After living with drought, dead crops, dust and no money, can you imagine having to deal with plagues of locusts, as well? Nearly annual infestations of grasshoppers by the billions added to the misery of life during the Dust Bowl. One woman related the story of how when she was a little girl, the grasshoppers completely consumed her beloved lacey denim jacket, leaving only the brass buttons. One young man told about how he and his buddies would bet matchsticks on how long it would take a grasshopper to eat a weed down to the ground.
The grasshoppers ate lawns in Denver, stripped the cattle grazing areas northwest of Ft. Collins and chewed 50 acres of beans down to bare ground. They sometimes moved as fast as a mile and a half a day. People spoke of seeing the ground "moving, alive, crawling." Some small-town main streets were blanketed with marching grasshoppers. When the billions of grasshoppers took to the sky, they would practically black out the sun.
The undaunted residents of Baca County constructed a facility in Vilas to concoct grasshopper poison. Sawdust was a major ingredient of the poison. To help combat the infestations, the National Guard collected sawdust from sawmills and trucked it to the poison mixing facilities.
The recipe:
200 pounds of sawdust
50 pounds of bran
25 gallons of water
15 gallons of molasses
10 gallons of sodium arsenite
1 pint of banana oil – grasshoppers supposedly like bananas
This lethal mixture was scattered by spreaders trailed behind old cars and was surprisingly effective. Entomologists in Lincoln County found as many as 250 dead grasshoppers in one square foot.
Sources:
Trials and Triumphs: a Colorado portrait of the Great Depression, Stephen J. Leonard
"Hard Times," VHS by Rocky Mountain PBS, 1995
A Place Called Baca, Ike Osteen
