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Birds , which scared the bejeezus out of moviegoers a century later, Sully matter-of-factly reported, “A soldier on his way here lay down to sleep on the prairie in the middle of the day—the troop had been marching all night. His comrades noticed him covered with grasshoppers and awakened him. His throat and wrists were bleeding from the bites of the insects.”
     
    The fate of the soldier had he been left to the locusts can not be known, nor can the veracity of the story itself, as there were no similar accounts of locusts feeding on live humans. However, such accounts leave no doubt of the terrifying nature of these insects in the minds of the pioneers. The psychological trauma of the locusts—the capriciousness of their arrival, the magnitude of the swarms, and the voracity of their feeding—became embedded in the lives and language of the frontier.
    The pioneers came to refer to a long, dry autumn at the end of a hot summer as “grasshopper weather,” most likely because these conditions favored the buildup of locusts. And drastically reduced costs of merchandise were not associated with our familiar disaster-laden label of “fire sale” but “grasshopper prices.” Not only were these insects converted into adjectives, but locusts were also metamorphosed into verbs. Mattie Oblinger, a Nebraskan whose family had been besieged by locusts, wrote to her relatives in the fall of 1876, “I suppose you would like to know if we have been grasshoppered again.”
    For some, gallows humor might have provided a moment’s respite from the trauma of locust infestations. A standard joke emerged on the frontier.

    TEACHER: Where does all our grain go?
    STUDENT: Into the hopper.
    TEACHER: What hopper?
    STUDENT: Grasshopper!
    The locusts worked their way into the lives and ultimately the literature of the pioneers. What modern Americans know of the locusts that decimated the settlers is gleaned from literary accounts of life on the frontier. One of the best recent examples is Larry Mc-Murtry’s Western saga Lonesome Dove , which includes a striking account of a locust swarm. The insects saturate the air with stunning swiftness:
    Newt’s first fear when the cloud hit was that he would suffocate. In a second the grasshoppers covered every inch of his hands, his face, his clothes, his saddle. A hundred were stuck in Mouse’s mane. Newt was afraid to draw a breath for fear he’d suck them into his mouth and nose. The air was so dense with them that he couldn’t see the cattle and could barely see the ground.
    But the ultimate account of a locust invasion is surely Laura Ingalls Wilder’s description in her fourth book of the Little House on the Prairie series, On the Banks of Plum Creek . After a bucolic set of chapters, the reader finds Laura’s father regaling the family with the fertility of the country, the abundance of their crop, and the rosiness of their future—and then the locusts arrive. The insects’ arrival is presaged by a strange foreboding:
    The light was queer. It was not like the changed light before a storm. The air did not press down as it did before a storm. Laura was frightened, she did not know why.
    She ran outdoors, where Pa stood looking up at the sky. Ma and Mary came out, too, and Pa asked, “What do you make of that, Caroline?”
    A cloud was over the sun. It was not like any cloud they had ever seen before. It was a cloud of something like snowflakes, but they
were larger than snowflakes, and thin and glittering. Light shone through each flickering particle.
    There was no wind. The grasses were still and the hot air did not stir, but the edge of the cloud came on across the sky faster than wind. The hair stood up on Jack’s neck. All at once he made a frightful sound up at that cloud, a growl and a whine.
    Within moments, the eeriness gives way to terror as the locusts begin to descend on the family’s homestead:
    Then huge brown grasshoppers were hitting the ground all around her, hitting