All that plague-of-locusts business seemed unbelievable, so I spent some time wandering around in cyberhistory.
Yes, well, the 1875 onslaught of grasshoppers makes the modern-day Walmart invasion look tame by comparison. Take, for example, this description from a history of Dixon County, Nebraska:
The progress of the county was steady though slow, until the famous grasshopper visitation of 1874. This visitation was a great calamity. The insects came in countless myriads, occasionally flying in such dense clouds as to obscure the sun. They ate the leaves off of nearly all vegetation, and headed the growing wheat in a most complete and admirable manner. In some cases they stripped the bark off young fruit trees. In consequence of these discouragements, many people left the county, and many who remained seemed for a time to lose heart, fearing a recurrence of the Rocky Mountain locust scourge. In 1875 and 1876 they did return as feared, but since the latter year they have not been seen.
And this from stories of the Loup Valley, also in Nebraska:
The month of July was about half spent when the locusts reached the North Loup Valley. Corn was "laid by" and in tassle; the small grain was heading and full of promise. Then dawned the fatal day. By noon a strange haziness overspread the clear, blue sky, and the bright sunlight took on a sickly, yellowish tint. Had anyone taken the trouble to look at the sun through some proper medium he would have discovered the cause of this gradual transformation in the day. Myriads of insects were flitting by the disk of the sun. But people were not looking for trouble and so allowed the phenomenon to go unnoticed. In a short time, however, everyone had cause to become wide enough awake. The clouds of locusts suddenly began to settle over the earth. With a strange whistling sound of wings and myriad bodies they came on, pelting the appalled earth; bustling and tumbling they came, clinging to whatever they happened to strike, devouring every planted thing from Indian corn to garden truck.
At first some of the settlers made vain attempts to scare the pests from their fields, but this was usually rewarded by having the clothes literally eaten from off their limbs. As time advanced the number of insects grew. In places branches of trees are said to have been bent almost to the ground under their living burden. The corn fields were speedily stripped of their leaves, and soon all but the toughest portions of the stalk were devoured. We hear of thrifty housewives attempting to save favorite flowerbeds by spreading over them bedquilts and carpets for protection, who to their chagrin found the locusts as eager to devour the spreads as they were the flowers.
From the more modern Living on Earth radio show:
In 1875 a doctor in Nebraska estimated that one swarm moved over an area of almost 200,000 square miles with an estimated twelve-and-a-half trillion bugs. And could those bugs eat! They devoured any and all vegetation, along with wooden tool handles, clothes drying on the line, even wool off the backs of sheep.
7:56:15 PM 
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