Plains Folk: Storytellers share tall tales about grasshoppers
By TOM ISERN
© Plains Folk
"At the regular concert of the McPherson high school band this week," wrote a reporter from McPherson in July 1936, "the hoppers were so thick in the bandstand under the lights that they nearly choked up the wind instruments. Miss Margaret Hoskins, a member of the band, was struck above the eye by a large hopper and she had to be treated for a laceration."
That report was believable at first — you could imagine the grasshoppers plopping into the horns and annoying the crowd. It was the latter part, about poor Miss Hoskins, that made it plain the reporter was telling a whopper.
In those days telling whoppers about hoppers got to be a habit. People didn't even have to be original in order to take part. There were enough old stories from the 1870s that when the insect plague returned in the 1930s, people could recycle the old tales.
Like the one about Ralph Dosset recounted by the same McPherson reporter. Ralph said the hoppers "cleaned up his vegetable garden and have turned to his fruit trees for dessert. He went out into his small garden one morning this week and found the hoppers had cleaned his peach trees and left nothing but the bare seeds hanging on the branches."
Then there was Maude Mingenback, who tried to save her tomatoes with mosquito netting. "Later she went out to see them and discovered the hoppers had filled the netting full of holes and were chewing away on the tomato plants."
A pipeline worker who had brought his lunch to work in a shoe box reported the grasshoppers ate it, box and all. A farmer counted 113 hoppers on one fence post. And in a perfect turnabout, Charles Andes said "the grasshoppers are eating his chickens."
Another reporter in Wichita wrote a round-up story filled with hopper whoppers from across the state. A farmer from Lyon County, it was reported, "had hung his overall jumper on the fence and it remained there overnight. The next morning he found nothing but the metal buttons and they had caused a couple of large hoppers to choke themselves to death while trying to take them at one bite."
Over in Phillips County, Sheriff John Voss offered to trade his Jersey cows for Holsteins, as the hoppers kept sucking his little Jerseys dry. John Jansonius of Prairie View topped that story, reporting the insects were sucking his gas tank empty with straws.
Fishermen, it was said, had to choose small hoppers for bait, because the large ones scared the fish.
Sure enough, a farmer from Phillipsburg trotted out this old one from the 1870s: he said he "turned his horses loose to go to the water tank and later discovered the grasshoppers had devoured the horses and two of the larger ones were pitching horseshoes to see who got the harness."
The trouble with these stories is, or maybe it's the beauty of them, you can't always tell which ones are whoppers. People bought flocks of turkeys and fattened them on grasshoppers — that's true. People built hopperdozers and drove them through alfalfa fields to gather bushels of the insects — that's true, too.
So when I read in the Topeka Capital of an Axtell hardware dealer, Martin Erickson, constructing "a machine that catches and kills grasshoppers with electricity," I figure there really was such a thing. His bug-zapper was an electrified drum mounted on his truck bumper. Of course, given the numbers of hoppers out there, it didn't really matter if he caught, as was reported, "enough to fill a bushel basket," unless he was just gathering chicken feed.
