Locust (4 page)

The pioneers were accustomed to physical privation, having experienced so much thirst, cold, heat, pain, and exhaustion to reach the frontier. One of every seventeen people—and by some estimates nearly one in ten—who headed west along the Oregon Trail would die on the way, leaving an average of ten gravesites along every mile of trail. Accidental gunshots, drowning, wagon accidents, hostile Indians, hypothermia, cholera, typhus, measles, smallpox, and whooping cough took a terrible toll and hardened the pioneers to bodily suffering. Numb to physical pain and deprivation, the settlers’ lasting images of the locust invasions were not so much visceral as mental. The psychological effects of a natural disaster can persist for a lifetime—or more. From the frontier farmers our culture inherited the images of devastation that were etched in their memories, rather than the pangs of hunger that settled in their bellies.

The homesteaders embodied a powerful and particular combination of immense pragmatism and tremendous idealism. As Willa Cather described in
O Pioneers!
—her classic story of life on the frontier—“A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.” Even so, the rugged folks who weathered such trials in search of a better life were not prepared for the onslaught of locusts. Perhaps Minnesotan historian Annette Atkins most effectively captured the utter disbelief of these insects’
power in her recounting of the
Gentleman from England,
a historical novel about life on the frontier written by her fellow Minnesotans Maud Hart Lovelace and Delos Lovelace:

The sight of an arriving locust swarm was an unforgettable sensory experience. The settlers tried to force the strange vision into a familiar category. And the imagery that was most frequently reported was that of an impending storm. A letter from E. Snyder of Highland, Kansas describes the sensation of a summertime blizzard transforming into a swarm of locusts:

The perception of the locusts as being some manifestation of the weather was the mind’s effort to reconcile the physical scale of a swarm with experience of the natural world. A looming thunderstorm had the commensurate capacity to grow ominously and sweep across the land. Insect populations might envelope a tree or a pasture, but only a change in the weather could fill the horizon—at least until the settlers witnessed their first locust swarm. Even the natural scientists of the nineteenth century resorted to meteorological similes to describe these phenomena: “On the horizon they often appear as a dust tornado, riding upon the wind like an ominous hail storm, eddying and whirling about like the wild dead leaves in an autumn storm, and finally sweeping up to and past you, with a power that is irresistible.”

The swarms had an unnerving similarity to tornadoes in terms of their damage as well. When the locusts settled they invariably denuded the land, but where they chose to touch down seemed as capricious as the track of a twister. A complex set of factors, probably including falling light, wind speed, and temperature, along with rising atmospheric pressure, conspired to bring a swarm to the ground. These factors are beyond the ability of modern entomologists to untangle in forecasting where contemporary locust swarms will settle. So it is no wonder that for the homesteaders, the arrival of locusts defied explanation. And just as a tornado might pulverize one house and leave the next one unscathed, a locust swarm could shred one part of a county and leave the neighboring precinct untouched. This apparent randomness only added to the sense of helplessness and anxiety during outbreaks.

Perhaps even more unforgettable than the sight of a swarm was the sound of the locusts as they arrived. A whirring buzz compared to “a distant threshing machine” initially heralded their coming, but this smothering hum soon gave way to the sound of their feeding and seething in the fields. The settlers struggled for words to adequately describe this sensation, most often drawing a parallel to a grass fire. A
scientist who witnessed many swarms described the sound in vivid terms: “The noise their myriad jaws make when engaged in their work of destruction, can be realized by any one who has ‘fought’ a prairie fire, or heard the flames passing along before a brisk wind: the low crackling and rasping—the general effect of the two sounds, are very similar.”

Even the bands of nymphs could produce dramatic sounds moving across the landscape. Surely one of the most fantastic events involving immature locusts unfolded at the confluence of the Big and Little Blues, tributaries of the Missouri River. Witnesses recounted the incredible events that transpired along these 100-foot-wide waterways:

Psychologists tell us that odors are the most deep-seated of sensory memories, capable of evoking events from our past with an intensity beyond that elicited by our other senses. If so, then the stench of rotting locusts in the waning days of an invasion must surely have become a potent trigger for nightmarish memories among the settlers. The vividness with which the odor of decaying locusts is described attests to the power of the experience. Consider the recollections of Milando Pratt, a Mormon farmer-turned-railroad-grader:

