| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Jeffrey A. Lockwood. Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier. New York: Basic Books. 2004. Pp. xxiii, 294. $25.00.
The near extinction of the bison—which declined in number from an estimated thirty million animals in the early nineteenth century to just a thousand a hundred years later—is a well-documented story in the history of the American West. In this book, Jeffrey A. Lockwood shows that the settlement of the West was a far more ecologically tumultuous enterprise than even the sight of fifty-foot-high heaps of bison bones might at first suggest. At the same time that the bison were being pushed to the edge of extinction, another tale of profound ecological change was unfolding on the plains.	1
In 1875 the West was in the throes of a locust swarm the scale and scope of which can scarcely be imagined. Lockwood estimates that some 3.5 trillion locusts descended from the Rocky Mountains that summer and proceeded to lay waste to Great Plains agriculture, consuming an astonishing fifty tons of vegetation per day. The swarms darkened the sky over Kansas and caused trains to stop dead as the rails became littered with thousands and thousands of locust carcasses. To deal with the outbreak, inventive settlers tried everything they could think of, from locust-crushers for grinding them into pulp to flamethrowers to setting fire to rags soaked with kerosene and dragging them through fields of wheat.	. . .

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