Seriously, look at one up close. Screw up your courage, but go ahead and grab one when you can, and get up-close-and-personal. They're not animals; they're machines, I swear it. They Transformers, Civil War gunboats insects, smothered with steel plates. Even though there's no spot of muscle on those legs, they've got superhuman bounce. Still, their landings almost always flop. Nothing about them is beautiful--or graceful. They're not poetic.
They're machines. Grasshoppers are inconsiderate gluttons who'll eat anything--beets and onions right out of the ground. They'll go in after them, eat 'em raw, then attack pitchforks and hammer-handles. They'll devour this weeks's wash right off the line, eat a five-dollar bill right out of your wallet, then take on the wallet itself.
About 150 years ago, they showed up throughout the Upper Midwest, and when they did thousands of people pulled up stakes and went back east because Rocky Mountain Locusts made farming a waste of time and space, and rendered life out here plain miserable.
How bad was it? In an odd, hyphenated word, it got "prayer-bad." In 1877 Minnesota's Governor Pillsbury inaugurated a state-wide Day of Prayer. A few years before that already, people here started supplicating for the spiritual aid they wanted badly, help they believed could only come by way of miracle.
In the northern heavens something rises
from the horizon—clouds maybe,
or smoke billowing so far up into the sky
it takes my breath away, so high,
it seems the wind has wings.
Oh, my God,
they swarm as countless
as the sand on the shores of the sea.
The fields all around,
the hopes of every farmer here,
will go up like smoke and vapor,
consumed by locusts whose appetites
will not be filled ‘til everything is gone.
That's supplication, a prayer for relief, for the love of the Creator. Today, if nothing else, it pushes the imagination along to a point that we can begin to feel that those grasshopper clouds were no joke. They could--and did--wipe out a family's fortune in a half hour, then casually move along to the neighbor, ten miles an hour some claimed through their own crying eyes.
That's supplication, a prayer for relief, for the love of the Creator. Today, if nothing else, it pushes the imagination along to a point that we can begin to feel that those grasshopper clouds were no joke. They could--and did--wipe out a family's fortune in a half hour, then casually move along to the neighbor, ten miles an hour some claimed through their own crying eyes.
Can you see my tears, Lord? --
will you hear my voice?
I lift my soul to you on high:
Must all of what we have be lost?
So reads a translation of the prayer/poem of Jelle Pelmulder, Orange City's first schoolteacher. Estimates of what the grasshoppers cost the area run as high as 220 million, which is--take a breath--115 billion today. Out east, relatives sent missionary barrels of second-hand clothing to starving Siouxland relatives.
In 1876, in Jefferson, SD, Father Pierre Boucher announced after Mass one Sunday morning that he would lead a processional of prayer for relief from the horrors of the plague. Dozens, even hundreds of Catholics and Protestants alike Protestants showed up and walked for six miles of country roads, erecting crosses at four places in a pattern that was itself a cross.
Next time you're in Jefferson, ask around. Still today, those crosses--replicas, of course--are known as "the grasshopper crosses."
In Cold Spring, MN, you take a ride out of town where you can still find amid the hardwoods, a chapel with a frontice piece that features Mary, Mother of Jesus, with blessed arms outstretched over two huge Rocky Mountain Locusts. You've found Cold Springs' "Grasshopper Chapel." It's not to be missed.
In the 1870s, all over the blessed region, the only thing more incredible than the plague of hoppers, those thieving scoundrels, were the prayers of the people.
How bad was it back then? It was bad. It was prayer-bad.
So reads a translation of the prayer/poem of Jelle Pelmulder, Orange City's first schoolteacher. Estimates of what the grasshoppers cost the area run as high as 220 million, which is--take a breath--115 billion today. Out east, relatives sent missionary barrels of second-hand clothing to starving Siouxland relatives.
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| Grasshopper Cross, Jefferson |
In 1876, in Jefferson, SD, Father Pierre Boucher announced after Mass one Sunday morning that he would lead a processional of prayer for relief from the horrors of the plague. Dozens, even hundreds of Catholics and Protestants alike Protestants showed up and walked for six miles of country roads, erecting crosses at four places in a pattern that was itself a cross.
Next time you're in Jefferson, ask around. Still today, those crosses--replicas, of course--are known as "the grasshopper crosses."
In Cold Spring, MN, you take a ride out of town where you can still find amid the hardwoods, a chapel with a frontice piece that features Mary, Mother of Jesus, with blessed arms outstretched over two huge Rocky Mountain Locusts. You've found Cold Springs' "Grasshopper Chapel." It's not to be missed.
In the 1870s, all over the blessed region, the only thing more incredible than the plague of hoppers, those thieving scoundrels, were the prayers of the people.
How bad was it back then? It was bad. It was prayer-bad.
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