Grasshoppers can be a nuisance. However, when they turn into huge creatures with bright red legs and long wings that work together to satisfy their huge appetites, they can destroy your entire livelihood.
The Jury Homestead
In 1869, John Charles Jury Sr., his mother, children, sister, and his brother’s family moved from Ontario, Canada to Bourbon County, Kansas. Once in Kansas, they set up housekeeping in a clapboard house. By 1871, they had moved to a log cabin. His brother William and his family settled nearby.
Both men went to work farming while the women raised the children and tended to household chores. John’s mother Eleanor “Ellen” (Willett) Jury and his sister Eleanor “Ellen” were helping raise his children since his wife Matilda (White) Jury had died in Canada the year before they undertook their journey to America. However, neither his mother nor his sister was listed in the 1870 census begging questions of where they might have gone without the men folk.
The Invasion
When the grasshoppers (Rocky Mountain Locusts) swarmed the Midwest in 1874 (John’s son John’s notes say this occurred in 1873, but he was only a child and it seems he was off a year per other supporting evidence), all attention turned to the sky and the grapevine for signs that swarms would be descending on the area.
Reports came in that the grasshoppers were in this county or that county. Often the reports included the damage, direction of movement, and sometimes even an estimated speed and expected date of arrival.
Warning
The newspapers also prepared their readers for the worst or scared the daylights out of them (depending on your perspective). They told horror stories from other states of the damage the grasshoppers had done. In some locations the grasshoppers were said to have eaten everything green (plants, tree leaves, fruit, corn, etc.), clothing, wool from live sheep, paper, wood handles, and even saw dust.
They even invaded homes eating anything they found to their liking and ruined uncovered wells.
Stopping The Trains
The St. Joseph – Denver railroad reported that the grasshoppers were so thick on the rails in one area that the train there could only proceed at a snail’s pace. Another train was completely blocked from making any progress due to the little critters.
Exaggeration
Some stories might have been exaggerated (e.g. entire fields stripped in a matter of minutes), but the damage was real. Some areas had been completely devastated. There were reports of families having no food except wild animals they could catch or handouts from those not so severely affected.
In the News
So, while waiting to see if Bourbon County, which was already fighting drought and chinch bugs, would be the next target of the “enemy”, the newspapers added grasshoppers to stories right and left. Some of the grasshopper happenings included:
- Grasshoppers being soulless and establishing their machine shop
- Grasshoppers taking a boxcar to Peoria, Illinois, being offered a free ride back, but deciding to stay
- When moving south, grasshoppers read a newspaper that they had missed destroying some crops and they turned around and headed north “to finish the job.”
- Grasshoppers had taken control of the grapevine so the newspaper didn’t have a lot of news.
- Large numbers of grasshoppers visiting the town imitating farmers that come to town one day a week to do business.
- A guy was in the country “herding grasshoppers.”
One store advertised that they had “grasshopper prices,” whatever that means. Meanwhile, meteors were compared to grasshoppers. And, in a interesting approach the Lawrence Journal started a discussion about whether the grasshoppers were sent by God.
Meanwhile, the local newspapers told stories of the “huge” grasshoppers that had been found by local people. It appeared to be a bit of a competition and quite embellished.
Source: Fort Scott Daily Monitor, The Border Sentinel, various issues.
Preparations
When they saw the swam coming, some people tried to smoke out the little creatures. This had limited success. Sometimes the creatures would turn away and other times they simply ignored the smoke. If the flame was small enough, they smothered it.
Others tried covering their crops. This had its limitations because it wasn’t physically possible to cover fields of any size. However, people were sometimes able to cover sections of their gardens. However, the cloth or other covering was often eaten along with the vegetation that had been below it.
Dust, explosives, shooting into the swarm, and swinging of boards or farm implements were also attempted to be used as a deterrent. Usually, these were unsuccessful.
Even the most successful technique was a matter of timing and knowing exactly when to execute the defensive plan. It needed to occur just before they arrived. However, none of these methods was guaranteed to work. The best method was to harvest crops, assuming they were ready to be harvested.
