In the jaws of a mystery

Contrary to the familiar iconography of western movies and novels, bandits and braves posed a less deadly threat to the pioneers of the American frontier than “pathogenic microbes and crippling parasites,” including cholera and typhus, body lice and roundworms. Among the greatest perils of all, as we discover in “Locust” by Jeffrey A. Lockwood, was the famine resulting from a nightmarish infestation of locusts that spread across the West in the 1870s like a biblical plague.

Lockwood’s book, a fascinating take on an overlooked aspect of the Western experience, shows us the sights, sounds and smells of a plague of locusts with both scientific precision and the soul-shaking effects of a horror movie. A single farm might be attacked by an army of 30 million locusts, and the hungry insects devoured clothing, house paint, tool handles, the dead flesh of fallen bats and birds, the living flesh of slumbering human beings and even each other.

Far more threatening, however, was the effect of the locusts on the necessities of human life. Crops, gardens, pastures and orchards were wiped out in a matter of minutes. Ponds, streams and wells were fouled by the putrefying bodies of the dead insects. Chickens grew fat on the plentiful supply of insects -- but “a diet saturated with locusts rendered the eggs and flesh of chickens inedible.”

Lockwood, a professor of natural sciences and humanities at the University of Wyoming, is the author of “Grasshopper Dreaming,” a collection of essays on the ethical implications of pest control. With the eyes of a scientist who is also something of a poet and philosopher, he is capable of describing the “once glorious Rocky Mountain locust” in grand terms.

“The North American continent had never seen a life form with greater fecundity,” he tells us. “They were the leitmotif of the Great Plains, as powerful a life force as the great herds of bison.” And he sets out to solve the riddle of their sudden disappearance: “The extinction of the Rocky Mountain locust is the quintessential ecological mystery of the North American continent -- a century-old homicide on a continental scale.”

Human effort to eradicate the locusts turned out to be utterly futile. Dynamiting the egg beds “provided a hearty sense of revenge,” for example, but it was pointless when the swarm in a single year, according to one scientist’s calculations, was composed of 3.5 trillion insects. Still, the settlers made war on the locust, and they used every weapon they could devise or imagine.

“They prayed for deliverance, organized bounty systems, conscripted able-bodied men into ‘grasshopper armies,’ and provided food aid for starving communities,” Lockwood writes. “Farmers tried to burn and beat the invaders -- or, failing this, they turned to drowning and plowing the eggs or crushing and poisoning the hatching locusts.” Some desperate souls resorted to whips, guns, pots and pans, even shouting and arm-waving to drive off an approaching swarm. But the locusts kept coming.

Virtually every American value and impulse were brought into play in confronting the crisis. Churchmen saw the locusts as “a chastisement of the Lord [for] wickedness, fraud, falsehood, and corruption” and recommended repentance and right living. Inventors came up with a whole arsenal of new implements, ranging from the Simpson Locust-Crusher to the King Suction-Machine to a horse-drawn flamethrower. And the government created the U.S. Entomological Commission -- “one of the most formidable teams of scientists to ever tackle a problem of the natural world.” Among the many strategies offered by the scientists, Lockwood points out, was one that called for the human consumption of the insects.

“[S]ome of the mature insects,” proposed one scientist, “boiled and afterward stewed with a few vegetables, and a little butter, pepper, salt and vinegar, made an excellent fricassee.”

Ultimately, as Lockwood explains, the Rocky Mountain locust abruptly declined in numbers and then disappeared. By 1913, the locust was declared to be “extinct, or practically so.” And the last third of Lockwood’s book is devoted to a kind of scientific whodunit in which Lockwood considers and rejects the theories that have been proposed for its baffling disappearance, which has been variously linked to cultivation of alfalfa, slaughter of bison, changes in climate and even confinement of Native Americans to reservations.

As far as Lockwood is concerned, the answer was revealed after he conducted a series of expeditions to the glaciers in and around Yellowstone National Park in the 1980s. Back in the 1930s, visitors reported a gagging stench at the so-called Grasshopper Glacier, where melting ice revealed a 4-foot pile of rotting insects. Lockwood succeeded in retrieving, studying and positively identifying the remains as the last remnants of the once-fearful swarms of the Rocky Mountain locust. But for Lockwood, it was more than a scientific enterprise.

“I was drawn to witness the immensity of life captured in the ice long ago,” he writes. “[T]o lift a corpse from its glacial grave, would be to make these fantastic life forms ... real in a way that historical accounts and woodcuts never could.”

“Locust” is a work of history and science, but I find myself in the same dilemma that confronts a reviewer of mysteries and thrillers -- Lockwood names the real killer of the Rocky Mountain locust, but it would be unfair to both writer and reader to reveal it here. Suffice it to say that Lockwood makes a compelling case that he has solved what he calls “perhaps the greatest ecological mystery of modern times.” Along the way, he tells a tale of the Old West that few of us have heard before, and he tells it exceedingly well. *