There was a final irony to the timing of his death. As if in some preternatural reckoning, a shifting of the scales of justice, the nemesis of Charles Ingalls’s life—Melanoplus spretus, the Rocky Mountain locust that in its trillions had devoured his crops and rendered him destitute—now abruptly and mysteriously went extinct.96 The last living specimen was collected in 1902, the year Charles died.
