“It may rain today, but it won’t rain rain. It will be hot air and trouble. The sod shack is cool, anyhow, Juno. Not so cool, though, as that little glen in the mountains where the clear spring bubbles and babbles all day long.” She brushed her hair back from her forehead and, squeezing Juno’s mane, she added, “We don’t want to go back yet, though. Not yet, do we, Juno, even if it rains trouble instead of rain? Inherited pride and the will to do as we please make us defy the plains, still.”
The day was exceedingly hot, but by noon a cloud seemed rising in the northwest; not a glorious, black thunder-cloud that means cool wind and sharp lightning and a shower of longed-for rain. A yellow-gray cloud with no deeper nor shallower tints to it, rising steadily, moving swiftly, shut off the noonday glare. The shadows deepened below this strange un-cloud-like cloud, not dark, but dense. The few chickens in the settlement mistook the clock and went to roost. At every settler’s house, 99 wondering eyes watched the unheard-of phenomenon, so like, yet utterly unlike, the sun’s eclipse.
“Listen, Asher,” Virginia exclaimed, as the two stood on the low swell behind the house. “Listen to the roar, but there’s no wind nor thunder.”
“Hear that rasping edge to the rumble. It isn’t like anything I ever knew,” Asher said, watching the coming cloud intently.
From their height they could see it sweeping far across the land, not high in the air, but beclouding the prairie like a fog. Only this thing was dry and carried no cool breath with it. Nearer it came, and the sun above looked wanly through it, as surging, whipping, shimmering with silver splinters of light, roaring with the whir of grating wings, countless millions of grasshoppers filled the earth below and the air above.
“The plague of Egypt,” Asher cried, and he and Virginia retreated hastily before its force.
But they were not swift enough. The mosquito netting across the open windows was eaten through and the hopping, wriggling, flying pest surged inside. They smeared greasily on the floor; they gnawed ravenously at every bit of linen or cotton fabric; they fell into every open vessel.
Truly, life may be made miserable in many ways, but in the Kansas homes in that memorable grasshopper year of 1874 life was wretchedly uncomfortable. Out of doors the cloud was a disaster. Nor flood, nor raging wind nor prairie fire, nor unbroken drouth could claim greater measure of havoc in its wake than this billion-footed, billion-winged creature, an appetite grown measureless, a hunger 100 vitalized, and individualized, and endowed with power of motion. No living shred of grass, or weed, or stalk of corn, or straw of stubble or tiniest garden growth; no leaf or bit of tender bark of tree, or shrub, escaped this many-mouthed monster.
In the little peach orchard where there were a few half-ripe peaches, the very first fruits of the orchards in this untamed land, the hard peach stones, from which the meat was eaten away, hung on their stems among the leafless branches. The weed-grown bed of Grass River was swept as by a prairie fire. And for the labor of the fields, nothing remained. The cottonwood trees and wild plum bushes belonged to a mid-winter landscape, and of the many young catalpa groves, only stubby sticks stood up, making a darker spot on the face of the bare plains.
For three days the Saint Bartholomew of vegetation continued. Then the pest, still hungry, rose and passed to the southeast, leaving behind it only a honey-combed soil where eggs were deposited for future hatching, and a famine-breeding desolation.