Bill Bryson by At Home

Author:At Home
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781409095545
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2011-07-01T00:59:02+00:00

III

The direction of movement for populations is not always downwards, it must be said. Sometimes populations boom, occasionally in ways that shape history. 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 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, and devoured almost everything they lighted on. They ate leather and canvas, laundry off lines, the wool off the backs of living sheep, even the handles of wooden tools. One amazed witness reported them landing in such numbers that they put out a good-sized fire. It was, according to most witnesses, like experiencing the end of the world. The noise was deafening. One swarm was estimated as being 1,800 miles long and perhaps 110 miles wide. It took five days to pass. It is thought to have contained at least 10 billion individual insects, but other estimates have put the figure as high as 12.5 trillion, with a massed weight of 27.5 million tons. It was almost certainly the largest gathering of living things ever seen on Earth. Nothing would deflect them. When two swarms met, they would push through each other and emerge in unbroken ranks on the other side. No amount of battering them with shovels or spraying with insecticide made any measurable impact.

This was exactly at a time when people were moving in vast numbers into the western United States and Canada, and creating a new wheatbelt across the great plains. Nebraska’s population, for instance, went from 28,000 to over a million in one generation. Altogether four million new farms were created west of the Mississippi in the period after the US Civil War, and many of these new farmers were heavily indebted with mortgages on their houses and land and with loans on flotillas of new equipment – reapers, threshers, harvesters and so on – needed to farm on an industrial scale. Hundreds of thousands of others had invested huge sums in railways, grain silos and businesses of every type to support the booming populations of the west. Now vast numbers of people were being literally wiped out.

At the end of the summer, the locusts vanished, and a measure of hopeful relief crept in. But the optimism was misplaced. The locusts returned in the following three summers, each time in larger numbers than before. The unnerving thought that life in the west might become untenable began to take hold. No less alarming was the thought that the locusts could spread eastwards and begin to devour the even richer farmlands of the Midwest and east. There has never been a darker or more helpless moment in the whole of American history.

And then it all just came to an end.

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