At Home - Bill Bryson [137]
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 twenty-eight thousand to over a million in one generation. Altogether four million new farms were created west of the Mississippi in the period after the U.S. Civil War, and many of these new farmers were heavily indebted both 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 railroads, 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 eastward and begin to devour the even richer farmlands of the Midwest and the 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. In 1877, the swarms were much reduced and the locusts within them seemed curiously lethargic. The next year they didn’t come at all. The Rocky Mountain locust (its formal name was Melanoplus spretus) didn’t just retreat but vanished altogether. It was a miracle. The last living specimen was found in Canada in 1902. None has been seen since.
It took more than a century for scientists to work out what had happened, but it appears that the locusts retired every winter to hibernate and breed in the loamy soils abutting the winding rivers of the high plains east of the Rockies. These, it turned out, were the very places where new waves of incoming farmers were transforming the land through ploughing and irrigation—actions that killed the locusts and their pupae as they slept. They couldn’t have devised a more effective remedy if they had spent millions of dollars and studied the matter for years. No extinction can ever be called a good thing, but this was probably as close to positive as such an event can get.
Had the locusts continued to thrive, the world would have been a very different place. Global agriculture and commerce, the peopling of the West, and ultimately the fate of our Old Rectory, as well as almost everything else beyond, connected to, and in between, would have been profoundly reshaped in ways we can scarcely imagine. American farmers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were already gripped with a form of angry populism that was deeply resentful of banks and big business, and these feelings were widely echoed in the cities, particularly among newly arrived immigrants. Had agriculture collapsed sufficiently to produce widespread