PREVENTIVE MEASURES IN THE MOUNTAINS. 
321 
natiag the native locust in the Rocky Mountain region can be system- 
atically and extensively applied beyond locally burning over tracts 
and destroying the freshly-hatched young, we may with confidence pre- 
dict that even in ten or twenty years from now, when the rich grazing 
and farming territory of Montana will sustain a much denser population 
than at present, the locusts may be in many places locally exterminated, 
their numbers in general diminished, and their ravages be greatly less- 
ened. 
"As is well known, the greater part of the injury done by the locusts 
is accomplished by the voracious young working in fields of young wheat. 
The winged adults swarm in after the wheat is harvested or about the 
time of harvest. 
" What the farmer of Colorado and Utah wants in the middle and 
latter part of July is certain, reliable, and detailed information respect- 
ing the presence or absence of locusts west of the Rocky Mountain Range 
or in Wyoming northward, if he live in Colorado ; or, if he be a Mormon 
farmer, whether the locusts are flying from Montana into the region of 
Idaho lying north of Cache or Malade Valleys. He may then be able 
to tell whether to expect the locusts late in August or early in the 
autumn in his own country. At the present time the western border 
farmers pick up in a desultory and haphazard way information of this 
sort, but as the Far West becomes more densely populated and increased 
care and diligence are observed, as they will have to be exercised in the 
future when the struggle for existence becomes more intense among 
agriculturists and wheat-growers, all the means we have referred to of 
obtaining, classifying, and disseminating a knowledge of the movements 
of the locusts will be more or less fully adopted. When this result is 
attained the battle with the locusts is more than half won. A tolerably 
complete knowledge of the habits and movements, direction and time of 
flight, &c, over a series of years will also (as it already has in Utah) 
tend to clear up the mystery hitherto attending the migrations and rav- 
ages of locusts. This will have the effect of making the agricultural 
community less subject to wild panics, and more bold, determined, and 
combined in endeavoring to exterminate the locusts. 
"A large proportion of the money losses resulting from the locust in- 
vasions of 1867, '69, '74, and '76 was the result of a panic, of uncertainty 
as to the future ; this resulted in disheartenment, in the abandonment 
of large tracts of the best of farming lands to nature and the locusts. 
This will probably never again happen in the West. The knowledge 
already disseminated, the extent of the population now pouring into the 
Northwest, the rapid settlement of the Territory of Montana, and the com- 
pletion of the Northern Pacific, Canadian Pacific, the Utah and Northern 
Raflroads, and the consequent change in the surface of the country due 
to human agency will so essentially modify the locust situation that we 
believe the West will never again suffer as in the past. It remains for 
the people of the Rocky Mountain Plateau to use such local and general 
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