The Great Grasshopper Panic: Why Washington Farmers Are Bracing for a Locust Apocalypse

Professor Riley predicts that we are to have an unprecedented crop of grasshoppers during the coming season. He read a paper before the Academy of Science a few days since, expressing his belief. The soil in a large portion of Minnesota, Iowa, Colorado, Nebraska, Idaho, and sixteen counties in the State of Missouri was so thickly planted with locust eggs that a man could scarcely take a step anywhere without trampling upon whole nests of eggs.

He was receiving eggs from every one of the sixteen Missouri counties, four counties in the extreme northwest corner of the State, and twelve counties in the south-western portion of the State, almost daily, and was therefore being kept constantly informed as to the condition of these eggs in all the counties. A great many of the eggs hatched in his office within a week after their arrival here, and from this the Professor inferred that a week's warm weather next spring would be sufficient to hatch them all out, providing they were not killed beforehand by the weather.

The only kind of weather that would be at all likely to kill them was changing weather, alternating suddenly between very mild and very cold weather. Although the crop hatched next summer throughout the west will be much larger than the crop of 1875, these devastations will certainly be much less, for the reason that the farmers are this time prepared for the locusts, or grasshoppers, as they are called. The ten thousand pamphlets containing the directions of 'Mr. Harrison' have been published by the Congress of Oregon and Washington, a new agency ago, have been distributed among numerous settlers in Missouri, Iowa, Colorado, California, and Nebraska, so that every precaution will be made for the annihilation that ravage.