Grasshopper Weather
by Sandra Merville Hart
I recently read On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her family moved to Minnesota when she was seven and first stayed in a sod house built into the creek bank. The details of everyday life in the 1870s fascinated me.
The Ingalls family was very poor. They had moved into the sod house too late to plant crops so finances were tight. Laura’s pa put all his hopes on the next year’s crop, which promised to be a bountiful one. She dreamed of having all the things they’d done without and eating candy daily.
There was no snow by Thanksgiving of that year. Days were still warm though the nights were chilly. No rain. No more frost. Pa learned that the old-timers called it “grasshopper weather” but no one explained what that meant.
An unusually dry, hot, sunny summer followed. Plump wheat promised a beautiful crop. Pa planned to pay for the farmhouse he’d borrowed the money to build with the bountiful wheat.
Sunshine dimmed at lunchtime, a couple of days before the planned harvest. A coming storm blackened the sky. No, not a normal storm. What was it?
Glittering thin snowflake-like matter blocked the sun. No wind. Then brown grasshoppers dropped to the ground, falling on Laura’s head and arms like hail. When she beat at them, they clung to her skin.
Grasshoppers by the millions ate the wheat crop, prairie grasses, leaves, cornstalks, and every vegetable in the garden. Though all windows were shut, brown grasshoppers came inside the house each time someone entered it.
Laura’s family endured a nightmare.
It’s estimated that one trillion Rocky Mountain locusts descended on the Great Plains in 1874, covering an area around 2,000,000 square miles and causing much devastation.
When large groups of grasshoppers swarm, they’re called locusts. In one day, these swarms can fly as far as 100 miles.
Locusts returned in smaller numbers some years but became extinct early in the 1900s. The arrival of farmers who plowed the prairie grass to grow crops changed the habitat, which many experts believe caused the extinction.
Sources
“Grasshoppers in On the Banks of Plum Creek.” Study.com, 12 April 2017, study.com/academy/lesson/grasshoppers....
Nuwer, Rachel. “When Weather Changes, Grasshopper Turns Locust,” The New York Times, 2021/09/29 https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/science/when-weather-changes-grasshopper-turns-locust.html.
Wheeler, John. “Weather Talk: Grasshopper plagues are gone with the wind,” AGWEEK, 2021/09/29 https://www.agweek.com/news/weather/4324688-weather-talk-grasshopper-plagues-are-gone-wind.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. On the Banks of Plum Creek, HarperTrophy, 1971.
