If the locusts’ consumption of their own dead and dying was not sufficiently unnerving, the account of General Alfred Sully, encamped between the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers in the summer of 1864, was absolutely chilling. A single locust or a single bird is hardly the basis for fear, but a feeding frenzy is horrifying—in history and in cinema. In an entomological version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, which scared the bejeezus out of moviegoers a century later, Sully matter-of-factly reported, “A soldier on his way here lay down to sleep on the prairie in the middle of the day—the troop had been marching all night. His comrades noticed him covered with grasshoppers and awakened him. His throat and wrists were bleeding from the bites of the insects.”
The fate of the soldier had he been left to the locusts can not be known, nor can the veracity of the story itself, as there were no similar accounts of locusts feeding on live humans. However, such accounts leave no doubt of the terrifying nature of these insects in the minds of the pioneers. The psychological trauma of the locusts—the capriciousness of their arrival, the magnitude of the swarms, and the voracity of their feeding—became embedded in the lives and language of the frontier.
The pioneers came to refer to a long, dry autumn at the end of a hot summer as “grasshopper weather,” most likely because these conditions favored the buildup of locusts. And drastically reduced costs of merchandise were not associated with our familiar disaster-laden label of “fire sale” but “grasshopper prices.” Not only were these insects converted into adjectives, but locusts were also metamorphosed into verbs. Mattie Oblinger, a Nebraskan whose family had been besieged by locusts, wrote to her relatives in the fall of 1876, “I suppose you would like to know if we have been grasshoppered again.”
For some, gallows humor might have provided a moment’s respite from the trauma of locust infestations. A standard joke emerged on the frontier.
TEACHER: Where does all our grain go?
STUDENT: Into the hopper.
TEACHER: What hopper?
STUDENT: Grasshopper!
The locusts worked their way into the lives and ultimately the literature of the pioneers. What modern Americans know of the locusts that decimated the settlers is gleaned from literary accounts of life on the frontier. One of the best recent examples is Larry Mc-Murtry’s Western saga Lonesome Dove, which includes a striking account of a locust swarm. The insects saturate the air with stunning swiftness:Newt’s first fear when the cloud hit was that he would suffocate. In a second the grasshoppers covered every inch of his hands, his face, his clothes, his saddle. A hundred were stuck in Mouse’s mane. Newt was afraid to draw a breath for fear he’d suck them into his mouth and nose. The air was so dense with them that he couldn’t see the cattle and could barely see the ground.
But the ultimate account of a locust invasion is surely Laura Ingalls Wilder’s description in her fourth book of the Little House on the Prairie series, On the Banks of Plum Creek. After a bucolic set of chapters, the reader finds Laura’s father regaling the family with the fertility of the country, the abundance of their crop, and the rosiness of their future—and then the locusts arrive. The insects’ arrival is presaged by a strange foreboding:The light was queer. It was not like the changed light before a storm. The air did not press down as it did before a storm. Laura was frightened, she did not know why.
She ran outdoors, where Pa stood looking up at the sky. Ma and Mary came out, too, and Pa asked, “What do you make of that, Caroline?”
A cloud was over the sun. It was not like any cloud they had ever seen before. It was a cloud of something like snowflakes, but they were larger than snowflakes, and thin and glittering. Light shone through each flickering particle.
There was no wind. The grasses were still and the hot air did not stir, but the edge of the cloud came on across the sky faster than wind. The hair stood up on Jack’s neck. All at once he made a frightful sound up at that cloud, a growl and a whine.
Within moments, the eeriness gives way to terror as the locusts begin to descend on the family’s homestead:Then huge brown grasshoppers were hitting the ground all around her, hitting her head and her face and her arms. They came thudding down like hail.
The cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.
Laura tried to beat them off. Their claws clung to her skin and her dress. They looked at her with bulging eyes, turning their heads this way and that. Mary ran screaming into the house. Grasshoppers covered the ground, there was not one bare bit to step on. Laura had to step on grasshoppers and they smashed squirming and slimy under her feet.
The locusts are not only frightening and disgusting, they are devastating to the family’s farm. But perhaps their greatest damage in the mind of young Laura is to nature’s garden, the fruit trees along the creek from which the title of the book is taken:Pa was not downstairs next morning. All night he had been working to keep the smoke over the wheat, and he did not come to breakfast. He was still working.
The whole prairie was changed. The grasses did not wave; they had fallen in ridges. The rising sun made all the prairie rough with shadows where the tall grass had sunk against each other.
The willow trees were bare. In the plum thickets only a few plumpits hung to the leafless branches. The nipping, clicking, gnawing sound of the grasshoppers’ eating was still going on.
At noon Pa came driving the wagon out of the smoke. He put Sam and David into the stable, and slowly came to the house. His face was black with smoke and his eyeballs were red. He hung his hat on the nail behind and sat down at the table.
