Arriving in Dakota Territory full of optimism, the early pioneers soon faced the harsh reality of an inhospitable environment and enemy insects. Anyone who has ever lived in Aurora County has felt the searing heat of summer, the bitter cold of winter and the strong winds in every season. Only the oldest of its citizens remember the dreadful feeling caused by hordes of grasshoppers everywhere –in their fields, in their homes, in their clothes, in their shoes, in their hair.
Just as the territory was starting to attract its earliest settlers in 1864, a plague of grasshoppers unexpectedly appeared one sunny summer day and devoured every green thing, completely destroying crops and gardens. The pests even attacked the prairie grasses. Discouraged, many people abandoned the territory, spreading stories of this horrific event and slowing immigration for years. Grasshopper raids continued in the new territory for almost ten years.
The devastating results prompted the United States government to send a commission from Washington to study the insects. Scientists concluded these were no ordinary grasshoppers, but Rocky Mountain locusts breeding in the foothills of the Rockies. Two months after hatching, with wings grown, they would amass to fly as one and head east.
The insect problem ceased abruptly in 1875, four years before the legislature created Aurora County. George Kingsbury describes the grasshopper episodes in detail in the History of Dakota Territory, Volume 1. Writing in 1915, Kingsbury claimed Dakota was now free from this scourge and had been immune for thirty years.
While this particular species of locusts was presumed extinct, a different species of grasshoppers appeared with a vengeance in the 1930s. Swarms of grasshoppers arrived in Aurora County during the hot, dry years of the Dirty Thirties. Forced out by the combined calamities of insects, drought and depression, discouraged families packed up and moved, shrinking the county’s population from its peak count of 7,246 in 1920 to 5,387 in 1940. The county lost close to one-fourth of its residents in the decade leading up to 1940. Slowly declining since then, the county population numbered 2,710 in the most recent census.
One of those who moved west attested to the devastation of the era in his memoirs in the 1983 Aurora County History. John Beam describes the grasshopper infestation from 1932 until he left the area, three years later, “They are not fussy what they eat. They ate Wilma’s nylon stockings hanging on the clothesline …After three or four years, the smaller hoppers were all gone and the big hoppers had become larger and you had a hopper the like of which was hard to believe…They would raise off the ground in swarms, and cruise along with the wind until they came to a likely looking feeding spot and then they would all light like birds.”
Ella Todd Wilson arrived in Aurora County as a young girl with her mother, Jane Todd (later Mrs. George Saville), in 1887. Holding out as long they could during the Depression years, she and her husband finally gave up and moved to California in 1943. Ella’s diary vividly describes the destructive force of these insect hordes:
“Drought and intense heat dried the ground till it pulverized to fine dust and the violent winds blew it from one direction to another. And then came the grasshoppers, riding the winds, great swarms of them. There were springs when we had moisture enough to make a crop, but by June the hoppers were a mighty army and could clean a field in a day.
They ate everything, where onions had been was a round hole lined with onion skin. They ate clothes on the line and nylon off the wearer and gnawed holes in fence posts and siding. They carried into the house on our clothing and found houseplants most tasty. A depression is bad enough and so is a drought, but to have both – and grasshoppers, which are a calamity in themselves, too, was enough to break the spirit of the staunchest – and there were eleven years of it.”
These plagues of locusts changed the course of migration in and out of the land of Dakota. The first plague scared would-be settlers and slowed immigration into the territory. The latter plague, combined with drought and depression, destroyed people’s ability to provide for their families, and accelerated emigration out of the county.
Hopefully, no one will ever again experience the frightful scourges that happened so suddenly and destructively in the first years of the territory and during the Dust Bowl years.
It Happened Right Here: A Plague of Locusts, by Ruth Page Jones. Published in the South Dakota Mail, Plankinton, South Dakota, May 2, 2013.
RPJ Histories - Ruth Page Jones 