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

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.