Grasshoppers

Reader Contribution by Sam Moore
Published on March 4, 2014
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A Kansas family sweeping grasshoppers into a pile and burning them. (Image from the May-June, 1975 issue of Iron Men Album.)

In the December 25, 1873 issue of the Yankton Press and Dakotian (still published in Yankton, SD), appeared the following letter from a disillusioned farmer: “The basest fraud on earth is agriculture. She has made me a 1,000 promises and has broken every one of them…the fact is, agriculture would demoralize a saint…I fight pigs, chickens, the moles, the birds, the bugs, the worms, everything in which there is a breath of life. ..I fight heat, the frost, the rain, the hail. In short, I fight the universe, and get whipped in every battle.”

During the mid-1870s, most of the farmers in the plains states could relate to the letter writer. It started in 1873 with a severe drought which caused the Rocky Mountain locust, which most folks called a grasshopper, to head east looking for food.

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