Such a mass of decay seems implausible, but this was by no means the first or only such account of locusts amassed along the lakeshore. A few years earlier a “notable mathematician,” most likely Mormon Apostle Orson Pratt, estimated that 1.5 million bushels of locusts were deposited along the shores of the Great Salt Lake in piles six feet high and two miles long. The state entomologist from Missouri reported:

The reek of decomposing locusts had long been associated, however erroneously, with the onset of disease among humans. Paulus Orosius, a historian and Christian theologian, recounted a swarm that was blown from the coast of Africa and drowned in the sea in about 380 C.E. The locusts emitted a stench greater than that “produced by the carcasses of one hundred thousand men” and purportedly induced an epidemic among the populace. The connection between the odor of decay and the onset of disease is sensible, given that piles of dead bodies can surely be the result of epidemics and corpses are not particularly healthy to have lying around. At the time that locusts were invading homesteads in America, a French doctor was making the discovery that microscopic organisms were the cause of malaria, rather than “bad air” (
mal aria
in Italian), for which the disease had been named. And so, there was a deep-seated evolutionary and experiential basis for nineteenth-century pioneers, like fourth-century observers, to link foul odor to illness.

The raw sensations that the locust swarms induced among the settlers evoked a feeling of being overwhelmed by a force beyond compare. They were awed by the voraciousness of the insects, the sheer capacity of a swarm to transform a farmstead into a wasteland before their eyes. Many of the journals and letters simply say that it would be futile to attempt to describe the rapacious power of the locusts. Some tried to capture the event by means of simile:

Others tried to quantify the intensity of invasions. After a swarm had departed, one Minnesota farmer went into his fields to see how many eggs had been left behind. Digging into the loose soil the poor fellow was flabbergasted to find that no matter where he dug the ground was packed with egg pods. Turning over a shovelful of soil and making a careful count, he found that there were 150 eggs per square inch. Perhaps he’d been an accountant before becoming a farmer because he determined, “At this rate there will be 940,896,000 eggs to the acre, or the nice little pile of 6,586,272,000 on seven acres of my farm.”

We might be tempted to discount this exercise in rural mathematics, except that twenty years earlier a similar calculation had been made during the locust invasions of Utah. Two of the settlers, Taylor Heninger and John Ivie of Sanpete County, made their estimates with painstaking precision, noting that “by actual count and careful average we found 118-28/54th eggs to the square inch of ground; making a total of 743,424,000 eggs to the acre, or a total of 2,973,696,000 to
the four acre piece.” Certainly not all of these eggs yielded locusts and not all of the hatchlings survived the course of development, but even if 1 in 100 reached adulthood their four-football-field-sized farm would have produced 30 million locusts—about the human population of the country at that time.

The settlers were perhaps as stunned by the indiscriminate gluttony of the locusts as by their rate of destruction. We expect grasshoppers and locusts to consume our gardens and fields, but when these insects begin to feed on fabric and flesh something seems demonically amiss. In Nebraska, a pioneer recounted that “At first some of the settlers made vain attempts to scare the pests from their fields, but this was usually rewarded by having the clothes literally eaten from off their limbs.” And a Missourian reported truly sinister feeding habits: “They do not refuse even dead animals, but have been seen feasting on dead bats and birds.”

From Utah came stories that the locusts devoured everything, “right down to window blinds and green paint.” The insects gnawed on decayed fence posts and wooden siding, but their gourmet delight was the wooden handles of tools. Shovels, rakes, and hoes were routinely covered in a bristling blanket of locusts. The traces of salts and amino acids that had soaked into the wood from the farmer’s sweat were delectable to the insects. Scraping loose the fine fibers of wood, the locusts slowly polished the handles as if they had been buffed by the finest sandpaper.

Although the settlers may have been astonished by the locusts’ voracity, they were appalled by the insects’ fierce cannibalism. By flailing at the locusts, the farmers unwittingly created a grisly buffet. The surviving insects greedily consumed the corpses of their brethren, with a dozen locusts descending on a carcass and jostling for position as they tore into the mangled body. Injured locusts were often eviscerated and dismembered while still alive. The locusts were driven not by a macabre lust but by a need for protein and fat—valuable sources of energy, essential nutrients for egg development, and substances that were in short supply on the prairies. Perhaps the settlers’ repulsion reflected a powerful subliminal association between the locusts’ gruesome propensities and the tales of human cannibalism on the frontier.
Seeing the insects gorge on their own kind may well have evoked images of their fellow pioneers stranded on mountain passes in the high Sierras or lost in desert crossings of the Great Basin and driven by hunger to the most depraved acts of desperation.