When The Sky Began To Bite The Grasshopper Years

 

The grasshoppers were so thick at time that they blocked out the sun

The 1860s to the 1870s were known as the Grasshopper Years. The “green hellions” came out of the Rocky Mountains and ate their way across the prairies devouring everything in their path. Many early settlers thought the hoppers did more damage than all the marauding Indians in the West.

The grasshoppers also went by the name of the “hopper,” the “red-legged locust,” the “Mormon Locust,” “G. Hopper” (sometimes, Mr. G. Hopper), and the “hateful grasshopper.”

They were often described as “an immense snowstorm” or like a “dust tornado, riding upon the wind like an ominous hailstorm.” Frequently, there were so many that they blocked out the sunlight.

Grasshoppers could eat a field of corn quicker than a herd of hungry buffalo. The hoppers weren’t fussy. “They eat anything—dead plants, dry wood, the wool off of sheep’s backs, dead animals, and when one of their own becomes disabled, they fall upon him and eat him up before he has time to die.”

If the hordes of hungry grasshoppers had been a onetime thing, it wouldn’t have been so bad; the hoppers returned with the spring rains. When they were done eating, they laid their eggs and continued to do so until the ground froze up or they died. 

The Storm Of The Century And The Towns That Disappeared

 

The outbreak started with twin tornadoes outside of Lisbon and Mount Vernon

June 3, 1860, was hot and sticky. Nothing unusual for an Iowa Sunday. Then the sky turned wrong.

 

The storm came out of nowhere. No warning. No time to think. Just a low, growing roar—like a freight train.

 

By the time it was over, over 150 people were dead. About a hundred in Iowa. Fifty more across the river in Illinois. The storm carved a 150-mile path from Cedar Rapids to Sterling in less than two hours. Entire towns—Camanche and Albany—were wiped out in minutes.

Denkman Lumber Yards Fire Davenport 1901

 

(Davenport Democrat. August 7, 1901)

The largest fire in Davenport’s history swept through the city’s riverfront district on July 26, 1901. Twenty acres of homes and businesses were swept away in the conflagration.

The Weyerhaeuser and Denkmann Lumber Yards were burned to the ground. Two hundred people lost their homes, and nearly one hundred eighty men at the lumber yard lost their jobs. 

“A strong wind fanned the flames, reported The Moline Dispatch. “They shot hundreds of feet into the air. Then, they jumped across streets and alleys and rushed forward with the force of a monster blast furnace.”

Everything from the foot of Federal Street to Oneida Street lay in ruins. The flames were so hot that the rails melted, and the ends flung themselves in the air like “snakeheads.” They stood up over a foot in some places. All that remained of the wooden sidewalks were ashes.

The telephone lines were out for nearly a week as the company raced to replace the burned poles and restring its wires. The trolley line replaced two blocks of tracks, most of the poles and wires that powered their lines, and railroad traffic was disrupted for weeks.

The bricks on East River Street were gone from their places, “as though they had popped out of their beds like so much corn.” Many more bricks were shattered, most likely from the cold water thrown on them. 

Thomas Mayberry Hero of the Kirkwood Hotel Fire

The Kirkwood Hotel at the turn of the century

There were roughly 150 people in the Kirkwood Hotel in Des Moines when it caught fire early on April 5, 1929. Six people died in the inferno. A dozen more were hospitalized. Several jumped from fourth-floor windows trying to escape. They didn’t make it.

 

A night clerk told investigators he put out a small fire in a linen closet at 2:15 a.m. Forty-five minutes later, the fire was back. When he tried to reach it, the smoke stopped him.

 

Porter Thomas Mayberry turned in the alarm around 3 a.m. “I went back to wake people up,” he said. “Women and men were screaming and moaning, and the smoke was terrible.”

Mrs. Kenneth Bowman Saved Her Children From A Barn Fire

Mrs Kenneth Brown and her children

Maquoketa, Iowa. July 9, 1930. It started like any other morning. Mrs. Kenneth Bowman was doing her chores when she realized her three boys and her little sister, Cora Beth—had climbed into the hayloft to see a baby pigeon.

Then the loft burst into flames. No warning, no time for panic. She just ran—pulled Warren Lee, Owen, little Neale, and Cora Beth out of the smoke one by one, moving on instinct while the heat snapped behind her.

