Never has that been more true than in 1873, when farmers in the western United States and across the plains of Canada experienced a devastating visitation unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. From out of nowhere there came swarms of Rocky Mountain locusts—great chirring masses of motion and appetite that blotted out the sun and devoured everything in their path. Wherever the swarms landed, the effects were appalling. They stripped clean fields and orchards. They ate laundry off lines and wool off the backs of living sheep. They ate leather and canvas and even the handles of wooden