Destroyed everything
John Jr. reported that at “the time of the grasshopper raid in Kansas they were so thick they looked like snow coming down.” This was similar to other depictions of the invasion of the grasshopper army.
Despite the county being relatively spared of the wrath of the grasshoppers, the Jury family lost all their crops. There crops were gone and likely the next spring there would be another wave of grasshoppers, possibly worse than this one, as the beasts seem to lay eggs everywhere they went.
According to John C. Jury Jr., they had no choice but to sell out and move. As of 1870, John Sr. and his brother William each had $1500 of real estate. It is unknown how much they got for their barren land in the fall when few people were moving around or moving into the area. It was off-season for moves as most people moved in late winter or early spring just before planting season. Additionally, the swarms of grasshoppers were scaring people away from moving westward.
Missouri
It is unclear if they had a destination in mind when they packed up and headed out. I assume they traveled until they found some place with little damage by the invading insects and also had farms to rent.
Although Missouri was also a destination for the pesky grasshoppers, John, William, their mother, and families ended up near Chiliothe, Livingston, Missouri. John’s sister Ellen had married Thomas Hartnett and she remained in Bourbon County, living in Hiattville. He was a farmer, but may have had less damage. Additionally, with the completion of the railroad, Thomas began working for them and their small boarding/hotel business expanded.
On Christmas Day, William’s wife Agnes Jane (Moore) gave birth to their seventh child, a son. Despite Agnes being only 29 at the time, they would not have another child for 10 1/2 years. It begs the question, “Why?” I wonder if it was their living conditions and situation that played a part in that result.
The next summer they “raised a good crop of corn, broom corn, and 11 acres of tobacco.” (John Jr.) However, by the time they returned to Kansas in the spring of 1876, they had lost all of their horses, but one a piece. John Jr. did not explain how or why their horses were lost.
Post-Grasshoppers
John remarried to Harriett Warner in August 1876 in Bourbon County. They had two children in the following couple of years. One died when only a year old. Like, William and Agnes, they had a 10-year gap before their third and last child was born, which may be due to their movement around the country.
During that gap in time, John, William, their mother, and their families moved again. This time much further north, landing in Michigan. There John Jr. stated that he hauled logs and shingles. It isn’t known what John Sr. was doing, but he had been a shingle maker in Canada so it is very possible that he returned to his previous occupation to make a living.
After some time at the location where they settled, they decided that they had moved too far north. And, they moved a bit further south, but stayed in Michigan. John Jr. stated that John Sr. purchased 40 acres of timber, which they cut and presumably sold. This is possibly the only property that John Sr. and William owned after selling out in Kansas.
After the matriarch of the family died in 1883, John Sr. and his sons looked at other opportunities, but ended up in Kansas, where John Sr. rented property in Drywood Township and later just north of Hiattville. His brother William and family remained in Michigan.
John Sr. died September 7, 1911. By this time the Rocky Mountain Locust were extinct. As quickly as they had come, they had died out, but not before changing the course of the lives of many families, including the Jury family.
Grasshopper/Rocky Mountain Locust Statistics and Fun Facts
- 1873-1877 crop damage in Midwest estimated $200m
- Estimated 12 trillion grasshoppers
- 120 billion created a path 100 miles wide in 1874
- The cloud of grasshoppers in 1875 estimated to have 3.5 trillion covering 198,000 square miles as possibly as much as a mile deep.
- The grasshoppers in 1874 covered 2,000,000 square miles.
- Grasshoppers estimated to weigh 27 million tons, which was more than the bison population
- The 1874 invasion led Kansans to start growing more winter wheat, which was ready for harvest earlier in the season before grasshoppers usually appeared.
- The “hopperdozer” was created to capture grasshoppers by raking it across the land.
- The hopper vacuum was created. It sucked the grasshoppers into the machine and bagged them for disposal.
- Rocky Mountain Locust bodies (minus legs and wings) were said to have a nutty flavor, taste like crawfish, and to be good fried or in stew.
Sources:
Image at top: John Jury, Sr.