Locust (2 page)

By the time he could see his wife in the garden, she had stopped weeding and was standing stock-still. Dropping the hand that had been shading her eyes, she gripped the handle of the hoe and her knuckles whitened. She tried to conceal her growing fear from their twin daughters, who were hidden between the rows, filling a basket with green beans and humming a ditty from Sunday school. The county’s first agricultural fair was in another week, and it seemed that everyone in the county—4,200 men, women, and children—would be in Centerville. As the shimmering wave seemed to wash over the hills
on the other side of the Platte River, she scooped up the girls and headed to the house.

As Abram unhitched the horse, the first one hit him in the cheek and clung to his beard. He swiped at the insect, and it leapt to the ground. As it fluttered back into the air, he knew—although he’d never before seen—what formed the cloud that was now filling the horizon. We can readily imagine his growing fear as another ten insects pelted him, then hundreds fell like living hail, driven by papery wings rather than a howling wind. This much we know from newspaper accounts: The sunlight dimmed, and the air took on the thick veil that he associated with the smoke of a prairie fire. The roaring crackle of a million wings sounded like a horrific blaze.

Abram panicked at first, frightened in a way he’d never been by blizzards, fevers, and cougars. These other invaders could be managed by knowledge, planning, and courage. But as the swarm descended, Abram felt as if he was suffocating. Locusts filled the air. They were clinging to him, their spiny legs tangled in his hair. He flailed as the insects worked their way down his shirt collar and up his pant legs. He seemed to be at the tip of a tornado, sucked into a demented whirlwind.

The scream of his daughters broke the grip of his own terror. His wife and the twins hadn’t made it to the house, and now the locusts were crawling into the folds of their dresses. The insects clung like giant burs in his daughters’ silken hair. His wife had set the girls down and buried her face in her hands, paralyzed with fear.

He swept the girls into one arm, wrapping the other around his wife’s shoulders and guiding her to the cabin. At the door, he brushed the horrid insects from their hair and clothing, stomping the locusts that fell at their feet. Shoving his family through the doorway, he started to follow—and then he heard the panicked whinny. The horse, still hitched to the cutting rig, reared up, locusts matted in its mane and chewing on its sweaty hide in search of moisture. Abram slammed the door and headed back into the swarm. The horse bolted, dragging the scythe through the length of the garden and racing alongside the cornfield beyond.

Like a dog that suddenly turns on his antagonist, Abram ran into the garden, grabbing the hoe that his wife had dropped. He swung in
wide, vicious arcs, knocking the locusts from the plants, grinding them into the soil. After long, futile minutes his chest was heaving, his anger spent. He dropped the hoe and plodded back to the house, its walls now seething with a living blanket of locusts.

In the doorway, he crushed one locust after another underfoot, until the ground was slick with their ruptured bodies. Behind him, the garden was in shreds and the limbs of the willow tree by the house nearly bent to the ground under the weight of the insects. Beyond that, the corn was being stripped bare, he could see a dozen rows into the field. His gaze lifted to the horizon—as thousands of insects continued to drop onto the land, millions more streamed overhead. He fell to his knees, the yellowish grease of the crushed locusts staining his overalls. Through the door, he heard his wife sobbing, his daughters whimpering.

We can only partially reconstruct that terrifying afternoon in 1875 because Abram McNeal left no journal telling of his life on the prairie. But we know from the accounts of other settlers that Abram McNeal was surely overwhelmed—and perhaps for the first time in his life he despaired. Every Sunday, the scattered families in the valley made the bone-jarring trek over dirt roads to the Congregational church in Fremont to listen to the Reverend Isaac E. Heaton explain the blessings that came to the faithful. Like so many of his fellow homesteaders, Abram was likely a devout man condemned to watching his farm be consumed by the locust plague—the same terror that God used to punish the pharaoh of Egypt. Like so many of his neighbors in Dodge County that blistering July, Abram McNeal had to wonder what had made the Creator so unfairly curse his children.