“It’s no use, Caroline,” he said. “Smoke won’t stop them. They keep dropping down through it and hopping in from all sides. The wheat is falling now. They’re cutting off like a scythe. And eating it, straw and all.”
In desperation, Pa leaves his family behind to search for work. His journey echoes our culture’s canonical story of a people wandering in the wilderness seeking the promised land. Laura learns from her mother’s reading of Scripture that locusts played a pivotal role in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs. And so the tale of the pioneers became interwoven with Western culture’s most deep and abiding literary account of locusts. Perhaps the Ingalls sensed that they were part of a great human migration—an American exodus—across the continent. But what they did not know while watching their farm disappear under a blanket of locusts that summer of 1875 was that no people on earth, not even a pharaoh, had ever witnessed a swarm of such immensity.
2
Albert’s Swarm
ISAAC CLINE WILL FOREVER BE REMEMBERED FOR HIS tragic hubris. He was the chief meteorologist of Texas when Galveston was hit by the deadliest weather disaster in U.S. history. He had claimed that the city was immune to tropical cyclones, but the hurricane that struck on September 8, 1900, took the lives of more than 10,000 people. At that time, hurricanes were not being named, but this lethal tempest was called Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson in his gripping book by that title. What few people will ever recall about Isaac Cline is how he began his career in the U. S. Army Signal Corps (the predecessor of today’s National Weather Service). Cline’s first assignment did not involve monitoring hurricanes, tornadoes, or any other atmospheric events. Rather, he began by tracking the Rocky Mountain locust.
The Army Signal Corps was a logical birthplace for a weather service, as the corps had the capacity to collect and rapidly transmit information regarding storms and their movements. For the first time, people could be warned of impending disaster and perhaps avoid the worst of the maelstrom. When General William B. Hazen wrote to colleges across the country to recruit graduates into the nascent weather service, Cline’s name was submitted by the president of Hiwassee College. After completing a demanding training program and passing a rigorous exam (only the sixtee
n passing with the highest scores were assigned to the field, and Cline scored sixteenth in his class), he was asked his preference for a duty station. Cline requested to be given an opportunity for research that would benefit humanity. Investigating the link between weather and the Rocky Mountain locust’s outbreaks and movements was deemed to be one of the most urgent missions of meteorology. As such, Cline was assigned to Little Rock, Arkansas, with orders to determine the relationship between weather patterns and locust swarms.
Unfortunately, Arkansas was at the eastern margin of the insect’s distribution, so Cline made little progress in this line of study. Instead, he found medicine most pertinent to his humanitarian interests. Cline earned his medical degree and was drawn into the nascent field of medical climatology, the study of how weather affects human health. He then became the officer-in-charge at the weather station in Abilene, Texas, and was then given the responsibility of organizing the Texas Section of the U.S. Weather Service and establishing the Galveston weather station. And so it was that his life collided with the deadliest storm in U.S. history—a story eerily reminiscent of another Signal Corps observer who was fated to witness a locust swarm of even greater force.
Like Isaac Cline, Albert Lyman Child was born in the East, earned a degree in medicine, and served in the Army Signal Corps. But unlike Isaac Cline, Albert Child was remembered by no one. Perhaps this is because there was nothing that Dr. Child could have done to avert the natural disaster that he meticulously recorded in his duties as a meteorological observer. Dr. Child made no claims that his community of Plattsmouth, Nebraska, was immune to the ravages of locusts. There was no tone of arrogance in his report, only a sense of near disbelief in what he had witnessed.
Albert Child was a renaissance man on the frontier. After practicing medicine and serving as a school superintendent in Ohio, he moved to Cedar Creek in Cass County, Nebraska, to try his hand at farming. If Cline had been a meteorologist who wanted to be a doctor, then it seems that Child was a doctor who wanted to be a meteorologist. As soon as he arrived in Nebraska in 1857, Dr. Child began keeping weather records. In 1861, he began providing reports to the Smithsonian Institution, and his work was transferred to the U.S. Signal Corps when it took over as the country’s weather service in 1873. By then, he’d been elected county judge and moved to Plattsmouth, but his passion for meteorology was unabated. This is how Albert Child came to be the right man, in the right place, at the right time to provide a definitive report of the most immense swarm of locusts in recorded history. He began his account with the objective tone of a trained and experienced observer:The extent of the swarm is difficult to ascertain, as the observer can only see a small belt. They may extend indefinitely right or left. During the flight from June 15 to 25 of 1875, I telegraphed east and west. I found a continuous line moving northward of 110 miles, and then somewhat broken 40 miles farther. The movements of the winds for five days (15th to 20th) averaged about 10 miles per hour; and the locust evidently moved considerably faster than the wind, at least 15 miles per hour.
