Locust Motive

In 1874, his ancestors blacked out the Dakota sun by the billions. Wet years had built their numbers unchecked in the foothills. Drought pushed them east to find food.

The swarms bred in river valleys across Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. They ate crops, bark, wool from living sheep, and paint from wagons. The railroad pushed through anyway, carrying settlers who plowed those same valleys to farm the land the locusts kept destroying.

The soil their eggs needed to survive winter disappeared under the settlers' own plows and irrigation. Less than thirty years later, the species that darkened the sky was extinct.