Wyoming History: That One Time Grasshoppers Ate A Man And Horse In 1870s

Newspapers across the American Plains and West in the mid-1870s carried stories of people suffering, many without food or sufficient clothing.

To blame, at least some of the time, were ravenous creatures with origins in Wyoming and other Rocky Mountain states. These destructive pests took flight and landed in areas of Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota and Missouri and started eating everything in sight — including clothing right off of people.

One fantastic account in 1877 published in the Owensboro, Kentucky, paper as a letter from Cheyenne, Wyoming, alleged the creatures descended on two riders on horseback in Kansas, devouring one of them and his horse.

University of Wyoming Extension entomologist specialist Scott Schell questions just how accurate that account was, but he has witnessed hungry grasshoppers eat some pretty outrageous things.

“I’ve seen them eat roadkill, a slice of pizza somebody threw out of their car alongside the road, a stale donut,” he said. “I don’t think that they would be able to eat somebody who was alive, but they definitely taste-test stuff. They also eat stuff that is inedible. They’ve eaten the coating on fiberglass-type window screens, paint off of houses and pine needles.”

The creatures with roots back to biblical-like plagues don’t exist today. Schell said Rocky Mountain locusts, or Melanoplus spretus, strangely went extinct. The last ones were found in Manitoba, Canada, at the turn of the 20th century.

“It is the only case that we know of of a pest insect going extinct that once numbered in the billions, if not trillions,” he said.

Locusts And Grasshoppers

Like the boom-and-bust cycles of Wyoming’s extractive industries, anyone who’s spent more than a few years in the Cowboy State have seen grasshoppers swarm. They get everywhere and gobble up gardens and everything else in their path.

And don’t confuse them with the periodic swarms of Mormon crickets that invade Wyoming and much of the U.S. West. Those swarms can be so dense they create traffic hazards because their crushed bodies make roads so slippery. Millions of crickets swarmed across some spots in Wyoming last year, including taking over the tiny town of Edgerton

Some ingenious Wyoming people 85 years ago found that a simple inches-high tin barrier was enough to save their crops from crickets

But when there aren’t crickets to deal with, at least there’s the potential for grasshoppers. While some newspapers refer to them as grasshoppers, Schell said historically they really were locusts.

“All locusts are grasshoppers,” he said. “Not all grasshoppers have the ability to become a locust. A locust is referred to as a grasshopper who will undergo a phased transformation that differentiates it from a low population density to a high population density.”

Schell said as more of the species build over successive years they change behavior. They can swarm, move and mass as nymphs or younger hoppers, and then in adulthood they get longer wings for better flying ability and also change color.

“It was a long time before they actually figured out that the solitary form and the … migratory form of the desert locust was the same insect,” he said.

What caused the extinction of the Rocky Mountain Locust remains a mystery. There has been a lot of speculation about their demise, Schell said. Certain “fungal-type pathogens” can target grasshoppers in areas of higher humidity.

Early entomologist Charles V. Riley was charged with researching the locust plague in the 1870s. Congress created the United States Entomological Commission in response to the infestations.

After initial research, he believed the creatures that left Wyoming, Montana and other arid areas of the Rockies once in a lower elevation and a more humid environment could not thrive.

“The first generation that hatched in this low country is more or less unhealthy,” he wrote in his book “The Locust Plague.” “And those that attain maturity do not breed. At least such in the case in the whole Mississippi Valley proper.”

‘A Grasshopper Story’

Riley’s book covered events up to 1877, the same year an article appeared in the Kentucky paper describing a previous locust attack. It carried the headline:” A Grasshopper Story” and for a dateline, “A Cheyenne (Wyoming) Letter.”

The letter, published March 23, 1877, described two riders, Dan Kavanaugh and Fred Keiser, who were riding about 15 miles from Lindsey, Kansas, when the locusts swooped down on them.

“The jerky birds came down in the countless millions, and all traces of vegetation disappeared as if by magic. They covered the ground several inches deep and suddenly seemed determined to settle on the men and horses,” the letter stated.

The account claims that Keiser used a blacksnake whip to try and fight them off and save his companion. His horse reared and rolled over him, but he managed to get back on. But Kavanaugh had the flesh eaten off him from his breast and ribs as Keiser galloped away.

Keiser found a ranch about 7 miles away and was so bitten around his face, hands and head that they swelled to twice their normal size. His horse died, the account stated.

Following his recovery, Keiser is alleged to have gone to the scene of the incident with the ranchers and found the skeletons of his companion and horse. The ranchers intending to sell land to English immigrants swore him to secrecy and provided him with a new horse and outfit.

