Grasshopper Plagues (1860-1879)

 

Catching grasshoppers with nets. (From Frank Leslie's
Illustrated Newspaper. September 1, 1888)

The 1860s to the 1870s were known as the Grasshopper Years. The “green hellions” came out of the Rocky Mountains and ate their way across the prairies, devouring anything and everything in their path. Many early settlers thought the hoppers did more damage than all the marauding Indians in the west.

The grasshoppers also went by the name of the “hopper,” the “red-legged locust,” the “Mormon Locust,” “G. Hopper” (sometimes, “Mr. G. Hopper”), and the “hateful grasshopper.”

They were often described as “an immense snowstorm” or like a “dust tornado, riding upon the wind like an ominous hailstorm.” Often, there were so many of them they blocked out the sunlight.

 

Grasshoppers could eat up a field of corn quicker than a herd of hungry buffalo. The hoppers weren’t fussy. “They eat anything—dead plants, dry wood, the wool off of sheep’s backs, dead animals, and when one of their own becomes disabled, they fall upon him and eat him up before he has time to die.”

 

If the hordes of hungry grasshoppers had been a one-time thing, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but like a bad penny, the hoppers returned with the spring rains. When they were done eating, they laid their eggs and continued to do so until the ground froze up or they died. 

 

After their eggs hatched in the early spring, the feeding frenzy began anew. Often it was worse because the young hoppers were voracious eaters. They ate everything in sight. Then, when the food was gone, they migrated by the millions consuming everything in their path. 

 

Grasshopper invasions were seen in Minnesota and the Dakotas as early as 1818. Tradition says the hoppers first came to Iowa in 1833. The Indians said the grasshoppers were so thick then they ate all the grass and left nothing for their horses. In 1850 the hoppers ate much of the Mormon corn crops around Council Bluffs. The grasshoppers infested Northern Iowa around Woodbury, Harrison, and Pottawattamie Counties in 1866 and 1867. They disappeared for a short period, then returned in the 1870s.

The hoppers tore into the area around Sioux City in 1866. They ate all the crops in sight. Then, their babies rose up like fiends from hell the next year and ate their way across Pottawattamie, Harrison, and Dickinson Counties. 

 

The worst years in Iowa were 1873, 1874, and 1876. After 1879, the grasshopper threat ended in most parts of the state. 

 

Looking at them, you would never guess grasshoppers could bring agriculture to a standstill across the Midwest. The hoppers that flew into Chicago were less than a quarter of an inch long. Yet, in no time, they ate all the flowers in the gardens and the fruit from street vendors’ stands, and after the novelty wore off, they forced private citizens to dodge for cover and get off the street. The hoppers were like rain, or hail, pummeling people’s faces and bodies.

 

Migratory Grasshoppers, also known as the Rocky Mountain Locust, are usually an inch to an inch and a quarter long but have been known to reach two inches. Most of the grasshoppers that descended on Iowa and Illinois ranged from a sixteenth of an inch to two inches in length. 

The upper wings are slightly larger than the body, and when seen in bright sunlight, they look like a giant snowflake which was why many early residents described their coming like a summer snowstorm.

 

The grasshoppers fly at the height of about ninety to three hundred feet off the ground. “They rattle against the window panes like hail and beat against the faces of anybody who may be out at the time.” If you saw them coming, the best advice was to close your eyes and mouth and run for shelter. The movement of their wings makes a “whizzing roar, plainly heard as they fly overhead.” One contemporary account said the hoppers were so thick that they took three days to pass over Omaha.

 

The hoppers fly with the wind to their back, traveling “without intelligent direction, dropping after a flight of a few hours.” They travel about one hundred and fifty miles annually and are expected to keep up that pace on their trek across the continent. They affect each area for two seasons. The first when they arrive and the second when their eggs hatch the following spring. Then, they catch a favorable wind and move on.

 

The Ottumwa Courier said the grasshoppers “seem to stop about one day, and they clear everything before them. One cornfield of about two hundred acres was cleaned completely, leaving nothing but stubs of stalks about two inches high.”

 

The grasshoppers destroyed Iowa and Illinois crops for five years from 1873—1877. They raised a ruckus in Cherokee County, Iowa, between 1876 and 1879. “The number was beyond man’s power to even estimate.” They arrived in late July 1876 and ate much of the grains in the fields. Before they left in mid-August, they deposited their eggs. Then, with the first northwest winds, they were gone.

 

The hoppers came back in force in the spring of 1877. “Fields which were passed through and settled on for a day were cut bare and looked as though a thousand sheep had been grazing on the field for many weeks.” Fields ready for reaping one morning were destroyed by nightfall.

 

In Boone County, west of the Des Moines River, the grasshoppers nearly wiped out the wheat crop, and on many farms, the corn crop was destroyed entirely. 

 

The grasshoppers were so thick in 1878 that the sky went dark. The chickens in O’Brien and Osceola Counties thought it was night and ran off to their roost.

 

There were so many grasshoppers along the railroad tracks “that when pressed down by moving trains, they were crushed to a jelly-like mass.” The effect was the same as pouring “oil or soft soap” on the tracks. It caused the wheels to spin and spin, but they could not get any traction.

