Free Locust by Jeffrey A. Lockwood

on their crops while the court’s officers pontificated. But the outcome of the trial was not in jeopardy, as there don’t appear to have been any cases that went the locusts’ way. And between the legal delays and the judge’s verdict—their relative contributions being left to the reader’s interpretation of biology and theology—the locusts left the region not long after the trial concluded.

GOD’S SERVANTS OR GREEN IMPS OF SATAN?
    The possibility that the Rocky Mountain locusts were God-sent was implicit in the most common biblical allusions used by the settlers in their letters and journals. These God-fearing people often made reference to the plagues of Egypt, although it was not always clear whether this was a theological analogy or literary device, as seen in this vivid recollection of a Nebraska homesteader:
    The summer of ’74 was blessed with an abundance of rain and warm weather. Corn grew rank and was surprisingly forward for the season
of the year. The small grain too gave promise of exceptional yield. Farmers in the Valley were beginning to make preparations for harvesting and housing the crop which should at once place them in easy circumstances, when a calamity as complete as it was unexpected with one fell stroke destroyed all their calculations and for a time left them stunned and almost broken in spirit. It came in the shape of one of the plagues of ancient Egypt. . . . They move not so much in sheets as in great columns from one to five thousand feet thick, resembling great fleecy clouds propelled onward by some strong but hidden agency.
    A Minnesota homesteader, on seeing the whirling, glittering cloud of insects descending on her family’s farm, sank to her knees and wailed, “The locusts! God help us!” We have to wonder whether she was appealing to the Almighty for deliverance from his wrath or from evil. And remember Richard Chalmers, the character in Gentleman from England, who was unable to fathom the tales he’d been hearing of the locusts? Well, seeing is believing, and Annette Atkins recounts, “Watching the creatures at work, Chalmers remembered a Bible passage: ‘The land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness.’ At last he believed.” But, we might ask, what exactly did Chalmers come to believe?
    According to a historical review of locust outbreaks in Missouri by George Jones, the settlers looked upon swarms as punishment for some moral shortcoming or evildoing. The biblical allusions by the settlers were not merely literary ploys; they were direct parallels to the Old Testament—and God was angry. This interpretation of the locust plagues was evinced in sermons to the people and in discussions among the clergy. A letter from Reverend August Kenter to Reverend J. H. Sieker in 1874 begins with some compassionate ambiguity as to God’s intention in having sent a swarm of locusts into his Minnesota community:
    Dear Brother,
    On the 12th of June I arrived, thanks to God, in good health and spirits and renewed vigor, at my dear home and found wife and children
well. But what a destruction! had the army of God completed meanwhile. Nothing remained of my forty acre wheat field. . . . At the commencement, it seemed as if God in his infinite grace would make an exception with some; but visiting my congregations a few days afterwards, to look after families, of whom I expected that they were suffering; I found enough of them, who had no bread and I divided what I had on hand amongst 12 families to whom it came like a Godsend.
    The reverend portrayed himself as a compassionate shepherd, providing for his congregants. And although he leaves little doubt as to the locusts having been sent by the Almighty, we might suppose that this disaster was simply a trial of the people’s faith. Maybe God was testing his flock, as he had done with Job. But the rest of Reverend Kenter’s angst-filled letter, although failing to explain what sins warranted such