Locust (5 page)

If the locusts’ consumption of their own dead and dying was not sufficiently unnerving, the account of General Alfred Sully, encamped between the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers in the summer of 1864, was absolutely chilling. A single locust or a single bird is hardly the basis for fear, but a feeding frenzy is horrifying—in history and in cinema. In an entomological version of Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds
, which scared the bejeezus out of moviegoers a century later, Sully matter-of-factly reported, “A soldier on his way here lay down to sleep on the prairie in the middle of the day—the troop had been marching all night. His comrades noticed him covered with grasshoppers and awakened him. His throat and wrists were bleeding from the bites of the insects.”

 

The fate of the soldier had he been left to the locusts can not be known, nor can the veracity of the story itself, as there were no similar accounts of locusts feeding on live humans. However, such accounts leave no doubt of the terrifying nature of these insects in the minds of the pioneers. The psychological trauma of the locusts—the capriciousness of their arrival, the magnitude of the swarms, and the voracity of their feeding—became embedded in the lives and language of the frontier.

The pioneers came to refer to a long, dry autumn at the end of a hot summer as “grasshopper weather,” most likely because these conditions favored the buildup of locusts. And drastically reduced costs of merchandise were not associated with our familiar disaster-laden label of “fire sale” but “grasshopper prices.” Not only were these insects converted into adjectives, but locusts were also metamorphosed into verbs. Mattie Oblinger, a Nebraskan whose family had been besieged by locusts, wrote to her relatives in the fall of 1876, “I suppose you would like to know if we have been grasshoppered again.”

For some, gallows humor might have provided a moment’s respite from the trauma of locust infestations. A standard joke emerged on the frontier.

The locusts worked their way into the lives and ultimately the literature of the pioneers. What modern Americans know of the locusts that decimated the settlers is gleaned from literary accounts of life on the frontier. One of the best recent examples is Larry Mc-Murtry’s Western saga
Lonesome Dove
, which includes a striking account of a locust swarm. The insects saturate the air with stunning swiftness:

But the ultimate account of a locust invasion is surely Laura Ingalls Wilder’s description in her fourth book of the
Little House on the Prairie
series,
On the Banks of Plum Creek
. After a bucolic set of chapters, the reader finds Laura’s father regaling the family with the fertility of the country, the abundance of their crop, and the rosiness of their future—and then the locusts arrive. The insects’ arrival is presaged by a strange foreboding:

Within moments, the eeriness gives way to terror as the locusts begin to descend on the family’s homestead:

The locusts are not only frightening and disgusting, they are devastating to the family’s farm. But perhaps their greatest damage in the mind of young Laura is to nature’s garden, the fruit trees along the creek from which the title of the book is taken:

In desperation, Pa leaves his family behind to search for work. His journey echoes our culture’s canonical story of a people wandering in the wilderness seeking the promised land. Laura learns from her mother’s reading of Scripture that locusts played a pivotal role in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs. And so the tale of the pioneers became interwoven with Western culture’s most deep and abiding literary account of locusts. Perhaps the Ingalls sensed that they were part of a great human migration—an American exodus—across the continent. But what they did not know while watching their farm disappear under a blanket of locusts that summer of 1875 was that no people on earth, not even a pharaoh, had ever witnessed a swarm of such immensity.

I
SAAC CLINE WILL FOREVER BE REMEMBERED FOR HIS tragic hubris. He was the chief meteorologist of Texas when Galveston was hit by the deadliest weather disaster in U.S. history. He had claimed that the city was immune to tropical cyclones, but the hurricane that struck on September 8, 1900, took the lives of more than 10,000 people. At that time, hurricanes were not being named, but this lethal tempest was called Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson in his gripping book by that title. What few people will ever recall about Isaac Cline is how he began his career in the U. S. Army Signal Corps (the predecessor of today’s National Weather Service). Cline’s first assignment did not involve monitoring hurricanes, tornadoes, or any other atmospheric events. Rather, he began by tracking the Rocky Mountain locust.

The Army Signal Corps was a logical birthplace for a weather service, as the corps had the capacity to collect and rapidly transmit information
regarding storms and their movements. For the first time, people could be warned of impending disaster and perhaps avoid the worst of the maelstrom. When General William B. Hazen wrote to colleges across the country to recruit graduates into the nascent weather service, Cline’s name was submitted by the president of Hiwassee College. After completing a demanding training program and passing a rigorous exam (only the sixteen passing with the highest scores were assigned to the field, and Cline scored sixteenth in his class), he was asked his preference for a duty station. Cline requested to be given an opportunity for research that would benefit humanity. Investigating the link between weather and the Rocky Mountain locust’s outbreaks and movements was deemed to be one of the most urgent missions of meteorology. As such, Cline was assigned to Little Rock, Arkansas, with orders to determine the relationship between weather patterns and locust swarms.

Unfortunately, Arkansas was at the eastern margin of the insect’s distribution, so Cline made little progress in this line of study. Instead, he found medicine most pertinent to his humanitarian interests. Cline earned his medical degree and was drawn into the nascent field of medical climatology, the study of how weather affects human health. He then became the officer-in-charge at the weather station in Abilene, Texas, and was then given the responsibility of organizing the Texas Section of the U.S. Weather Service and establishing the Galveston weather station. And so it was that his life collided with the deadliest storm in U.S. history—a story eerily reminiscent of another Signal Corps observer who was fated to witness a locust swarm of even greater force.

 

Like Isaac Cline, Albert Lyman Child was born in the East, earned a degree in medicine, and served in the Army Signal Corps. But unlike Isaac Cline, Albert Child was remembered by no one. Perhaps this is because there was nothing that Dr. Child could have done to avert the natural disaster that he meticulously recorded in his duties as a meteorological observer. Dr. Child made no claims that his community of Plattsmouth, Nebraska, was immune to the ravages of locusts. There
was no tone of arrogance in his report, only a sense of near disbelief in what he had witnessed.

Albert Child was a renaissance man on the frontier. After practicing medicine and serving as a school superintendent in Ohio, he moved to Cedar Creek in Cass County, Nebraska, to try his hand at farming. If Cline had been a meteorologist who wanted to be a doctor, then it seems that Child was a doctor who wanted to be a meteorologist. As soon as he arrived in Nebraska in 1857, Dr. Child began keeping weather records. In 1861, he began providing reports to the Smithsonian Institution, and his work was transferred to the U.S. Signal Corps when it took over as the country’s weather service in 1873. By then, he’d been elected county judge and moved to Plattsmouth, but his passion for meteorology was unabated. This is how Albert Child came to be the right man, in the right place, at the right time to provide a definitive report of the most immense swarm of locusts in recorded history. He began his account with the objective tone of a trained and experienced observer:

To determine the height of the swarm, Dr. Child used a rather clever approach. He focused his telescope on various objects of similar size to a locust placed at known distances across the rolling hills. Then, he aimed the instrument into the sky, and if the locusts were in focus he’d conclude that the swarm must be at least as high as the horizontal focal distance that he’d just determined. The method only yielded coarse approximations, so Dr. Child was cautious in his estimates. But in his accounts of these observations, his awe at the scale of the phenomenon began to sneak into the technical report:

Like any good scientist, Dr. Child took his data and transformed the raw numbers into a complete picture of what he had witnessed. The mathematics were simple, but the results were nearly beyond imagination. When Dr. Child presented his straightforward calculations of the aggregate size of the locust swarm that was passing over Nebraska, he was incredulous of his own findings: