One of the most devastating scenes in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s On the Shores of Plum Creek comes just after Pa borrows money to buy lumber and build their first house that isn’t a log cabin or a dugout. Laura remarks how smooth the boards are and is excited to live in a house with real glass windows and doors on real hinges and with a Franklyn stove. Ma, surprised, gently reproves Pa: she doesn’t like borrowing. But Pa points to their wheat fields gently waving as far as the eye can see: the crop is just about ready to harvest, money in the bag. It seems like their ship has finally come in!

And then the grasshoppers arrive.

In no time, the crop is gone, eaten down to the ground by the hoards of grasshoppers. And not just their crop but all their neighbor’s crops. They eat the gardens of vegetables that the family planned to eat and can for the winter. They eat the hay that the stock depends on; they eat the trees that provide shade and fruit; they eat the handles of hoes and rakes; they spit ugly “tobacco juice” on the girls’ dresses; they contaminate water supplies. The girls skim the insects out of the water pails, the milk pails, but the liquids still look and taste funny. Locusts crunch under their bare feet. Chickens run about gorging themselves on locusts until they collapse from overeating. The stock suffers, and the family suffers mentally – not just depressed by the loss of their crops and the burden of debt, but mentally broken down by the noise of the insects and the insects that cling to their clothes and their hair. It’s hot but they can’t leave the windows open because the insects will fly into their house. Laura describes sweeping them up as part of her daily chores.

Eventually the grasshoppers leave, walking West and then hopping up into the air to disappear in clouds of insects. But, before they leave, the grasshoppers lay eggs in the soil that hatch the following year, cursing the Ingalls with another year of bad crops, another year of increasing debt.

Pa has to take jobs doing manual labor for others in other places, so he’s not with the family and they have to depend on others to help them with their chores. Pa has to go far to find work, some place that the locusts haven’t devastated.

The “grasshoppers” that Laura experienced may have been the Rocky Mountain locusts which Locust is about. A hoard of hungry insects that traditionally swarmed annually, sweeping out over the plains, consuming and then laying eggs before returning to the Rocky Mountains, where they existed in smaller numbers most of the time. But what made them swarm so, and why haven’t we seen them since the late 1800s?

You would think that a book about an insect – and a locust at that and a pretty much extinct insect at that – would be boring.

It’s not.

Lockwood does a terrific job describing the impact on agriculture and the settlers’ mental and physical health. The insects often arrived first as rumors – people disregarded the rumors, the way Pa disregarded one of his neighbor’s comments as he looked out over Pa’s wheat fields that it was “grasshopper weather” – then as huge swarms that covered the wide horizon from edge to edge, in black clouds similar to blizzards (I believe Laura, first sighting the cloud with Pa, wonders if it could be a blizzard in the summer).

Then they caused immediate starvation and difficulty. Then longer-term starvation, as most farmers lived season to season and stocked up for the winter on that summer’s supplies, and couldn’t afford to buy food – what food there was, considering that most people on the plains was facing the same devastation. But not all of the plains, since there seemed to be a randomness to how the swarms landed, which Lockwood compares to a tornado, taking out one house or neighborhood without touching the ones nearby.

Lakes, including the Great Salt Lake, filled with dead and dying locusts – “1.5 million bushels of locusts… in piles 6 feet high and two miles long” – creating a stench that terrified people who were certain that the decay presaged an outbreak of disease, on top of everything else. One tale tells of a soldier who laid down for a nap and was awoken by locusts nibbling at his throat and wrists.

Lockwood describes the meteorologists and entomologists who sought to understand, predict, and combat the locust; the difference between locusts and grasshoppers; the lifecycle of the Rocky Mountain Locust. He explores the causes of the swarms (drought), mitigation factors, and the end of the plague.

And then he goes on to describe more recent swarms – not of the Rocky Mountain Locust, which seems, if not extinct, beaten back to a minimal presence in the high Rockies – of grasshoppers that continue to plague agriculture in the Midwest.

As someone who spent all of last summer stomping on Spotted Lantern Flies (my husband is in PT for a repetitive motion injury from stomping and squishing), I have a mere taste, a sniff, of what it feels like to be overrun with insects. Spotted Lantern Flies are an invasive species, and do not have natural predators in the U.S. I read over the weekend that a high school student devoted her science project to finding a way to combat Spotted Lantern Flies and developed a contraption that will attract and zap them – but how many of these heat-lamp sized contraptions would upstate and NJ farmers need to distract the Lantern Flies from their crops?

The battle is not over. As summers grow warmer, water less available, and weather less predictable, the challenges of farming will only grow, and conditions will impove for other plagues of insects. If you google “grasshopper storm” you will find YouTube videos and postings from agricultural experts about swarms in Minnesota, Colorado – assisted by hot, dry weather that is the result of climate change.

If you like books about disasters or the settling of the West or bugs, you’ll enjoy this book. Well-told, compelling, fast-moving account of something we don’t see every day.