APPENDIX I. whitman's MINNESOTA REPORT. [9] 



Country. On the east it terminated generally where the open prairie changed to woods, 

 while on the west; the limit was more irregular, including especially the tracts lying 

 along the Upper Minnesota and its branches. The young appear to have come forth 

 at once during the first ten days of May so numerously as in most cases to defy all 

 eiforts made to check them. In some cases, particularly in counties that had suffered 

 in previous years, ditches were dug around fields at the outset, aud everywhere great 

 numbers were destroyed by straw spread around the hatching-grounds and fired. On 

 the 18th of May the attention of the public was called to a new method of destroying 

 the young, detailed in a letter to the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, dated May 17, and 

 describing the coal-tar pan. The letter was written by Hon. A. B. Robbins, State 

 senator from Willmar, Kandiyohi County, who made no" claim whatever as an orig- 

 inal invention, but who deserves all the credit of having forcibly brought to the 

 notice of the people a principle which had been published several times before. The 

 principle of the coal-tar pan had already beeu applied in Kansas, Colorado, and even 

 in Minnesota, and mentioned iu such a way that it ought by no means to have proved 

 such a novel invention as it did. The New Ulm Herald, of May 28, 1875, had urged 

 the use of coal-tar spread upon sheets of building-paper as a means of protecting 

 grain-fields, and the same was referred to in full in the " Report to the Geological and 

 Natural History Survey of Minnesota for 1876." Again, the Farmers' Union of Minne- 

 apolis, under the date of August 8, 1876, in a letter from Greeley, Colorado, had de- 

 scribed the use of the same material, spread over stout canvas, fastened to a frame, to 

 be dragged over the ground ; while on page 51 of the " Report of the proceedings of 

 the conference of governors at Omaha to consider the locust problem," the same ma- 

 chine was again described, with a notice of the use of zinc instead of canvas. 



But the invention, when once brought to notice, gained favor at the outset. Meeker 

 County summoned the county commissioners at once, and " determined to send for 

 250 barrels of coal-tar and 1,000 sheets of iron." Other counties took similar action, 

 and for a time it was impossible to supply the materials fast enough. When tar was 

 wanting, kerosene, molasses, ashes or sand moistened with kerosene, ashes and water, 

 soft soap, or flour and water were used. The latter, when well tilled with young 

 locusts, was fed to the hogs. Tar was shipped over the different lines free of freight- 

 charges, and the State provided a supply of 1,000 barrels to be distributed wherever 

 it was needed. 



In the last week of May I rode for about three hundred miles through some of the 

 western counties and along the Upper Minnesota River. A portion of this trip 

 included the northeastern part of Kandiyohi County, where, later in the season, the 

 crops were almost totally destroyed. Here, on the 25th of May, the locusts had hardly 

 begun to spread over the wheat- fields. They were at work upon the edges of the fields 

 in immense numbers, and iu a ride of about six miles across prairie and through woods 

 the young were so numerous that, they gave the impression, as they leaped up at every 

 step, of heat flickering in the air. In many places the sand in the road was blackened 

 for rods with the young basking in the sun, while the low bushes by the road-side had 

 been trimmed bare. All these were still young, and had evidently moved but a short 

 distance from where they were hatched. In some places they had already entered the 

 grain fields in such numbers that iu moving a distance of five rods the tar upon the 

 tar-pan became so completely filled with the young that it would hold no more. But 

 everywhere, over farms distributed all along the road, men, women, and children were 

 bravely at work fighting as well as they could. In another direction, southwest of 

 Willmar, and toward the Minnesota River, there was a different state of things. Here 

 on a broad stretch of open prairie farms decreased iu number on leaving the line of 

 the railroad, and were situated miles apart in many cases. On leaving the thickly- 

 settled portion, the locusts were found to be fewer and fewer iu number, until out on 

 the open prairie hardly a single locust was to be seen even where a patch of new 

 breaking might have been expected to invite them in the previous laying season. This 

 was an exact repetition of all that was learned last year, that in Minnesota it is only, 

 in the vicinity of cultivation, only near and among farms, that the locusts dejjosit their 

 eggs. After a greatdeal of inquiry during the past summer, I have been able to learn 

 of only one case where the young were found hatching at a distance of five miles from 

 a cultivated field. 



Between the 25th of May and the 1st of June I received reports from every county 

 in which eggs had been laid, giving the condition of things up to that date. It was 

 at that time impossible to estimate the damage that was likely to ensue, and while 

 many counties which were afterward badly ravaged expressed a hope that the injury 

 would be slight and could be averted by strenuous fighting, still other counties which 

 in the end escaped unharmed w«re anxious for the future. Up to the middle of June 

 a vigorous fight was kept up as long as there was any hope of saving a crop. By the 

 15th of the month, in the worst-inlested towns, all crops were so nearly ruined that 

 there was little left to fig'^t lor, while in others, where locusts had seemed numerous 

 before, the weather and the efforts of the farmers comhined had set the wheat so far 

 ahead of the locusts that the crojis were essentially saved. 



It is impossible to say that all this warfare was pursued in the most intelligent man- 



