snyder of Highland, Kansas describes the sensation of a summertime blizzard transforming into a swarm of locusts:At our place they commenced coming down about 1 o’clock in the afternoon, at first only one at a time, here and there, looking a little like flakes of snow, but acting more like the advance skirmishers of an advancing army; soon they commenced coming thicker and faster, and they again were followed by vast columns, or bodies looking almost like clouds in the atmosphere. They came rattling and pattering on the houses, and against the windows, falling in the fields, on the prairies and in the waters—everywhere and on everything. By about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, every tree and bush, buildings, fences, fields, roads, and everything, except animated beings, was completely covered with grasshoppers.
The perception of the locusts as being some manifestation of the weat
her was the mind’s effort to reconcile the physical scale of a swarm with experience of the natural world. A looming thunderstorm had the commensurate capacity to grow ominously and sweep across the land. Insect populations might envelope a tree or a pasture, but only a change in the weather could fill the horizon—at least until the settlers witnessed their first locust swarm. Even the natural scientists of the nineteenth century resorted to meteorological similes to describe these phenomena: “On the horizon they often appear as a dust tornado, riding upon the wind like an ominous hail storm, eddying and whirling about like the wild dead leaves in an autumn storm, and finally sweeping up to and past you, with a power that is irresistible.”
The swarms had an unnerving similarity to tornadoes in terms of their damage as well. When the locusts settled they invariably denuded the land, but where they chose to touch down seemed as capricious as the track of a twister. A complex set of factors, probably including falling light, wind speed, and temperature, along with rising atmospheric pressure, conspired to bring a swarm to the ground. These factors are beyond the ability of modern entomologists to untangle in forecasting where contemporary locust swarms will settle. So it is no wonder that for the homesteaders, the arrival of locusts defied explanation. And just as a tornado might pulverize one house and leave the next one unscathed, a locust swarm could shred one part of a county and leave the neighboring precinct untouched. This apparent randomness only added to the sense of helplessness and anxiety during outbreaks.
Perhaps even more unforgettable than the sight of a swarm was the sound of the locusts as they arrived. A whirring buzz compared to “a distant threshing machine” initially heralded their coming, but this smothering hum soon gave way to the sound of their feeding and seething in the fields. The settlers struggled for words to adequately describe this sensation, most often drawing a parallel to a grass fire. A scientist who witnessed many swarms described the sound in vivid terms: “The noise their myriad jaws make when engaged in their work of destruction, can be realized by any one who has ‘fought’ a prairie fire, or heard the flames passing along before a brisk wind: the low crackling and rasping—the general effect of the two sounds, are very similar.”
Even the bands of nymphs could produce dramatic sounds moving across the landscape. Surely one of the most fantastic events involving immature locusts unfolded at the confluence of the Big and Little Blues, tributaries of the Missouri River. Witnesses recounted the incredible events that transpired along these 100-foot-wide waterways:[The rivers were] crossed at numerous places by the moving armies, which would march down to the water’s edge and commence jumping in, one upon another, till they would pontoon the streams, so as to effect a crossing. Two of these mighty armies also met, one moving east and the other west, on the river bluff, in the same locality, and each turning their course north and down the bluff, and coming to a perpendicular ledge of rock 25 or 30 feet high, passed over in a sheet apparently 6 or 7 inches thick, and causing a roaring noise similar to a cataract of water.
Psychologists tell us that odors are the most deep-seated of sensory memories, capable of evoking events from our past with an intensity beyond that elicited by our other senses. If so, then the stench of rotting locusts in the waning days of an invasion must surely have become a potent trigger for nightmarish memories among the settlers. The vividness with which the odor of decaying locusts is described attests to the power of the experience. Consider the recollections of Milando Pratt, a Mormon farmer-turned-railroad-grader:The Great Salt Lake pickled them in its briny waters by the hundreds of thousands of tons then cast their carcasses ashore until a great wall of these inanimate pests was formed for miles along the lake’s shore. [They put forth a] great stench . . . and cast the aroma of this slowly melting putrid wall upon the windward breezes to be wafted earth-ward toward our suffering camp.
Such a mass of decay seems implausible, but this was by no means the first or only such account of locusts amassed along the lakeshore. A few years earlier a “notable mathematician,” most likely Mormon Apostle Orson Pratt, estimated that 1.5 million bushels of locusts were deposited along the shores of the Great Salt Lake in piles six feet high and two miles long. The state entomologist from Missouri reported:I spent some time in this county, and the gloomy outlook toward the end of May could not well be exaggerated. The stench from the immense numbers destroyed around Kansas City, was at one time unendurable, and lest it should breed pestilence the authorities of Westport took measures to deodorize and disinfect the atmosphere on a large scale. Fifteen barrels of locusts were one evening shoveled up and hauled from the base of the courthouse at Independence, each barrel weighing 220 pounds.
