Locust (10 page)

For all of their unusual religious beliefs, the Mormons were ultimately much like the other pioneers. In the end, they were pious pragmatists who understood Oliver Cromwell’s sage advice to his troops: “Put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry.” In this sense, their story is probably representative of how many of the settlers viewed religion on the frontier. They would not be content with praying for divine deliverance from the locusts; they would wield their own swords. And it was in this realm of direct confrontation that the settlers showed the great American penchant for innovation, practicality, and industry. Prayer was fine, but what the West really needed was a good horse-drawn locust harvester.

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HEN THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN LOCUSTS INITIALLY invaded homesteads and farms, the settlers’ immediate reaction was to retaliate with whatever implements were at hand. If only they could keep the insects from alighting and establishing a beach-head, then perhaps the invasion could be repulsed. The desperate settlers fired guns into the swarms, clanged pots and tin cans, and raised their arms and voices in a vain effort to keep the locusts from descending. Others burned smudge pots or piles of straw to create smoke screens, but the insects kept coming through the choking haze. The dismal failure of such attempts convinced even the most stalwart homesteader that the locusts could not be kept from landing in the fields.

Once the swarms had settled, the farmers tried to drive them back into the air. In Utah, the people turned out in droves with brush whips to lash at the insects. Elsewhere, farmers traversed their fields while swinging ropes and shaking plants to dislodge the locusts. While the
men flailed at the invaders, the women tried to protect valuable plantings by cloaking them with carpets, blankets, and quilts. The insects merely chewed through the flimsy coverings, leaving shredded remnants draped over the ravaged gardens.

When the locusts finally left of their own accord, the settlers told one another that surely such disasters were like lightning strikes. There were plenty of confident declarations that the plague was a passing storm, devastating yet fleeting. But hope gave way to despair when the locusts returned, either arriving as swarms or, far more often, boiling from the ground upon hatching. Still, there was always the local self-appointed authority asserting that “this was most assuredly the last year of the plague.” Such Pollyanna pronouncements were soon dismissed, and the settlers came to realize that the locusts were not ephemeral enemies. This opponent would return again and again. Along with this realization came the understanding that once a swarm appeared on the horizon, there was no hope of either repelling or displacing it, but this did not condemn the farmers to utter hopelessness. Maybe the amassed adults on the wing were invincible, but their offspring might be defeated with a bit of ingenuity and a lot of hard work.

The invention of lethal machinery was the pinnacle of pioneer technology in the battle against locusts. The devices were intended to kill the hatchlings in the fields before they developed into more damaging and mobile adults. The arsenal of human- and horse-drawn implements looked like the result of a creative conspiracy between Rube Goldberg and the Marquis de Sade.

Perhaps the most obvious way to kill an insect is to crush the creature. But fly swatters pale in comparison to the Drum, Hansberry, Hoos, and Simpson Locust-Crushers. Named for their inventors, these heavy, horse-drawn implements used rotating drums, rollers, wheels, or wooden bars to mash the locusts into the soil. Such attempts to squash the nymphs were largely ineffective as success depended on having hard, smooth ground. The machines that drew the
locusts into a system of macerating belts and pulleys or fan blades were somewhat more viable. When a wheeled scoop (made of sheet metal or canvas stretched over a wooden frame) was pushed or pulled through the field, the locusts could be flushed into the lethal inner workings of the device and deposited back on the ground. The Peteler Locust-Crushing Machine and the Flory Locust-Machine relied on this principle. The greatest engineering marvel of this type, however, was the King Suction-Machine, which used a revolving fan to vacuum locusts into the death chamber, where they were flung against a wire screen and dropped into removable bags.

The most fantastical weapon for killing locusts was a horse-drawn flamethrower. Imagine a pitch-pine fire burning on an open grate, straddling a pair of runners; then add an arched metal sheet to cover the grate and direct the heat downward. With this device, two men and a team of horses could incinerate ten acres of locust-infested fields in a day. If the fire was kept stoked and aerated, two-thirds of the enemy could be roasted in the process. Less dramatic approaches included various means of dragging kerosene-soaked flaming rags across the fields. And still less pyromaniacal strategies called for simply laying out bundles of straw, which could be set alight on cool mornings to incinerate the sluggish nymphs that had hidden beneath the flammable shelters. But the strangest of all incendiary contraptions was patented by Kimball C. Atwood. This complex and expensive device involved a stove to which was attached a bin for holding sulfur and elaborate bellows and tubes that carried the hot, poisonous fumes to the ground. An apron behind the rear axle was intended to keep the operator from experiencing his own version of Dante’s inferno. There are no reports of whether this contraption actually worked—perhaps the machine was never employed or nobody survived to report having used it.

The least complex and most effective devices were designed to gather and poison or bag the young locusts. The Adams, Anderson, and Canfield Pans all depended on dragging a flat pan (ten to fifteen feet wide and two or three feet deep) filled with kerosene or coated with coal tar through an infested field. Panicked locusts hopped over the low lip at the leading edge of the pan and perished in the oil or
gunk. The simplest of all these devices came to be known at the Robbins Hopperdozer. This was essentially a modified road scraper with the interior coated in coal-tar.
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In 1877, Minnesota subsidized the purchase and distribution of 56,000 pounds of sheet iron and 3,000 barrels of coal tar for arming the farmers with hopperdozers. The community of Litchfield alone claimed that more than a thousand of these contrivances were in use that year, each collecting 2 to 5 bushels of locusts a day. Later reports placed locust harvest at 200 pounds per hour, or more than 2,500 individuals per minute.