Throughout the nineteenth century, swarms of locusts regularly swept across the North American continent, turning noon into dusk, devastating farm communities, and bringing trains to a halt as the crushed bodies of the insects greased the rails. The U.S. Entomological Commission estimated that during the outbreaks of 1874-1877 the Rocky Mountain locust inflicted a staggering $200 million in damage on agriculture west of the Mississippi (this is equivalent to a loss of $116 billion in today’s money, with annual agricultural production in the United States being valued at $217 billion). The commission,
formed by Congress to assess and redress the devastation, was a brilliant and eccentric trio of scientists: Charles Valentine Riley (the Missouri State Entomologist, who would one day become known as the Father of Economic Entomology), Cyrus Thomas (the Illinois State Entomologist, who abandoned his Evangelical Lutheran ministry to pursue science and eventually serve as a director in the Smithsonian Institution), and Alpheus Spring Packard, Jr. (a Harvard-educated zoologist, who founded the
American Naturalist
and headed the Peabody Academy of Science). Not only did the locust shape the cultural history of the West, but this creature also profoundly affected the lives and work of the most important and influential entomologists in history.

Pioneers and government agencies tried every imaginable method of control. They prayed for deliverance, organized bounty systems, conscripted able-bodied men into “grasshopper armies,” and provided food aid for starving communities. Farmers tried to burn and beat the invaders—or, failing this, they turned to drowning and plowing the eggs or crushing and poisoning the hatching locusts. Elaborate horse-drawn devices were invented to destroy locusts, and the most desperate farmers resorted to using dynamite to blast the egg beds of the insects. This approach surely decimated local pockets of the pest and provided a hearty sense of revenge, but pulverizing thousands of acres with explosives was hardly a viable strategy. And so, as courageous and creative as these methods were, the locusts kept coming.

The swarms continued to pummel America’s heartland into the 1880s, moving and settling with the caprice of tornadoes. Their devastation was like that of a living wildfire, consuming fifty tons of vegetation per day to fuel a typical swarm. Finally, in the 1890s, to the relief of a beleaguered nation, the locust outbreaks subsided. But such remissions had occurred before, only to have the locusts return with a fury. When a small swarm was reported in Manitoba in 1902 people wondered if another period of devastation was at hand. The specter of an outbreak loomed and there were still no reliable methods to defend the land.

Nobody could have guessed that this would be the last swarm of locusts to be seen in North America. Suddenly—and mysteriously—the Rocky Mountain locust had disappeared. For a decade nobody
noticed, as more urgent matters of a world at war occupied the nation. Later, a few state entomologists remarked on the absence of their former nemesis. But soon another ecological and economic crisis captured the attention of the country. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s displaced both soil and people. This disaster was aggravated by horrific outbreaks of grasshoppers—renewing the memories of locust plagues. But the stories would eventually fade in a culture that looked to the future, rather than the past. Nine decades would pass before the Rocky Mountain locust made its next appearance. And this time it would be found in a most remarkable place.

“Goddamn! Jeff, come check this out!” Larry cried, dropping to his knees, the frigid water soaking into his pants. Although swearing was not entirely out of character, such ebullience was unexpected—particularly given how cold and tired he must have been. Two days earlier, Larry had hiked the twenty-three miles to Indian Pass in the Wind River Range of Wyoming. The other members of the scientific team, including me, had ridden two-thirds of the way, until our horses started slipping and stumbling on the steep, wet path, after which we scrambled over the rocky trail on foot.

It was our second day on the glacier, and the previous day had been cruelly disappointing; we had found no evidence of insects in the ice. We had good reason to believe that this expedition was going to pay off: Geologists collecting ice cores from this glacier earlier in the season had heard of our work and told us they’d found what looked like rotting insects. Besides, Larry argued, after years of searching we had finally earned enough karma (his term for suffering of any sort, especially when undeserved) to score the “big one.” The previous night’s dinner of undercooked macaroni with powdered cheese had been punctuated with fewer jibes and jokes than our usual camp meals.

