This article is reprinted from the Kansas City [Mo.] Star with
permission of the Star and the author. Frances S. Bush is a
free-lance writer whose articles appear frequently in the Kansas
City Star and Times. Pictures from archives of Kansas State
Historical Society.
Pioneer farmers who settled the West were victims of
blizzards, tornadoes but the disaster that descended upon them,
literally, in the middle ’70s of the last century was different
from any they had known.
Grasshoppers, by the millions.
There was the natural revulsion of human beings from contact
with insects, and then there was the eerie feeling that what began
to happen to them in 1873 and grew into total ruin in 1874 and 1875
had actually been described with complete accuracy some 4,000 years
earlier.
It was in the Old Testament, Exodus 10: ‘And the locusts
went up all over the land of Egypt . . . very grievous they were;
before them there was no such locusts, as they, neither after them
shall there be.
‘For they covered the face of the whole earth so that the
land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land and all
the fruits of the trees . .. and there remained not any green thing
in the trees, or in the herbs of the field …’
It happened just like that, and no one who saw the solid waves
coming, sometimes extending for miles, ever forgot the experience.
My grandmother, who was a child in Kansas then, used to tell how
they stood at their windows to watch and when the great cloud hit
the house it was like a hailstorm. She recalled with awe how a pair
of overalls was eaten off the clothesline.
An eyewitness in Missouri wrote of watching grasshoppers cross
the Blue River at a point where it was 100 feet wide. Insect armies
‘would march to the water’s edge and commence jumping in,
one upon another, until they pontooned the stream.’ Climbing
out over a bluff on the opposite shore, until they passed over it
in a sheet six or seven inches thick, causing a roaring
voice.’
Unbelievable sights were everywhere stripped peach trees with
bare seeds left hanging on the branches, sheep shorn of their wool,
water unfit to drink, railroad tracks brought to a half because of
rails made slippery with the insects’ bodies.
Missouri alone suffered more than $15 million of crop damage,
with Jackson County the hardest hit $2.5 million.
Grasshoppers and locusts, entomologically, are of the same
family, which also includes crickets, katydids, mantises and
others, the difference between grasshoppers and locusts being in
the length of their antennae.
It was largely the Rocky Mountain locust, a short-horned
grasshopper, in this huge invasion of states from the Dakotas to
Texas, extending east into western Missouri, Iowa and
Minnesota.
Charts made since that time show that drought conditions and
grasshopper infestations parallel each other and in 1873 every
month except April was deficient in rainfall.
That summer, adult ‘hoppers appeared in large numbers but no
excessive damage was done. Eggs were laid and 1874 was the year of
the great devastation. The following spring, wheat and other early
crops were destroyed but later moisture and humidity thinned the
horde and some corn and later foodstuffs were raised.
Public response to the catastrophe was strongly tinged with
guilt feelings. The Lord had visited that plague on Egypt for the
sin of holding Israel in bondage. To the God-fearing this was a
clear message that their plague too was a punishment, and religious
sects were quick to point out wickedness and corruption.
In June, 1875, Gov. Henry Hardin of Missouri proclaimed a day of
fasting and prayer. Little more than a week later rains fell and
winds blew and the pests began to disappear, causing irreverent
remarks that ‘the governor prayed the grasshoppers clear out of
Missouri and into Iowa.’
On the practical side Governor Hardin followed with another
proclamation asking for federal aid and for gifts of clothing and
seeds for planting from parts of the country not afflicted.
The Legislature declared grasshoppers to be public enemies and
offered bounties for insects and their eggs. The editor of the
Paris (Mo.) Mercury noted that ‘it is now illegal to be a
grasshopper.’
Governor Olson of Kansas also asked for gifts of clothing and
small grains, authorized the issuance of $73,000 in relief bonds
and also authorized counties to issue bonds to finance local
relief.
A Nebraska law required all able-bodied males between 16 and 20
to contribute labor to help eradicate grasshoppers.
The federal government did contribute small amounts of aid to
the various states and citizens from more fortunate sections of the
country responded generously.
Dr. Charles V. Riley, entomologist of Missouri, was not one who
subscribed to the belief that the infestation was a scourge sent
down from on high to chasten the people.
It was, he said ‘a downright insult to the hard-working,
industrious and suffering farmers of western country who certainly
deserved no more to be visited by Divine wrath than the people in
other parts of the state or country.’
Meanwhile, back in the fields, farmers were attempting against
long odds to stem the tides of invaders. They dug ditches for the
insects to fall in and set fires in them. Deep discing and
harrowing was done to break up egg clusters. Paris Green, an
arsenic compound, was the only insecticide then and could not be
used on food crops but poisoned bran mash was widely spread.
Some rigged up ‘hopperdozers,’ attaching a long box
between two wheels with a large pan of oil in the box and a broad
canvas stretched across behind. As this was pulled across the field
grasshoppers would jump or fly against the canvas and fall into the
oil.
Those were fat years for turkeys, quail, toads, frogs, skunks
and hogs, which thrive on grasshoppers or their eggs.
It is probable that many families, driven by hunger, ate
grasshoppers and some promotion was given the idea. Didn’t John
the Baptist subsist on locusts and wild honey and Shakespeare speak
of food ‘luscious as locusts’? They were listed in the
Scriptures as a ‘clean food’ for Hebrews. In China, the
Mediterranean countries and the Philippines they were diet staples.
Some American Indian tribes ate them.
Dr. Riley was eloquent in his efforts to get Missourians to try
them. He described how he had one day eaten no other food except
‘hoppers. He had made a broth by boiling them. With salt and
pepper ‘it can scarcely be distinguished from beef broth,’
but, he added, ‘a little butter helps.’
Ever the cheerer-upper, Dr. Riley also observed that after the
swarms passed, the soil was fertilized by their bodies and
excrements which perhaps included the ‘tobacco juice’
encountered by generations of small boys who try to play with
grasshoppers.
Periodic grasshopper infestations have always occurred in the
western states though never with this severity. It is known there
was a massive one in 1820 and the dust-bowl years of the 1930s were
grasshopper years. There have been other minor ones in various
parts of the country. Some archaeologists have suggested that
unexplained, sudden movements of prehistoric American tribes may
have been caused by locusts which destroyed food sources.
Some dry year the locusts will come again. The U.S. Department
of Agriculture, in fact, recently reported infestation of more than
a million acres in one county of New Mexico and warned of a
possible plague this summer. Will today’s sophisticated
agricultural methods be able to cope?
Agronomists mention sevin, malathion and diazonone as
insecticides not harmful to man or the environment which, spread at
the proper time, would be effective in destroying young
‘hoppers, while the broad expanses of cultivation on modern
farms would provide far less cover in which eggs could mature and
hatch than the half-wilderness farmlands of a century ago.
Chances are none of us will be called upon to barbecue
grasshoppers on the back yard grill.
Frances S. Bush is a Kansas City free-lance writer.
