The Grasshopper Plagues of 1874–77 — the Year the Sky Ate the Crops

Summary

In the summers of the mid-1870s the homesteaders of the Plains watched the worst disaster of the insect world descend on their fields. Vast swarms of the Rocky Mountain locust — a now-extinct migratory grasshopper that bred in the river valleys of the northern Rockies — boiled up out of the west and settled on the grain belt from Minnesota and Dakota Territory south through Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and into Texas. Witnesses described a glittering haze that dimmed the sun, a sound like hail or a distant train, and a living drift that piled inches deep on the ground and broke the limbs of trees with its weight.

What the locusts did to a homestead in an afternoon was total. They ate the standing wheat and corn to the dirt, then the garden, then the leaves off the trees, and when the leaves were gone they gnawed at fence rails, harness leather, the wool off live sheep, the handles of tools, the clothing on the line, and the curtains in the windows. A family that woke to a green, ripening claim could be staring at bare brown ground by nightfall, a year's labor and the whole winter's food simply gone. For families already living on the margin of a homestead claim, with no reserves and a mortgage to meet, it was ruin in a single day.

The scale of it strained belief, and one observation became famous. In 1875 a Nebraska physician and amateur scientist, Albert L. Child, used telegraph reports and the swarm's own speed and dimensions to estimate that a single passing swarm — later dubbed 'Albert's Swarm' — covered on the order of 198,000 square miles, an area larger than California. By that reckoning it may have contained trillions of insects and ranks as perhaps the largest congregation of animals ever recorded. Whether or not the arithmetic was exact, no one who lived through it doubted that the swarms were beyond any human scale.

The plague drove thousands of families off their claims, forced reluctant state and federal governments into emergency relief, and seared itself into Plains memory — Laura Ingalls Wilder would recreate the 1870s grasshopper years in 'On the Banks of Plum Creek.' And then came the strangest turn of all: within a generation the Rocky Mountain locust, an insect that had darkened the sky over a third of a continent, vanished entirely. The last living specimens were collected around the turn of the century — the last confirmed in 1902 — and the species is now considered extinct, the only major agricultural pest known to have gone extinct, and a mystery that scientists are still working to fully explain.

Timeline

The Claim

The Rocky Mountain locust, Melanoplus spretus, was native to the West and, in its quiet years, lived inconspicuously in the river valleys and foothills of the northern Rocky Mountains. Under the right conditions of drought and warmth it underwent a transformation common to locusts: ordinarily solitary grasshoppers crowded together, changed color and form, and entered a 'gregarious' migratory phase, taking to the air in swarms that rode the prevailing winds out of the mountains and down onto the Plains. The grain country settling rapidly under the Homestead Act lay directly in the path those winds carried the swarms.

The timing could hardly have been worse. The early-to-mid 1870s drew a flood of homesteaders onto the central Plains just as a run of dry years primed the locust's breeding grounds for a population explosion. Outbreaks struck as early as 1873, but it was the great invasion of 1874 — sometimes called 'the year of the grasshopper' — that became legendary, hammering Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Dakota Territory, Iowa, Missouri, and beyond. The swarms did not strike once and leave; they returned summer after summer through 1875, 1876, and 1877, and laid eggs in the soil so that even a clear year could give way to a fresh hatch of wingless 'hoppers' chewing their way across the fields the following spring. For a family that had bet everything on a homestead claim, there was no insuring against it and almost no defending against it.

Building In

The arrival of a swarm was a thing witnesses never forgot. People described first a silvery shimmer high in the sky, like snow or a coming storm, then a darkening of the sun, then a roaring, ticking sound as the insects came down — and then the locusts themselves, raining out of the air until they lay heaped on the ground and clinging in a writhing mass to every surface. They settled so thickly that railroad trains stalled on tracks made slick with crushed bodies, and the stench of the dead and the damage was overpowering. A green field of wheat or corn could be reduced to bare stubble and naked dirt within hours.

