Closeup of a United States quarter coin showing "Colorado 1876"

Colorado farmers battled biblical grasshopper plagues in 1876

Chase Woodruff

(Colorado Newsline)

The specimen arrived in the offices of the Las Animas Leader in a glass bottle in late March 1876, courtesy of a local rancher: a grasshopper, about one inch in length, its wings not yet fully grown.

“The ranchman informed us that the sample sent was one of a lot of about 10,000,000 which he saw on Rule Creek,” the Leader reported on March 31.

It was an ill omen for farmers and ranchers across Colorado’s Eastern Plains as the spring planting season began. For the third year in a row, they would be battling swarms of grasshoppers — Melanoplus spretus, the Rocky Mountain locust — that ravaged crops in the states and territories between the Rockies and the Mississippi River.

Close up of a computer screen showing the word "Agriculture."

“How to get rid of the British was the problem the land of the free and the home of the brave was called on to solve in 1776; how to get rid of the ’hopper will be, for this portion of the country at least, the problem for 1876,” the Rocky Mountain News had written of “The Centennial Problem” in December 1875.

With Colorado’s population continuing to grow — and the “mining excitements” in the San Juan Mountains and the Black Hills bringing flocks of fortune-seekers who would pay exorbitant prices for flour and other staples — more acreage was expected to be planted in the territory in the spring of 1876 than in any previous year.

“The prospects for the coming season, with one exception, are very favorable,” the Leader reported. “The one exception is grasshoppers.”

Contemporary accounts described the locust swarms in biblical terms: “One is bewildered and awed at the collective power of the ravaging host, which calls to mind so forcibly the plagues of Egypt,” wrote entomologist Charles Valentine Riley in 1877.

Overhead view of a magnifying glass over the word "history."

“On the horizon they often appear as a dust tornado, riding upon the wind like an ominous hail storm, eddying and whirling about like the wild dead leaves in an autumn storm,” Riley wrote. “In alighting, they circle in myriads about you, beating against everything animate or inanimate; driving into open doors and windows; heaping about your feet and around your buildings; their jaws constantly at work biting and testing all things in seeking what they can devour.”

In 1874 alone, locust swarms had caused $50 million in crop losses across a dozen Great Plains states and territories, the U.S. Entomological Commission would later estimate. The following year, the insects “abounded all over Northern and Central Colorado, in the plains and among the mountains, as far south as the La Plata,” the commission recorded. A swarm was observed on the summit of Pike’s Peak in July.

That same year, in eastern Nebraska, an immense, unbroken cloud of flying grasshoppers filled the sky for ten days in late June. “Albert’s Swarm,” named for the meteorologist who estimated the size of the host at 110 miles wide by 1,800 miles long, is considered one of the largest concentrations of insects observed in recorded history.

Pest control and disaster relief

Pest control strategies centered on early intervention — killing a great number of locusts as soon as they hatched locally, before they were capable of flight, and hoping that mature swarms didn’t migrate from elsewhere later in the growing season.

“Last year’s experience proves that by a united and persistent effort, the young locusts may be subdued, and a great majority of the crops saved,” the Boulder County News told readers on March 31, 1876. “In each neighborhood the battle should begin simultaneously, and when the pests first make their appearance. A delay of a few days is often fatal to a portion or to all of a crop.”

PROMO 660 x 440 Agriculture - Corn - FEMA

Farmers on the Great Plains used a wide variety of methods to try to eradicate the bugs, including horse-drawn contraptions that crushed, incinerated or poisoned them with tar or kerosene. The Boulder County News reprinted instructions for assembling an iron “burner” and advised readers to use it during warm afternoons when locusts gathered in ditches in search of water.

“While the ditch holds them in check the blazing fire machine is drawn up and down its banks, and the hopping army is rapidly demoralized,” the News wrote.

Such methods were likely far less effective in turning the tide against the locusts than changing patterns of agricultural production west of the Mississippi: “The hoppers have assisted in deciding the advantages of mixed crops,” as the Las Animas Leader put it. Peas, beans and other crops were less vulnerable to the bugs than wheat — as was corn, which quickly replaced wheat as the dominant grain crop on the Great Plains.

The last of the great swarms of Rocky Mountain locusts would descend on Colorado just as it achieved statehood in the centennial year, though the impacts were small compared to the previous two years.

“Coming generally later than in 1874, they did less damage, and the farmers were in so much better condition to withstand injury, that it was much less felt,” Riley would write.

Within the next several decades, Melanoplus spretus went extinct entirely, as pioneers settled the West and cultivated all the arable land they could find on the arid plains, including riparian ecosystems that were critical to the locust broods’ long-term survival.

The devastating impacts of the grasshopper plagues were a formative event in the history of American agriculture. Thousands of farmers and their families were at risk of starvation in the winters of 1874 and 1875, and Congress stepped in to appropriate $180,000 in aid and recovery funds for “persons living on the western frontier who have been rendered destitute and helpless by ravages of grasshoppers” — one of the nation’s first large-scale disaster-relief programs.

“The federal programs associated with the Rocky Mountain locust and its victims in the 1870s set the stage for the next 125 years of agricultural policies in the United States,” writes author Jeffrey Lockwood.

These farm relief programs would later form the basis for Dust Bowl-era aid measures and permanent New Deal institutions like the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation, which pays out billions of dollars each year to cover losses caused by disasters.