VARIOUS INSECTS EATEN AS FOOD. 361 ' 



The HillDamaras collect locusts by lighting fires in the 

 direct path of the devouring swarms. In roasting the 

 wings and legs crisp up and are separated ; the bodies 

 are then eaten fresh or dried in hot ashes, and put away 

 for future use. The American Digger Indians roast 

 them, and grind or crush them to a kind of flour, which 

 they mix with pounded acorns, or with different kinds 

 of berries, make into cakes and dry in the sun for future 

 use. The species employed by the ancients were doubt- 

 less the same as those employed at the present day, viz., 

 the two already mentioned, and, to a less degree, the 

 smaller Calopterus Italiacus. 



We have no records of any extended use of the 

 Rocky Mountain species (Calopterus spretus), unless, 

 which is not improbable, the species employed by 

 the Indians on the Pacific coast should prove to be 

 the same, or a geographical race of the same. " It had 

 long been a desire with me," says Mr. Riley, " to test 

 the value of this species (the Rocky Mountain locust) as 

 food, and I did not lose the opportunity to gratify that 

 desire which the recent locust invasion into some of the 

 Mississippi Valley States offered. I knew well enough 

 that the attempt would provoke to ridicule and mirth, 

 and even disgust, the vast majority of our people, unac- 

 customed to any thing of the sort, and associating with 

 the word insect, or ' bug,' everything horrid and repul- 

 sive. Yet I was governed by weightier reasons than 

 mere curiosity, for many a family in Kansas and Ne- 

 braska was brought to the brink of the grave by sheer 

 lack of food, while the St. Louis papers reported cases of 

 actual death from starvation in some sections of Missouri, 

 where the insects abounded and ate up every green thing 

 the past spring. Whenever the occasion presented I 

 partook of locusts prepared in different ways, and one 

 day ate of no other kind of food, and must have con- 

 sumed, in one form and another, the substance of 

 several thousand half-grown locusts. Commencing the 

 experiments with some misgivings, and fully expect- 

 ing to have to overcome disagreeable flavour, I was 