Desperate families tried everything. They dragged sheets and tin across the fields, beat the insects with boards, set fires and smudge pots, dug trenches to trap the marching hatchlings, and drove them into 'hopperdozers' — pans of coal tar or kerosene mounted on runners and pushed across the ground to catch and kill them by the bushel. None of it could stop a swarm that numbered in the trillions. When the crops were gone the locusts kept eating: they stripped the bark and buds from fruit trees, devoured garden vegetables to the root, ate the wool from the backs of living sheep, chewed leather harness and the wooden handles of hoes and pitchforks, and were reported to eat clothing off the line and even the dirt-darkened sweat from tool handles. Settlers' letters and county histories from Nebraska, Kansas, and Minnesota return again and again to the same stunned details. Laura Ingalls Wilder, who lived through the grasshopper years as a child near Walnut Grove, Minnesota, later rendered them in 'On the Banks of Plum Creek' — the cloud over the sun, the family's wheat crop eaten, her father walking east to find work after the harvest failed.

Proving Up

The plague left destitution behind it. Families who lost their entire crop and their stored food faced a Plains winter with nothing, and many had no reserves because they had only recently arrived to prove up. Thousands abandoned their claims and went back east or moved on; those who stayed often did so only because charity and government relief reached them in time. The disaster forced governments that prized self-reliance into reluctant action: Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, and other states organized relief and bounties, the U.S. Army distributed surplus clothing, blankets, and rations to suffering settlers through frontier posts, and Congress eventually appropriated emergency aid. Nebraska went so far as to pass a law requiring able-bodied men to turn out and fight the hoppers, and several states paid bounties by the bushel for collected insects.

The outbreak also produced one of the era's most consequential scientific responses. The destruction was so severe that the federal government created the United States Entomological Commission in 1877, with the pioneering entomologist Charles Valentine Riley among its leaders, to study the locust and recommend control measures. Riley's work mapped the insect's 'permanent zone' of breeding in the Rockies, its wider 'temporary' and 'subpermanent' invasion ranges, and the life cycle that drove the swarms — early, careful applied entomology born directly out of homestead catastrophe.

And then the Rocky Mountain locust did something no one predicted: it disappeared. The great swarms subsided after the late 1870s, smaller outbreaks flickered into the 1880s, and by the turn of the century the species had become so rare that scientists struggled to find any at all. The last living specimens were collected around 1902 (the final recorded specimen in Colorado a couple of years later), and Melanoplus spretus is now classed as extinct. The leading modern explanation, advanced by the entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood, is grimly ironic: the locust's survival between outbreaks depended on a relatively small permanent breeding habitat in the fertile river valleys of the Rocky Mountains — and those same valleys were exactly the bottomland that settlers plowed, irrigated, and grazed with cattle in the late nineteenth century. In breaking the mountain valleys for farms, the argument goes, the settlers inadvertently destroyed the cradle of the insect that had nearly destroyed them.

What Decided It

What’s There Now

The grasshopper plagues passed into Plains folklore as a benchmark of disaster — the years measured against ever after, the way a later generation would measure things against the Dust Bowl. County histories across Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, and Iowa devote pages to 1874, and the relief efforts of the mid-1870s marked an early, grudging step toward the idea that the federal government had a role in helping farmers through catastrophes beyond their control. Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'On the Banks of Plum Creek' kept the memory of the locust years alive for millions of later readers who had never seen a swarm.

The most haunting legacy is the insect's disappearance. The Rocky Mountain locust is the rare case of a species that was once almost unimaginably abundant — perhaps the most numerous large organism on the continent during a swarm — and yet went completely extinct within a few decades, undone, most likely, by the very plowing of the West that its swarms had once threatened to halt. Specimens are now so scarce that researchers have hunted for frozen, centuries-old locusts preserved in Rocky Mountain glaciers, in places like Montana's aptly named Grasshopper Glacier, to study the animal that no longer exists.

For this site, the locust years stand as a reminder that the homestead gamble was wagered against forces no amount of grit could master. A family could choose good land, build a sound soddy, break the sod, and plant a fine crop — and still lose everything in an afternoon to a cloud that ate the sky. That such a cloud could itself be wiped from the earth by the same wave of settlement only deepens the strangeness of the story.

Lessons

References

• Rocky Mountain locust Wikipedia
• Albert's Swarm Wikipedia
• Grasshopper Plagues Kansas Historical Society
• On the Banks of Plum Creek Wikipedia
• The Grasshopper Plague of 1874 History Nebraska (Nebraska State Historical Society)