176 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



left the country for ever. The number of actual homestead 

 settlers is thus reduced fully one-half in ray own neighbour- 

 hood, and of that one-half not one family in ten have 

 provisions, fuel, or clothing, to last them through the winter; 

 fully two-thirds have not food enough to last until the 1st of 

 December. I find, from conversation in Kearney with settlers 

 both north and south for a distance of thirty to fifty miles, 

 that the same statement holds true over almost the entire 

 region. Thus, notwithstanding the crij of some of our papers 

 that "we are not beggars," more than two-thirds of those now 

 on their homesteads must either beg or starve. In less than 

 thirty days there will be starvation and death, unless these 

 needs are promptly met. There is no corn, no oats, no feed 

 of any kind for stock, except what is shipped in from a 

 distance ; there is no fuel except coal, at from 8 to 1 1 dollars 

 per ton ; there is no work, no money ; there is no seed-corn, 

 and, in very many instances, no seeds of any kind for 

 another year's planting. On the 13th inst. I met two of my 

 neighbours. One has a family of six to provide for, three of 

 them young children : says he, — " I have just flour enough to 

 last until Saturday night." The other has a family of ten," 

 four of whom are sick, and have been since September; one 

 child, a bright boy of some four years, has lost the entire use 

 of his limbs, and now has to have the care of a helpless babe : 

 this man has flour for ten days, and potatoes that will enable 

 him to get along for a week or two longer. Last winter this 

 family of children were entirely without shoes or stockings, 

 with clothing just sufficient to cover nakedness, and ragged 

 at that. The writer of this article has flour for a week, — fifty 

 pounds, — and pays for it in breaking one acre of prairie, thus 

 giving 3 dollars in work for 1*20 dollar-worth of flour. He 

 does not state this complainingly, bejng glad to get work to 

 feed his five babies at any price. I merely give these three 

 cases as a sample. While I give but three, there are many 

 others all around me in fully as deplorable a situation. Tliis 

 want extends over the whole area of country, — west, north, 

 and south ; and the farther the settlement is from the 

 supplies, the greater the wants and privations of the 

 settlers.' 



" The Plague of Locusts m Maniloha, 8fc.; specially with 

 reference to Devastations previously to 1874. — Thus far we have 



