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six days of each other from the want of food to keep body and soul together. But it is but justice to say that the neighbors and citizens were unaware of the facts of the case and were not, therefore, responsible for the terrible death which overtook these poor pilgrims on their journey to the better land. This is, we believe, the first case of the kind which has transpired in this county; but, from present indications, the future four months will make many graves, marked with a simple piece of wood with the inscription “Starved to death,” painted on it.
    The pioneers were accustomed to physical privation, having experienced so much thirst, cold, heat, pain, and exhaustion to reach the frontier. One of every seventeen people—and by some estimates nearly one in ten—who headed west along the Oregon Trail would die on the way, leaving an average of ten gravesites along every mile of trail. Accidental gunshots, drowning, wagon accidents, hostile Indians, hypothermia, cholera, typhus, measles, smallpox, and whooping cough took a terrible toll and hardened the pioneers to bodily suffering. Numb to physical pain and deprivation, the settlers’ lasting images of the locust invasions were not so much visceral as mental. The psychological effects of a natural disaster can persist for a lifetime—or more. From the frontier farmers our culture inherited the images of devastation that were etched in their memories, rather than the pangs of hunger that settled in their bellies.

LOCUST INVASION TACTICS
    The homesteaders embodied a powerful and particular combination of immense pragmatism and tremendous idealism. As Willa Cather described in O Pioneers! —her classic story of life on the frontier—“A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.” Even so, the rugged folks who weathered such trials in search of a better life were not prepared for the onslaught of locusts. Perhaps Minnesotan historian Annette Atkins most effectively captured the utter disbelief of these insects’
power in her recounting of the Gentleman from England, a historical novel about life on the frontier written by her fellow Minnesotans Maud Hart Lovelace and Delos Lovelace:
    [Richard Chalmers] had heard persistent rumors for over a month but “could not yield to grasshopper stories even a measure of alarm.” The tales seemed too exaggerated. A “vast ravenous army of insects . . . eating every growing thing and leaving desolation in its wake,” he thought to himself; “Whoever had heard of such a visitation outside the pages of the Bible?” Chalmers, like many settlers, employed a hierarchy of defenses. First he ignored the stories, then denied them, and then told himself that even if the rumors were true, the pests could never reach Crockett [fictional] County. Finally, even if the grasshoppers did come, he argued, they could not destroy whole fields. He was wrong. Chalmers became only slightly alarmed when he heard that the insects had crossed into his county. For sport and to quell their slightly nagging fears, Chalmers and several neighbors rode west to see for themselves. They were “incredulously silent” when they first spotted the grasshopper cloud. Those outrageously exaggerated rumors had been neither outrageous nor exaggerated.
    The sight of an arriving locust swarm was an unforgettable sensory experience. The settlers tried to force the strange vision into a familiar category. And the imagery that was most frequently reported was that of an impending storm. A letter from E. Snyder of Highland, Kansas describes the sensation of a summertime blizzard transforming into a swarm of locusts:
    At our place they commenced coming down about 1 o’clock in the afternoon, at first only one at a time, here and there, looking a little like flakes of snow, but acting more like the advance skirmishers of an advancing army; soon they commenced coming thicker and faster, and they again