The reek of decomposing locusts had long been associated, however erroneously, with the onset of disease among humans. Paulus Orosius, a historian and Christian theologian, recounted a swarm that was blown from the coast of Africa and drowned in the sea in about 380 C.E. The locusts emitted a stench greater than that “produced by the carcasses of one hundred thousand men” and purportedly induced an epidemic among the populace. The connection between the odor of decay and the onset of disease is sensible, given that piles of dead bodies can surely be the result of epidemics and corpses are not particularly healthy to have lying around. At the time that locusts were invading homesteads in America, a French doctor was making the discovery that microscopic organisms were the cause of malaria, rather than “bad air” (mal aria in Italian), for which the disease had been named. And so, there was a deep-seated evolutionary and experiential basis for nineteenth-century pioneers, like fourth-century observers, to link foul odor to illness.
The raw sensations that the locust swarms induced among the settlers evoked a feeling of being overwhelmed by a force beyond compare. They were awed by the voraciousness of the insects, the sheer capacity of a swarm to transform a farmstead into a wasteland before their eyes. Many of the journals and letters simply say that it would be futile to attempt to describe the rapacious power of the locusts. Some tried to capture the event by means of simile:The voracity of these insects can hardly be imagined by those who have not witnessed them, in solid phalanx, falling upon a cornfield and converting, in a few hours, the green and promising acres into a desolate stretch of bare, spindling stalks and stubs. Covering each hill by hundreds; scrambling from row to row like a lot of young famished pigs let out to their trough; insignificant individually, but mighty collectively—they sweep clean a field quicker than would a whole herd of hungry steers. Imagine hundreds of square miles covered with such a ravenous horde, and you can get some realization of the picture presented last year in many parts of Kansas.
Others tried to quantify the intensity of invasions. After a swarm had departed, one Minnesota farmer went into his fields to see how many eggs had been left behind. Digging into the loose soil the poor fellow was flabbergasted to find that no matter where he dug the ground was packed with egg pods. Turning over a shovelful of soil and making a careful count, he found that there were 150 eggs per square inch. Perhaps he’d been an accountant before becoming a farmer because he determined, “At this rate there will be 940,896,000 eggs to the acre, or the nice little pile of 6,586,272,000 on seven acres of my farm.”
We might be tempted to discount this exercise in rural mathematics, except that twenty years earlier a similar calculation had been made during the locust invasions of Utah. Two of the settlers, Taylor Heninger and John Ivie of Sanpete County, made their estimates with painstaking precision, noting that “by actual count and careful average we found 118-28/54th eggs to the square inch of ground; making a total of 743,424,000 eggs to the acre, or a total of 2,973,696,000 to the four acre piece.” Certainly not all of these eggs yielded locusts and not all of the hatchlings survived the course of development, but even if 1 in 100 reached adulthood their four-football-field-sized farm would have produced 30 million locusts—about the human population of the country at that time.
The settlers were perhaps as stunned by the indiscriminate glu
ttony of the locusts as by their rate of destruction. We expect grasshoppers and locusts to consume our gardens and fields, but when these insects begin to feed on fabric and flesh something seems demonically amiss. In Nebraska, a pioneer recounted that “At first some of the settlers made vain attempts to scare the pests from their fields, but this was usually rewarded by having the clothes literally eaten from off their limbs.” And a Missourian reported truly sinister feeding habits: “They do not refuse even dead animals, but have been seen feasting on dead bats and birds.”
From Utah came stories that the locusts devoured everything, “right down to window blinds and green paint.” The insects gnawed on decayed fence posts and wooden siding, but their gourmet delight was the wooden handles of tools. Shovels, rakes, and hoes were routinely covered in a bristling blanket of locusts. The traces of salts and amino acids that had soaked into the wood from the farmer’s sweat were delectable to the insects. Scraping loose the fine fibers of wood, the locusts slowly polished the handles as if they had been buffed by the finest sandpaper.
Although the settlers may have been astonished by the locusts’ voracity, they were appalled by the insects’ fierce cannibalism. By flailing at the locusts, the farmers unwittingly created a grisly buffet. The surviving insects greedily consumed the corpses of their brethren, with a dozen locusts descending on a carcass and jostling for position as they tore into the mangled body. Injured locusts were often eviscerated and dismembered while still alive. The locusts were driven not by a macabre lust but by a need for protein and fat—valuable sources of energy, essential nutrients for egg development, and substances that were in short supply on the prairies. Perhaps the settlers’ repulsion reflected a powerful subliminal association between the locusts’ gruesome propensities and the tales of human cannibalism on the frontier. Seeing the insects gorge on their own kind may well have evoked images of their fellow pioneers stranded on mountain passes in the high Sierras or lost in desert crossings of the Great Basin and driven by hunger to the most depraved acts of desperation.
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