The Rocky Mountain Locust ~ D. K. Deters

The 1870s were a brutal time for settlers. Rainfall was erratic, and an entire crop could wither in a single dry summer. Prairie fires could spread for miles, and high winds stripped topsoil from their farms. If that wasn’t enough, conflicts with native tribes, outlaws, and claim jumpers brought violence and tension. Diseases such as cholera, typhoid, smallpox, and diphtheria were prevalent and often fatal. Homesteaders lived in isolation, contributing to loneliness and mental strain.

However, it was the summer of 1874 that had farmers pulling up stakes and heading to other parts of the country. Over 12.5 trillion Rocky Mountain locusts swarmed the Great Plains, covering over 2,000,000 square miles. Areas included the Dakota Territory, Montana Territory, Wyoming Territory, Colorado Territory, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), and Texas.

The insects stripped the land bare in hours, devouring everything green, including wheat, corn, oats, barley, and gardens. Settlers reported the locusts ate everything, including fence rails, harness leather, laundry on clotheslines, and wooden tool handles.

With the grass gone, livestock had no feed, so homesteaders sold off their cattle and horses. To avoid starvation, many settlers abandon their claims. Wagon after wagon of families moved eastward. Kansas alone lost approximately one-third of its population, although history shows this number was short-lived.

The Settlers’ West by Martin F. Schmitt and Dee Brown, “Homesteaders who refused to quit…were faced with a hard winter. Many had no money, no credit, no food; some had no fuel or clothing. For the first time in the nation’s history, the federal government offered relief to farmers. The Secretary of War issued a ‘grasshopper appropriation’ for the purchase of food and clothing to be ‘divided among the naked.’ Those funds didn’t last long.

When the locust returned in 1875, the numbers had declined, but it was estimated that one swarm was 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide. It consumed everything for about 198,000 square miles.

From the Homestead National Historical Park, “In 1877 the Nebraska Legislature passed the Grasshopper Act, officially declaring the swarms of locusts a ‘public enemy’. The Act required all males between the ages of 16-60, when called upon, to perform two days of service fighting the swarms. If after two days their service was still needed, they could be forced to continue fighting swarms for up to ten days. If a person refused to perform the service when called upon, they were subject to a $10 penalty!”

The Settlers’ West explains, “Minnesota established a bounty of fifty cents a bushel on the destructive insects. Happy farmers fastened boxes on their reaper platforms and drove around their fields until the boxes were full. One farmer who had an abundance of the insects chased his neighbors with a pitchfork when he discovered them ‘poaching grasshoppers’ on his land.”

Other states also made bounty offers and settlers attempted to destroy the locust by several methods. Here’s a photo of a “hopper dozer” in action. It shows a horse-drawn device dragging a plate coated in coal tar across flat fields, used to trap locusts during the 1870s plagues.

Between 1873 and 1877, the locusts caused $200 million in crop damage. “In one year, … the weight of all the bugs in the swarms was estimated to be more than 27 million tons.”

By the 1880s, the farmers had recovered from the locust infestation. While the Rocky Mountain locust is extinct today, scientists suggest many factors may have contributed to its eradication. Some say habitat-altering plants, insect-eating birds, and farming itself destroyed the locust egg masses. The last sighting of a living specimen came in southern Canada in 1902.

 

Resources:

The Settlers’ West by Martin F. Schmitt and Dee Brown

The 1874 Rocky Mountain Locust Plague That Blotted Out the Sun by Lou Bodenhemier

1874: The Year of the Locust by Chuck Lyons

Grasshopper Plague of the Great Plains by Kathy Alexander

Homestead National Historical Park

Wikipedia