204 GRASSHOPPEES AND LOCUSTS 



mission of Santa Clara, Padre Jose Viadere fired the pastures, and 

 getting all his neophytes together made such an awful noise that those 

 which were not killed by the smoke and fires were frightened ofi" so 

 thoroughly as to save the grain crops and the mission fruit gardens. 

 About 1834-'35 occurred another visitation of the grasshopper, when 

 they destroyed a second time the crops of the rancheros and missions, 

 with the exception of the wheat. 



An American settler, who resided for ten years near the bay 

 of San Francisco, informs us that in the summer of 1838 the crops 

 and gardens of the missions and ranches thereabouts were nearly 

 destroyed by the ravages of the grasshopper. Another settler informs 

 us that they committed great ravages near San Rafael, and on the 

 north side of the bay. He saw them eat up, in a single afternoon, a 

 field of thirty acres of beans and peas, consuming it to the surface of 

 the ground. In these districts they stopped for three successive years. 

 A California sea captain informs me that he has sailed through the 

 Santa Barbara channel and neighboring waters when the surface of 

 the ocean was covered for miles with the dead bodies of grasshoppers, 

 the air being filled with them at the same time, and shoals of fish 

 feeding on them. 



In July, 1846, a friend of ours living in Monterey was per- 

 sonally cognizant of afield of eight or nine acres on the Salinas plains 

 of corn, frijoles, &c., being completely consumed to the ground 

 in a single day. The appearance of the field afterwards was as if it 

 had been blackened and killed by a heavy frost. The late Mr. J. B. 

 Wall, collector of Monterey, informed me that in a journey from 

 Oregon to Missouri, in 1846, his party encountered in July, on the 

 plains near the north fork of the river Platte, myriads of the grass- 

 hoppers, which all appeared to be travelling northward, and proved 

 extremely annoying to the train for many days. Bryant, in his 

 " What I saw in California/' relates that on his passage to California, 

 under dates of July, 1846, their company of emigrants also encountered 

 immense swarms of grasshoppers on the prairies near the Platte. 



In the "Utah and the Mormons," by B. G. Ferris, on page 149, 

 mention is thus made of the visitation of the Locusta in the Salt Lake 

 country : " The year 1848 was one of privation and suffering, prior 

 to the maturing of the growing crops. Among other discouraging 

 incidents a curious kind of ' cricket' made its appearance in myriads, 

 manifesting all the destructive properties of eastern countries. All 

 vegetation was swept clean before its frightful progress as effectually 

 as the grass before the scorching fury of a prairie conflagration, and 

 the crops, put in with so much toil and on which so much depended, 

 were fast disappearing. Suddenly,' however, flocks of white gulls 

 floated over the mountain tops with healing in their wings, and stayed 

 this withering destruction by feasting on the destroyer. The crickets 

 and the gulls have been annual visitors siuce, as they were before ; 

 the bane and the antidote come together." They are said to appear 

 invariably in great numbers in very dry and hot summers, succeeding 

 to very inclement winters. 



Throughout California, with its ante-1849 boundaries, through- 

 out Lower California, New Mexico, and all the dry and the elevated 



