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other senses. If so, then the stench of rotting locusts in the waning days of an invasion must surely have become a potent trigger for nightmarish memories among the settlers. The vividness with which the odor of decaying locusts is described attests to the power of the experience. Consider the recollections of Milando Pratt, a Mormon farmer-turned-railroad-grader:
    The Great Salt Lake pickled them in its briny waters by the hundreds of thousands of tons then cast their carcasses ashore until a great wall of these inanimate pests was formed for miles along the lake’s shore. [They put forth a] great stench . . . and cast the aroma of this slowly
melting putrid wall upon the windward breezes to be wafted earth-ward toward our suffering camp.
    Such a mass of decay seems implausible, but this was by no means the first or only such account of locusts amassed along the lakeshore. A few years earlier a “notable mathematician,” most likely Mormon Apostle Orson Pratt, estimated that 1.5 million bushels of locusts were deposited along the shores of the Great Salt Lake in piles six feet high and two miles long. The state entomologist from Missouri reported:
    I spent some time in this county, and the gloomy outlook toward the end of May could not well be exaggerated. The stench from the immense numbers destroyed around Kansas City, was at one time unendurable, and lest it should breed pestilence the authorities of Westport took measures to deodorize and disinfect the atmosphere on a large scale. Fifteen barrels of locusts were one evening shoveled up and hauled from the base of the courthouse at Independence, each barrel weighing 220 pounds.
    The reek of decomposing locusts had long been associated, however erroneously, with the onset of disease among humans. Paulus Orosius, a historian and Christian theologian, recounted a swarm that was blown from the coast of Africa and drowned in the sea in about 380 C.E. The locusts emitted a stench greater than that “produced by the carcasses of one hundred thousand men” and purportedly induced an epidemic among the populace. The connection between the odor of decay and the onset of disease is sensible, given that piles of dead bodies can surely be the result of epidemics and corpses are not particularly healthy to have lying around. At the time that locusts were invading homesteads in America, a French doctor was making the discovery that microscopic organisms were the cause of malaria, rather than “bad air” ( mal aria in Italian), for which the disease had been named. And so, there was a deep-seated evolutionary and experiential basis for nineteenth-century pioneers, like fourth-century observers, to link foul odor to illness.

    The raw sensations that the locust swarms induced among the settlers evoked a feeling of being overwhelmed by a force beyond compare. They were awed by the voraciousness of the insects, the sheer capacity of a swarm to transform a farmstead into a wasteland before their eyes. Many of the journals and letters simply say that it would be futile to attempt to describe the rapacious power of the locusts. Some tried to capture the event by means of simile:
    The voracity of these insects can hardly be imagined by those who have not witnessed them, in solid phalanx, falling upon a cornfield and converting, in a few hours, the green and promising acres into a desolate stretch of bare, spindling stalks and stubs. Covering each hill by hundreds; scrambling from row to row like a lot of young famished pigs let out to their trough; insignificant individually, but mighty collectively—they sweep clean a field quicker than would a whole herd of hungry steers. Imagine hundreds of square miles covered with such a ravenous horde, and you can get some realization of the picture presented last year in many parts of Kansas.
    Others tried to quantify the intensity of invasions. After a swarm had departed, one Minnesota farmer went into his fields to see how many eggs had been