The website Find a Grave reveals there was a Fred Keiser who was born Aug. 15, 1849, in Ohio and who lived much of his life in Leavenworth County, Kansas. He died June 6, 1920, and is buried there.

General’s Investigation

Less deadly, but still dramatic, were accounts published in the Cheyenne Democratic Leader on Nov. 7, 1874, that detailed a U.S. Gen. James Brisbin’s account of visiting Nebraska farmers suffering as a result of the locusts and finding them threatened with starvation, having little clothing or help.

He had written to relief agencies in Omaha about the needs.

In one instance, a woman with four children, one nursing, had only a little flour and tea. The only clothes they had, they wore. There were no shoes for the children. The woman’s husband had gone to Iowa trying to find help.

Another woman who described herself as a former teacher told Brisbin that she was preparing her last loaf of bread.

“All our crops were destroyed both last year and this,” she said. “I am baking my last loaf of bread today, and I wondered where I would get flour to make any more.”

“Little House on the Prairie” author Laura Ingalls Wilder in her book “On the Banks of Plum Creek” described the locust invasion on her family’s Minnesota homestead in 1875. It destroyed her father’s wheat crop and the locusts marched in rank by the hundreds over and through her home.

Mormons in Utah also battled the locusts several times in the 1860s. A biography of John Fell Squires quoted on the Utah government website historytogo.utah.gov, talks about how the locusts ate clothing.

“If a male or female appeared outdoors dressed in green they would be driven to cover or uncover in less than no time,” he wrote. “If they could eat all the bark from a shade tree, which they did, it would not take them long to eat up a fellow’s pantaloons when the color suited them.”

Riley in his research estimated the destruction caused by the locust invasion in 1874 alone totaled $50 million. That would be $1.3 billion today.

120 Species In Wyoming

Schell said while modern farmers and ranchers don’t have to worry about Rocky Mountain locusts, there are still 120 species of grasshopper in Wyoming and about a dozen of those are pest species, including the migratory grasshopper.

“We had a big outbreak in 2009 and 2010 of mainly the migratory grasshopper and every year we have smaller outbreaks and problems with some of the other species,” he said.

Schell said Montana in 2022 and 2023 had “millions of acres infested and major crop losses.”

Some of the swarms of the migratory grasshopper were picked up on weather radar, he said. Once a food source is exhausted in one area, the grasshopper is able to fly to a new place and destroy it in a short time.

Schell said the creatures can eat their body weight daily and waste more than they can eat by cutting leaves and dropping them.

“A corn crop can be defoliated very easily by grasshoppers,” he said.

Farmers fighting the locust back in the 1870s tried many methods, such as burning straw to create smoke over a field, shooting their weapons or sending a herd of sheep through the masses to trample them. There are accounts of the locusts eating the wool off of sheep.

For the more modern pests, such as the migratory grasshopper and just as threatening two-striped grasshopper, researchers at the University of Wyoming created a product in the 1990s that was registered in 2002 that can stop migratory grasshoppers by affecting their ability to grow, Schell said. As a graduate student at the university, he assisted in the research.

University Of Wyoming Solution

The product, diflubenzuron, was developed for rangeland grasshoppers that can move into crop lands. The product stunts insect growth by targeting chitin, a chemical in the grasshopper that hardens its shell as it goes between its different stages of growth.

“If you give them a dose of this diflubenzuron it interferes with the chitin formation so they will fail,” he said. “The other thing about it, is when you have 100,000 acres of infested rangeland, which they just had in eastern Colorado, you don’t have to do a blanket treatment. You can just apply on every other swath.”

The best protection is to apply the chemicals to areas where they are hatching such as ditches and fence rows that aren’t plowed.

When grasshoppers get into crops, such as sunflowers or wheat, neurotoxin pesticides that act quickly are applied to get rid of the creatures to keep crop damage at a minimum, Schell said.

He said it remains important for farmers and ranchers to pay attention to their fields and crops, because grasshoppers are small at hatch but sometimes it’s too late when they fly into a pickup truck as it drives by a field.

“Our philosophy is that we do not want to eradicate or eliminate the grasshopper population,” he said. “We just want to bring it back down to the non-economic level. And that leaves a prey-base for all the other things that prey on grasshoppers.”

Schell tells a story from several years ago when he was doing field research near Guernsey, Wyoming and an old farmer told him about a grasshopper attack in the 1930s. He had left his pitchfork in a pile of hay and went to lunch. After the grasshoppers descended on his pitchfork, the former smooth handle was turned rough.

That’s not the end of the story.

“His uncle had his fishing pole in the back of the truck becausae that’s not too far from the Platte River,” Schell said. “And the grasshoppers ate the cork handle off it.”

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.