 

One thing farmers could do to kill off the hoppers was burn the prairie grass, but if they did, the proper timing was everything. If they burned the grass in the fall, the hoppers would lay their eggs afterward. Then, when the babies hatched in the spring, it would be “an invitation to the young hopper-grass to help himself to another spring crop of grain.”

 

Spring was the correct time to fire the prairie. That was the only sure way to kill the grasshoppers and their eggs. But unfortunately, once the babies hatched, it was too late to stop them.

 

It was a good effort, but as one paper said, “where one was killed, a hundred came to the funeral.”

 

In 1874 one farmer rode over to his neighbors to brag about his corn crop. It was five inches tall and growing like a weed. When he returned home, the hoppers had eaten two-thirds of his crop. The following day, his entire crop was gone.

 

One correspondent said the grasshoppers came in waves. The scouting parties ate the prairie grass while the farmers planted their corn. Then, when the farmer least expected it, they attacked his cornfield, stripping it bare.

 

 In mid-May of 1875, the hoppers feasted their way across the Midwest. Farmers in Southwestern Missouri were “panic-stricken.” Everything green had been eaten or would be eaten soon. Cattle and horses went hungry. Many people fared no better. The Chicago Daily Tribune went so far as to suggest that “large sections of Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska are declared to be doomed.”

 

The paper was gearing up for a Chicago visit from their green friends. Conditions were favorable. The cold rains had stopped, and the warm sun had begun to shine. “It is to be expected that the millions of eggs in the ground will send forth myriad swarms, and the invasion of the grasshoppers will begin.”

 

Plants were the hopper’s food of choice, but that didn’t sell enough papers. The Chicago Daily Tribune suggested if the hoppers eat through all the crops, they may turn to people. Swarms of grasshoppers nipping away at an adult could do serious damage, but “with little children and babies, their attacks might even be fatal.” The hoppers might eat away the soft portions of the face. It was possible all that might be found would be the “clean-picked bones and perforated wrappings.”

 

If movies existed back then, they had the makings of a blockbuster horror film. 

 

Many parts of Iowa were still troubled by the hoppers in 1877. In late May, the farmers around Estherville killed millions of the tiny pests when they burned the prairies, but it didn’t make any difference. “The grasshoppers are now working on the corn, and the prospects of a crop are very slim.”

 

Things seemed better near Orange City. The people there were killing the hoppers with kerosene and coal tar. If it worked, the farmers expected a good crop. Kossuth County seemed to be winning the battle. Fire and the “hopperdozer” were keeping the grasshoppers at bay.

 

The farmers did what they could to eradicate the hoppers, but most methods they devised failed miserably. One method that did show promise involved attaching a huge sheet iron scraper twenty feet long to a team of horses and dragging it through the fields. At the bottom, they attached a trough filled with kerosene. At first, the hoppers enjoyed the oil bath. But after a while, many of them curled up and died. Those that survived got dragged to the edge of the field and burned. A farmer near Des Moines reported scooping up twenty bushels of hoppers in fifteen minutes using this method.

Governor Hardin of Missouri formulated his own plan. He designated June 3rd, 1875, as a day of prayer. He said, “Providence is the only thing that can save us from the grasshoppers.” The Chicago Daily Tribune was unsure what to think. The plan wasn’t “practical.” They did not believe prayer alone could “save us.”

 

An unnamed man in Kansas tried baking the hoppers and frying them in butter. The result was delicious and tasted better than oysters. In Warrensburg, Missouri, gourmet chefs made soup “bedewed with locust legs” that tasted much like chicken soup. They cooked cakes consisting “mainly of hoppers which had been mixed into the dough.” And, finally, they ate “roasted locusts, plain.” Another grasshopper aficionado said, “they make a soup of such excellent flavor that with a little pepper and salt, it is hard to distinguish it from beef broth.”

 

If you can’t beat them, eat them. That was one way to stop the grasshopper plague. It was one way to take revenge on the hoppers but not the preferred method.

 

In 1876 the Governors of the affected states met to discuss how they could protect their states from the grasshopper plague. They debated offering a bounty for the eggs, starting prairie fires to kill the young hoppers, and changing the game laws to prevent hunting birds that fed on the insects. 

 

The last proposal would have been the best. “The game birds are the greatest enemies of the hoppers. A prairie chicken will devour in the year enough hoppers to ruin a hundred acres of vegetation. Toads and reptiles are also a terrible menace to the hopper. Hence, if the people would stop their killing of the birds with which the Eastern markets are glutted and stop the senseless war on toads and reptiles, they would have less occasion to call for aid.” Hogs, dogs, and cats are other natural enemies of the hoppers. By changing the balance of nature, Midwesterners may have brought the crisis on themselves.

 

In the end, the most “effective remedy for locust invasions was for the settlers to turn more generally to stock raising, instead of staking their entire hope upon crops of grain” The hoppers didn’t know it, but they forced a change for the better in agriculture in the Midwest. They helped to create modern dairy farms and hog and cattle operations.

 

Most of these ideas to eliminate the hoppers came too late to help the farmers in Iowa and Illinois. As a result, the Grasshopper Plagues ended on their own after 1879.