The phrases sound biblical: “Plagues of locusts;” “pestilential destroyers;” the “greatest of all terrors.” In reality, these quotes come from Texas, which was on the southern edge of the enormous swarms of locusts that ate their way through the middle of North America during the nineteenth century. Another swarm in the 1930s in the Midwest is just barely within living memory. Yet we don’t hear much about locusts in the U.S. anymore. So what happened to the locusts of history?
A locust is a grasshopper that goes communal. Both the Rocky Mountain locust (Melanoplus spretus), which spread in the nineteenth century, and the High Plains locust (Dissosteira longipennis), which swept through the early 1930s, come in two forms. Most of the time, they live solitary lives. But when their populations get dense enough, they produce eggs that turn into a gregarious generation. This new generation swarms away from the place of their birth to eat and breed further afield. In turn, the eggs of this generation produce more swarming forms, so they hopscotch across great swaths of landscape year to year.
The Rocky Mountain locust swarms have the distinction of being described as the “greatest concentration of animals” ever by the Guiness Book of World Records. The 1874 swarm was estimated to be twice the square mileage of the state of Colorado. Both Laura Ingalls Wilder’s On the Banks of Plum Creek and O.E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth vividly portray locust swarms. The 1977 film Days of Heaven dramatizes a harrowing battle with them.
These locusts numbered in the trillions, obscured the sun as they flew, and piled up on the ground inches deep. They ate everything…and when they finished that, they started chewing through the cloth used in desperate attempts to cover gardens. A dark joke of the day had it that the locusts would eat whole farms until nothing was left but the mortgage.