Larry DeBrey had been my first graduate student and had worked as my research associate for the last three years. Before coming to the University of Wyoming, he had operated his own logging company,
worked highway construction, and fought forest fires. Only a few pounds heavier than I, he carried twice the weight of ropes, carabiners, ice screws, and collecting bottles that I hauled. Seeing Larry on his knees was not surprising. He’d suffered from scoliosis—and between childhood surgeries and metal rods he couldn’t bend over very well, which also explained why he preferred hiking to riding a horse. But he was not prone to outbursts of excitement; dry witticisms were his standard fare.

“Come over here. Look, they’re everywhere,” he said, waving his hand toward a boulder incongruously perched in the center of the ice flow. The glacial ice crunched under my crampons as I hurried from the edge of the moraine, where I’d been jotting notes.

“What’s everywhere?” I asked.

Before he could answer, it was my turn to drop to my hands and knees. The surface of the rotting ice was like a frozen cheese grater. In a tiny cavity, soaked in meltwater, lay a crumpled form about an inch and a half long. Its legs were missing, but the bulbous head, powerful thorax, tapered abdomen, and straight wings left no doubt that this was the body of a grasshopper—or a locust. In the intense sunlight that cuts through the thin air of 12,000 feet, the dark remains had melted out of the surrounding ice.

For five years I had waited for this. At other sites we had discovered ancient fragments that could be tentatively ascribed to the Rocky Mountain locust, and we had found intriguing deposits of modern-day grasshoppers. But we had yet to find an intact body of the locust, the definitive evidence that our quest had not been a foolhardy venture. Could these soggy bodies be the bizarre treasure that might prove to be a window into the last days of the Rocky Mountain locust?

Larry’s ruddy face split into a grin at the prospect of having struck entomological gold. He’d stuck with me through August snowstorms, lung-searing climbs, and horrifically bad advice from local guides. Scattered across the surface of the glacier, either in water-soaked pockets or just beneath the ice, were dozens of these mummified insects. The afternoon passed quickly with tedious but hopeful labor, as we gently placed the limp and sodden bodies in numbered vials. That night, as Larry brought water up from the stream and Craig and
Charlie fixed dinner, I laid out a couple dozen of the better-preserved specimens under the harsh, white light of a Coleman lantern. Gently turning the limp bodies onto their sides, I finally found a male. Within seconds of lifting the first body from its watery grave, I knew that it was in the genus
Melanoplus
, to which the Rocky Mountain locust belonged—but the only way to be certain of the species was to examine the internal genitalia of a male. Dismembering the body would effectively destroy a rare and valuable specimen, but I had to know if we had found what we had been looking for.

I didn’t know what I was going to tell Larry if the specimen wasn’t the Rocky Mountain locust. But then, we’d grown used to disappointment, almost inured to failure. We’d come to love the hunt, the companionship, the quixotic search for buried treasure. I had no doubt that if the species was something other than the locust, Larry would pause from his well-earned meal, nod knowingly, and declare that, by God, tomorrow we’d find the bastards. And if not, then we’d go back to the yellowing reports of the early geologists and the topographic filigree of modern maps. That is, if we could garner endorsements from increasingly dubious colleagues and eke out funding from correspondingly impatient sources. But I’d begun to harbor misgivings of a different sort.

Seeking the physical remains of the once glorious Rocky Mountain locust was both thrilling and saddening. The North American continent had never seen a life form with greater fecundity. Swarms of these insects swept across the prairies, at one time reaching from southern Canada to the Mexican border and from California to Iowa. They were the leitmotif of the Great Plains, as powerful a life force as the great herds of bison. To touch a creature that had shaped the folk-tales, culture, and history of the West would be worth years of frustration. Or so I had believed.

After searching so long and hard, I began to wonder whether it was right to disturb the icy tombs secreted in the Rockies. Even if the glaciers would one day yield the remains of the locust, maybe this most magnificent of species should be allowed to rest in peace amid one of the country’s most spectacular settings. As I began to tease apart the mushy abdomen I didn’t know whether we had finally succeeded.
Finding the tiny, diagnostic structures within the decomposing soft tissues was a slow and delicate process that gave me time to contemplate what I did know. I understood that I had transcended the bounds of science. I was coming to realize that my intention to rob the graves of this long-lost creature imposed a deep obligation, the nature of which I was only beginning to discern.