People tried to make sense of it afterward. Investigators said someone had used dynamite to break apart the tightly packed hay so it would burn faster. It sounded impossible until you saw how fast the fire moved.

By the time the flames died, seven buildings were gone. Only the farmhouse, the separator shed, and a barn across the road were still standing.

Neighbors called Mrs. Bowman a hero. She probably didn’t feel like one, but those kids are alive because she didn’t stop to think.

Davenport Iowa Train Wreck November 1919

Two trains on the Rock Island line collided five miles west of Davenport just after dawn on November 20, 1919.

When help reached the site, the wreck looked unreal. Seven cars were thrown off the tracks—some half-buried in the dirt, others twisted into crooked piles. A cattle car had exploded into splinters. Thirty head of cattle lay dead or dying, their moans drifting across the fields. The Davenport Democrat and Leader said the pitiful sounds could be heard for blocks.

 

How the three-man crew lived through it was a mystery.

 

Engine No. 2529, run by engineer Thorpe, had been crushed into a tangle of iron. The fireman crawled out first on his hands and knees, shaking and scraped raw but alive. A witness said he looked like a man clawing his way out of the jaws of something that meant to kill him.

The Day the Music Died February 3, 1959

Buddy Holly

February 3, 1959. Clear Lake, Iowa. The air felt like glass. You could see your breath in the headlights. Inside the Surf Ballroom, it was — sweat, perfume, and static.

 Buddy Holly hit the stage in a gray suit and black-rimmed glasses. He opened with “Gotta Travel On.” The crowd roared. Ritchie Valens followed with “Donna,” smiling through the flu. The Big Bopper — J.P. Richardson — lumbered across the stage, wiping his brow, booming out “Chantilly Lace.”

 

Carroll Anderson, the ballroom manager, said, “They were in good spirits. Buddy was joking; Ritchie was nervous but happy. Nobody was thinking about the weather.”

 

Outside, the temperature was ten below. Snow whipped across the lot. The tour bus was parked near the back, with a dead heater, iced windows, smelling like old socks and diesel.

Rockdale Iowa Flood of 1876

Centennial parade in Dubuque, Iowa, July 4, 1876

It was America’s hundredth birthday — a loud, sweaty carnival of self-congratulation. Dubuque was drunk on patriotism and beef fat. Main Street looked like a fever dream of George Washington with arches everywhere, bunting flapping, men in hats shouting nonsense about liberty. “Hayden’s Battery preceded the car of 1776,” somebody wrote, as if that meant anything. Every man was a patriot, every woman a flag, and every kid sticky with pie and gunpowder.

 The Germania Band blared while Holman’s Cavalry clomped down the avenue, followed by grim men pretending this was still about freedom and not about eating their body weight in ribs. Fireworks cracked overhead, and somewhere a brass band struck up something heroic and off-key. It was all very grand, very human, very doomed.

 

Then, as it always does, nature got bored. The sky rolled its eyes and said, enough already. A few polite raindrops fell on the arms of drunks and dancers. Nothing serious, just a quiet warning from the gods. Nobody listened. They never do. They mounted up and rode home to Rockdale, two miles west — a one-saloon village tucked in a gorge, the place where lightning likes to linger.

Lost Creek Mine Disaster Oskaloosa, Iowa

Horrified look on trapped miners faces as the air caught fire, 
and the timbers came crashing down.

It happened in 1902, in a place called Lost Creek — which, come to think of it, is a terrible name for a coal mine. You’d think someone might’ve taken the hint. Lost things rarely come back.

Sunday morning near Oskaloosa, Iowa. The miners went down like they always did — coughing, joking, swearing, thinking about breakfast. Regular men with soot in their lungs and hope in their pockets. At seven o’clock, the air exploded.

A miner’s powder charge hit a pocket of gas. Methane. Firedamp, they called it — sounds harmless, doesn’t it? Twenty men dead, fourteen burned and half-blind but alive. The Oskaloosa Herald said the mine “belched smoke and dust like the breath of hell.”

The Consol Coal Company said it was tragic. Unforeseen. Deeply regretted. Nobody said “avoidable.” The mine was a firetrap — with coal dust everywhere, weak ventilation, and open flame lamps. A paycheck wrapped in dynamite.