In 1876, the U.S. Congress declared the locust “the single greatest impediment to the settlement of the country between Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains.” Throughout the nineteenth century, swarms of locusts regularly swept across the American continent, turning noon into dusk, devastating far...
The Canadian government’s Digital Collections Program has conserved local histories, and Criddle’s story can be explored at collections.ic.gc.ca/wawanesa/E/people/criddles/criddles.html. Grasshopper outbreaks in the twentieth century are not collated in any coherent manner, although accounts of p...