The Benson, Godard, Hutchins, Sylvester, and Wilson-Rhode Locust-Catchers were a bit more varied than the poisoned pans, the former netting, scooping, sweeping, or otherwise depositing locusts in a collection bin to which a removable bag or box was attached. These inventions did away with the problem of disposing of locust-laden kerosene or tar, but they created the problem of burying or otherwise destroying bushels of nymphs. For these locust-catching devices, the best marketing award has to go to John Carlen of Bernadotte, Minnesota, who appears to have been the only inventor clever enough not to name his machine after himself. That said, there is no evidence that Mr. Carlen’s “Hero ’Hopper-catcher” caught more than its share of locusts or sales.

An editorial in the
St. Paul Pioneer Press
suggested that the hopperdozer provided “complete efficacy in clearing the land of hoppers [and that] pluck and perseverance meet with their just reward in the saving of their crops by those who exercise it.” Such enthusiasm surely boosted the spirits of the struggling farmers. Even if your team is getting trounced, it’s still nice to have cheerleaders shouting encouragement.
However, Minnesota historian Annette Atkins was probably right in claiming that the real value of inventing, adapting, refining, and using these machines was psychological. The smashing, scooping, and sucking provided the settlers with a sense of doing something, of not being helpless. Through their labor they affirmed the work ethic and honored rural values. But despite the newfangled inventions’ having been of limited use in controlling locusts, modifying standard agricultural practices had substantial promise.

The eggs left behind by the swarms were the one life stage against which the settlers could readily launch a counterattack. These buried pods were highly concentrated, so less labor could yield greater results than trying to battle nymphs or adults. And most obvious and important, the eggs were immobile, unable to evade whatever punishments humans devised. In this regard, the keys were to alter the amount of water and disturb the protective cover of soil.

Females preferred to oviposit in well-drained sandy soil, so the eggs were normally kept dry by virtue of their parents’ having carefully chosen a suitable nursery. Although the locusts’ eggs were well protected from natural assaults, prolonged and repeated flooding could eventually drown the embryos. With irrigation, the farmers could inundate their fields in the fall or, more commonly, in the spring before the eggs hatched. With good luck and timing, an observant settler could even flood the fields just as the tiny nymphs were emerging from the soil.

Likewise, the buried eggs had no defense against an assault by the plow and harrow. The plow was used to turn the soil and bury the eggs deep in the earth so that the nymphs could not wriggle to the surface. Conversely, the harrow raked the eggs to the surface, exposing them to the elements and hungry scavengers. However, as if suspecting such a counterattack on their offspring, locusts often foiled these strategies by destroying the forage and grain prior to laying their eggs and moving on. This lack of feed translated into a severe shortage of draft animals, and finding horses, mules, or oxen to plow or harrow
the infested fields was nearly impossible in many cases. There was one last, spectacularly desperate means of disrupting the soil that harbored the next generation of locusts. A few farmers resorted to dynamiting the egg beds, which surely did far more good to their sense of vengeance than it did harm to the locusts.

Once the nymphs hatched, hand-dug ditches made effective pitfall traps for the little locusts. In this inverted version of trench warfare, the open fields were safe but the trenches were deadly. Trial-and-error revealed the optimal ditch dimensions: eighteen inches wide and two feet deep—too wide for the nymphs to hop across and too deep for them to escape. The depth could be reduced if there was a means of filling the bottom of the trench with water. Conversely, some farmers dug the trenches extra deep so that the trapped insects could be buried once the stench of their decay became overpowering, and the ditch would continue to function. Otherwise, the moldering bodies had to be shoveled out or new trenches had to be dug. In general, the bands of nymphs were simply allowed to wander into the ditches of their own accord, as they seemed to have no hesitancy in tumbling over the edge. Impatient farmers attempted to drive the bands toward the lethal pitfalls using flails, but this was rarely necessary or worth the effort. In at least some cases, the trenches were spectacularly successful. According to the
Nebraska Eagle:

As the swarms continued to plague the settlers, farming practices began to change. The swarms provided some benefits to those people who had the ability to financially absorb the immediate losses. Although most homesteaders relied on hand-to-mouth subsistence, established farmers found that replanting crops with late fall yields
could offset some of their losses. One Missourian optimistically noted that after the swarms departed in July, “Root crops do well, and vegetables of all kinds attain immense proportions, owing to the freedom from weeds, and fertility resulting from the dung and bodies of the dead locusts.” But the locusts caused much broader and more profound changes in agriculture than such tactical shifts suggest.

Historians credit the repeated invasions by the locusts with reshaping American agriculture west of the Mississippi River into the production patterns that persist today. Admonished by federal entomologists, farmers began to diversify their production systems. Wheat had come to nearly monopolize the Midwest, but this crop was particularly vulnerable to the locusts. For example, nearly two-thirds of the Minnesota farmland was producing wheat in 1873, just before the locusts’ most withering offensive. By the last year of the invasions, less than one-sixth of the land was in wheat. The farmers learned that peas and beans were far less vulnerable to the insects, and corn was a more robust grain crop than wheat.
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