﻿134 SEVENTH ANNUAL REPORT 



The earliest record I can find of Locust injuries in America, is in 

 Gage's West Indies, and they date back to the year 1632. In speaking 

 of their visitation in Guatemala, he says : 



" The first year of my abidinof there it pleased God to send one of the plagues of 

 Egypt to that country, which was of Locusts, which I had never seen till then. They 

 were after the manner of our Grasshoppers, but somewhat bigger, which did fly about 

 in numbers so thick and infinite that they did truly cover the face of the sun, and hin- 

 der the shining forth of the beams of that bright planet. Where they lighted, either 

 upon trees or standing corn, there was nothing expected but ruin, destruction and bar- 

 renness ; for the corn they devoured, the fruits of trees they ate and consumed, and 

 hung so thick upon the branches that with their weight they'tore them from the body. 

 The highways were so covered with them that they startled the traveling mules with 

 their fluttering about their heads and feet. My eyes were often struck with their wings- 

 as I rode along ; and much ado 1 had to see my way, what with a montero wherewith 

 I was fain to cover my face, what with the flight of them which were still before my 

 eyes. Where ihey lighted in the mountains and hiachways, there they left behind 

 them their young ones, which were found creeping upon the ground, ready to threaten 

 such a second year's plague, if not prevented ; wherefore all the towns were called^ 

 with spades, mattocks and shovels, to dig long trenches and therein to bury the young 

 ones." 



The early Jesuit missionaries of California have left numerous 

 records of their injuries on the Pacific Coast. Father Michael del 

 Barco records their visitations in California in 1722, 1746 and the three 

 succeeding years; also in 1753, 1754, and 1765. Clavigero, in his His- 

 tory of California, also gives a very full description of these pests. 



In 1827, 1828 and 1834, they destroyed all the crops in'the ranche- 

 ros and missions, and in 1838 and 1846, again did great damage in upper 

 California. "For more than half a century they have troubled the 

 Argentine Republic in South America. In a latitude corresponding, 

 with Louisiana and Xexas, but in the southern hemisphere they have 

 made agriculture worthless, and rendered the settlement of that mag- 

 nificent country between the Andes and the Atlantic Ocean, by a^ 

 dense population, impossible."* Dr. B. A. Gould gives a graphic ac- 

 count of a swarm of locusts in 1873 that devastated Cordoba, a swarm 

 at least twenty miles in length and six miles in breadth, extending: 

 for an altitude of 5° like a thick, black trail of smoke, f Of the rav- 

 ages of locusts in the Atlantic States, I shall speak more particularly 

 in a future chapter: We have records of great injury from locusts in 

 New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont, at several periods during 

 the latter part of the last century. 



Coming now to the chronological history of the particular Rocky 

 Mountain species in question, anything like substantial records fail 

 us, and in order to give the following summary of its devastations 

 during the present century, I have had to ransack the files of hun- 



*Rev. Edw. Fontaine, in New Orleans Times, March, 1866. 

 t Amer. Journ. of Sc. Dec. 1873. 



