Huge swarm of locusts....

[Bigmack]

.... no.... not the Repubs - who are worse - but these guys must have really screwed up the Plains on this day in 1875.

Swarm of locusts
Interesting article from The Writer’s Almanac

It was on this day in 1875 that the largest recorded swarm of locusts in American history descended upon the Great Plains. An estimated 3.5 trillion locusts made up the swarm. It was about 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide, ranging from Canada down to Texas.
Swarms would occur once every seven to 12 years, emerging from river valleys in the Rocky Mountains and sweeping east across much of the country. The size of the swarms tended to grow when there was less rain, and in 1873, the American West began to go through one of its driest periods on record.
The land was still relatively dry on this day in 1875 when farmers just east of the Rocky Mountains began to see a cloud approaching from the west. Some farmers noticed the distinctive color of the cloud, glinting around the edges where the locust wings caught the light of the sun.
People there that day said that the locusts descended like a driving snow in winter, covering everything in their path. Some people described the sound of the swarm landing as like thunder or a train. The locusts blanketed the ground, nearly a foot deep. Trees bent over with the weight of the insects, and large tree limbs broke off under the pressure.
They ate nearly every living piece of vegetation in their path, as well as harnesses on horses, the bark of trees, curtains, and clothing hung on laundry lines. They gnawed on fence posts and railings, and they especially loved the handles of farm tools, which were left behind polished, as if by fine sandpaper. Some farmers tried to scare away the locusts by running into the swarm, and they had their clothes eaten right off their bodies.
In the wake of the swarm, settlers on half a million square miles of the West faced starvation. Similar locust swarms occurred in the following years, and farmers became desperate. But by the mid-1880s, the rains had returned, and the swarms died down. Most scientists predicted that the locusts would return with the next drought. Mysteriously, they did not. Within a few decades they were believed to be extinct.

https://dwbox.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/swarm-of-locusts/

[groovedaddy]

1. Were plains tribes of Native americans familiar with this phenomenon? What happened to grazing

animals, i.e. bison?

[xchrom]

4. the plains people probably just set the plains on fire.

they did on a regular basis any way.

[MilesColtrane]

2. "Within a few decades they were believed to be extinct."

Naah...

Chuck just lost interest in the whole plague thing and started getting into the NRA.

[Arkansas Granny]

3. I'll never forget reading about this in Laura Ingalls Wilder's book "On The

Banks of Plum Creek" when I was a little girl. She referred to them as grasshoppers, but it was the same swarm.

[EFerrari]

6. Oops. You beat me! I was trying to see if I could find the year

of the swarm she writes about. In real life, her parents had to go work on other farms because that swarm wiped them out and left them holding a lot of debt.

[EFerrari]

5. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about Rocky Mountain locusts.

She tells about one swarm that ate their whole crop, laid eggs and how the eggs hatched and took another crop before they left the next year(On the Banks of Plum Creek).

[eppur_se_muova]

7. A fascinating book on the extinction ...

Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)

"Jeffrey A. Lockwood's Locust is aimed at the general reader with an interest in science and natural history, and it tells the story of a mystery. Who killed the Rocky Mountain locust?...Lockwood teases the reader with the possibility that Melanoplus spretus may still persist in Yellowstone National Park. An identifiable specimen would set the seal on this remarkable piece of acridological detective work." A. W. Harvey, The Times Literary Supplement (read the entire Times Literary Supplement review)

http://www.powells.com/review/2005_01_16.html

Throughout the nineteenth century, swarms of locusts regularly swept across the continent, turning noon into dusk, demolishing farm communities, and bringing trains to a halt as the crushed bodies of insects greased the rails. In 1876, the U.S. Congress declared the locust "the single greatest impediment to the settlement of the country."

In its own way, as momentous as the extinction of the passenger pigeon, and the near-extinction of the buffalo and prairie dog.