Day and night, above the roar of the train, our ears
were kept busy with the incessant chirp of grasshoppers—a noise like the winding
up of countless clocks and watches, which began after a while to seem proper to
that land.
— (Robert Louis Stevenson, Across
the Plains, 1879.)
Yes, Theo had finally entered the
gates of Dakota, but this cross seemed to block his way and test his resolve to
emigrate west. He couldn’t have failed to hear the story of the grasshoppers.
It was a chilling tale of Biblical proportions. . . .
***
It was a peaceful Sunday in early
July of 1874 in the quiet town of Jefferson as people emerged from churches
with the usual pleasantries. For three years crops had been good and this
summer another bountiful harvest was almost certain. The corn was ready and so
was the grain.
As they stood in
front of their churches or visited on sidewalks, someone looked into the northern
sky and saw a dense black cloud. “Just a cloud,” some said. Suddenly a wind
sprang up. Then an old farmer recognized the oncoming mass.
“Grasshoppers!”
he shouted, “Run for your lives!”
People hurried
to their homes, bolted doors, closed windows, and prepared for the most
devastating siege known in modern history.
“I remember
watching my father go out to our forty-acre field of wheat,” said Mrs. Alfonse
La Breche. “Then the sky became dark; it blotted out the sun. Hoppers began
falling on the roof and against the windows.
“It sounded like
a continuous hailstorm. In one hour the field had been stripped, the heads cut
off and the bare stems left standing.
“In the garden
everything was taken. Onions and turnips were eaten out of the ground. The
hoppers started at the top and worked down; they ate the greens, the bulb, even
the roots and left a neat hole in the ground.”
Hoppers covered
the earth, buildings, grain, everything. They were six inches deep on the
ground. They landed on trees in such numbers they broke branches. All attempts
to protect crops failed. The sound of their eating was like a herd of cattle
chewing corn.
“We couldn’t
keep them out of the house,” said Mrs. Margaret Connors. “They got inside and
ate the lace curtains. My brother left a jacket on the fence post, and when he
went to get it there was nothing left but the buttons. They would eat the shoes
right off your feet.”
Said Mrs. Mary
Beaubien: “Our cattle were driven insane by the gnawing of the insects. They
tried to run away, but the hoppers were everywhere. My father decided to go
after them. He tied ropes around the bottom of his pants and around his sleeves
at the wrists. When he came back about an hour later, his clothes were in
shreds, almost eaten away. He could not find the animals.
“When there was
nothing left for them to eat the hoppers became cannibals and ate each other.
They remained about three days then suddenly rose with the wind and were gone.”
The people of
Jefferson came out of their homes and surveyed their lands. Destruction was
complete. In just three short days, they had been plunged from a good and
bountiful life to the prospect of starvation when winter came. Jefferson was
not alone in the maelstrom. The invasion extended from North Dakota to Texas
and from the Rockies almost to the Mississippi River.
The whole
countryside stank with rotting hoppers for more than a week. Many raked them
into piles, sprayed them with kerosene, and set them on fire. Some of the
farmers pulled up stakes, piled their meager belongings on wagons, and went
back to where they came from.
Those who
remained, although now in poverty, were a hardy breed and vowed to try again.
They stayed for what was later called the winter of corn, flapjacks, and
sorghum. The next year (1875) was not much better. Again the hoppers came, but
not in such great numbers. Somehow, the settlers managed to survive.
By 1876, the
story goes, grasshoppers had nearly eaten out this part of Dakota Territory.
Great clouds of them had come—so many the sky turned black; so many that they
even stopped the trains. Some homesteaders sold or gave away their claims and
went back East. Others left for the newly discovered gold fields in South
Dakota’s Black Hills.
The hoppers
devoured every green thing that grew, leaving devastation as complete as though
fire had passed over the fields. They flew in by the billions and sounded like
a rushing storm. There was a deep hush when they dropped to the earth and began
to eat the crops. Turkeys and chickens feasted on them and pigs and even dogs
learned to eat them. But the grasshoppers ate everything—the corn, the gardens,
even the bark off fruit trees. Pioneers threw carpets and rugs on their
favorite plants but they ate them, too.
You would think
that after they had eaten everything they would fly away. Not at all! They
liked the pioneers so well they left their children with them. The mother
grasshoppers pierced the earth with holes and filled them with eggs. Each one
laid about one hundred eggs. Then they died and the ground was covered with
their dead bodies.
It was around
this time that the territory declared a day of fasting and prayer. On one muddy
Sunday in May 1876, the townspeople and farmers, defeated and despondent,
gathered on the grounds of St. Peter’s church in Jefferson and appealed to
Father Boucher, South Dakota’s first resident priest, for help. The priest was
old and “the snows of many winters had fallen in his white hair.” There was
calmness in his voice.
“Have faith,”
said Father Boucher. “Do as I ask and the plague will end.”
The desperate
farmers said they would do anything he asked them to.
So Father
Boucher organized a pilgrimage. Three big wooden crosses were erected that
roughly bounded the parish. One was set in the church grounds and two others
east and north of town. They called them “grasshopper crosses;” each with a
circle in the middle like a Celtic cross. Religious denominations from far and
wide came to have a place in the pilgrimage.
Father Boucher,
singing litanies, led a mile-long pilgrimage of Catholics and Protestants out
into the countryside. They prayed and marched around the whole parish for
eleven miles seeking God’s intervention. Women and children rode in wagons; men
walked; it was muddy, following a rain. They went first to the cross set in
Nelson Montagne’s field, two miles west of Jefferson. Father Boucher conducted
a solemn ceremony and eloquently implored divine aid.
So serious and
tense was the service that stouthearted muscular men who wrested a living from
the earth with their hands—discouraged by gigantic forces with which they could
not cope—fell to their knees in the mud of the road and prayed with a fervency
they had never felt before.
Then the
procession went three miles north to the cross in Moran’s field where another
service was held, and back to Jefferson for a final service at the church. The
pilgrimage lasted all day.
Joseph Montagne,
nephew of one of the founding pioneers, later said: “Hoppers flew over many
times after that, but they never landed here again. I have seen them swarm on
poles and fence posts without touching the grain only a few feet from them.”
***
So Theo had been warned. He could
turn around, get on the next train back to Wells Bridge, and forget the whole
thing. Or maybe, past the fiery specter of grasshoppers, there was indeed a
bright new future. Perhaps God would continue to intervene and the grasshopper
threat would stay away.
The good news was that the
hoppers tended to drive down the cost of land. They even threatened to keep the
coming railroad out of Sioux Falls:
. . . "if the ‘hoppers don’t come we can afford to haul our grain to where the railroad is now [still miles from Sioux Falls], and if they do come we won’t have any grain to haul, and then we don’t want to pay an extra [railroad] tax.” —(upset farmers, Dakota Pantagraph, Sioux Falls, October 8, 1877.)
From my nonfiction book:
Whither thou Goest
ISBN 0-595-17505-8 (copyright 2001)
Chapter 5:
Grasshoppers