To determine the height of the swarm, Dr. Child used a rather clever approach. He focused his telescope on various objects of similar size to a locust placed at known distances across the rolling hills. Then, he aimed the instrument into the sky, and if the locusts were in focus he’d conclude that the swarm must be at least as high as the horizontal focal distance that he’d just determined. The method only yielded coarse approximations, so Dr. Child was cautious in his estimates. But in his accounts of these observations, his awe at the scale of the phenomenon began to sneak into the technical report: The swarm I estimated from one-quarter to one-half mile deep. It seemed like piercing the milky-way of the heavens; my glass found no limits to them. They might have been a mile or more in depth.
Like any good scientist, Dr. Child took his data and transformed the raw numbers into a complete picture of what he had witnessed. The mathematics were simple, but the results were nearly beyond imagination. When Dr. Child presented his straightforward calculations of the aggregate size of the locust swarm that was passing over Nebraska, he was incredulous of his own findings:They were visible from six to seven hours of each of the successive five days, and I can see no reason to suppose that their flight was checked during the whole five days. If so, the army in the line of advance would be 120 hours by 15 miles per hour = 1,800 miles in length, and say at even 110 miles in width, an area of 198,000 square miles! and then from one-quarter to one-half mile deep. This is utterly incredible, yet how can we put it aside?
An area of 198,000 square miles would encompass the combined areas of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The swarm was probably an elongated stream of insects, but if it had been configured in a more familiar geometric shape, it would have comprised a square 450 miles on a side. The frontier of the New World was revealing marvels and terrors of a scale unparalleled in written history. The largest swarm of locusts outside of North America was reported in 1954, when fewer than a hundred square miles were covered by the notorious Desert locust in Kenya. No insect outbreak has ever approached the magnitude of the Rocky Mountain locust.
Trying to estimate the number of locusts in Albert’s Swarm is quite a challenge, but we can use some values from the scientific literature to approximate the size of the population. We might safely assume a settled density similar to that of the famed locust swarms in Africa (which involve a larger locust and likely have fewer individuals packed into each square yard). If so, then the 1875 swarm that passed over North America had 3.5 trillion locusts, outnumbering the current human population on earth by a factor of 600 to 1. The swarm outweighed a man to the same degree that the biomass of a whale exceeds that of a mouse. Such quantities are unfathomable, but newspaper reports of damage from neighboring townships clearly substantiate Dr. Child’s account.
Although Isaac Cline never managed to associate weather patterns with locust outbreaks, we can now deduce the biological and meteorological conditions that conspired to create Albert’s Swarm. Scientists of the nineteenth century had begun to piece together the life cycle of the Rocky Mountain locust, and it appears that Albert’s swarm was qualitatively typical of the species. In an outbreak cycle, the locust swarms descended from the northern Rockies in early June. Carried by prevailing winds, these insects swept across the countryside, settling wherever there was abundant food. As the locusts advanced to the south and east, they began to mate, and soon after, females began laying eggs. Cylindrical clusters or “pods” of about thirty eggs were buried in the soil, and so the swarms left behind denuded fields riddled with eggs. The adult locusts would live for perhaps a couple of months, seeding the countryside with the next generation. The embryos would mature through the summer and then hibernate—a physiological state called diapause in insects—for the winter. The following spring, the ground would appear to boil as the nymphs hatched on warm days. Forming into immense aggregations or “bands” these immature locusts would march across the land, stripping the vegetation to fuel their development. The nymphs would molt five times, shedding their old outer cuticle and growing in size. On the final molt, the stubby wing buds were replaced with fully developed wings, the reproductive system was functional, and the adult locust was ready to swarm.
This next generation would typically continue the plague, riding the winds further into the heartland of the continent. After a buildup over the course of three or four years—and an equal number of generations—the outbreak would enter its final stage. Stretched to its southern and eastern limits, a portion of the population would stream back to the Northwest in an apparent effort to return to its mountainous homeland. Scientists were unsure of whether this return migration was necessary to restock the founding population or whether a portion of the original population was always left behind in the Rockies to ensure the “seed bank” necessary to produce the next outbreak. In either case, they knew that the locust man
aged to sustain itself somewhere in the mountains, biding its time between irruptions.
The periodic outpouring of insect life from the West was intimately linked to weather, as Cline and the Weather Service suspected. The locusts flourished during droughts, which we can now infer to have provided several critical catalysts for population growth. The hot, dry weather weakened plant defenses and actually increased the nutritional value of the vegetation as sugars and other nutrients concentrated in the leaves. The dry conditions also suppressed fungal diseases, which could reach epidemic proportions and devastate locust populations in wet years. Furthermore, the heat accelerated the locusts’ maturation—and development was a race against predators that inflicted a constant mortality on the dense bands of nymphs. So, the faster the young locusts made it to adulthood, the greater the proportion of the population that would survive to reproduce. Finally, in times of drought lush vegetation was restricted to swales (and well-tended agricultural fields), so the locusts were forced to aggregate in these habitats, a behavior that initially generated and then sustained the coherence of both nymphal bands and adult swarms.
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