The Great Cricket Invasion

[WARNING: the following contains graphic depictions of pest eradication]

In his 1970s essay entitled "The Great Cricket Invasion of 1927 & 1928," rancher-politician-storyteller Farrington Carpenter (1886-1980) recalled an infestation that devastated northwestern Colorado.

This was a modern-day plague that destroyed one million acres of Colorado crops in 1927 alone. Carpenter called the crickets "the most feared insects in the Rocky Mountain area." They feasted not only on plants but animal flesh, were cannibalistic and females laid about 200 eggs apiece in the ground before dying—thereby ensuring that the following spring's infestation would be worse.

One minor detail: these crickets weren't actually crickets.

Dry farming in Northwestern Colorado had surged during World War I (when food production increases were urged and grain prices were high) and consisted of letting fields lie fallow every other year so that soil retained enough moisture to grow crops. The result: grain, alfalfa and corn fields in a semi-arid region that had never produced much agriculture.

Carpenter wrote about how folks initially fended off swarms of Mormon Crickets:

The only protections against these marauders was noise. Many settlers protected their gardens or small fields by ringing cow bells, sleigh bells; pounding on tin buckets or rattling tin cans on a wire. This would cause an oncoming band to divide and go around the hubbub.

Two-foot-deep pits were dug every few hundred feet near the inside of the tin fence, and soon these trenches filled with migrating Mormon Crickets—and rattlesnakes, according to Carpenter.

The only time I ever felt sorry for a rattlesnake was when I saw one squirming around in a pit, all covered with crickets who were busy eating it alive.

Once the pits were filled with insects, volunteer teams of men and boys poured gasoline on the pits, set them ablaze and later, removed the ashes. Women, explained Carpenter, "had their own organization which provided [a] 24 hour supply of coffee and sandwiches for the workers."

The arsenic spray also had dire consequences for other animal life. Carpenter wrote that Livestock Commission firms at the Denver Union Stock Yards were sympathetic to the farmers in northwestern Colorado and sent a boxcar of hungry turkeys to the area. He described the disturbing outcome:

When the goblers [sic] were turned loose on the crickets a mad race began and it looked as though they would eat all the crickets. After half an hour however, the turkeys became sated and many of them got sick from the arsenic spray on the bugs. If they squated [sic] or stood still however, the crickets promptly got on them and began eating them alive. Some of the turkeys were butchered, but the meat was a pink color and tainted with arsenic, so it could not be eaten.