Horsin' around
Originally published 01:38 p.m., May 19, 2008
Updated 01:38 p.m., May 19, 2008
In the middle 1930s, we had some really strange weather in Kansas. I was at a very impressionable age then and I well remember the dust storms which made it hard to breathe. My mother tied wet cloths over the faces of her family and in a short while the areas over mouth and nose would be black with mud from the dust that was filtered out by breathing. It would be twilight at noon and you couldn’t see a street light from a block away. It was pretty scary.
We had an aunt and uncle on a farm about 20 miles away and I spent a lot of time there during those summers. I’m not sure of the year, but for two or three of those dreadfully different summers they had a plague of grasshoppers. The insects numbered in the millions and were pretty destructive. I can recall corn fields stripped down to stubble, peach trees with no more leaves that they’d had in December. Fruit was one of the more important Kansas crops then, before wheat came to its peak later. It must have been devastating to a farmer to watch grasshoppers destroy his orchard before his very eyes. There were stories of grasshoppers chewing on the skin of infants in cribs, leaving raw patches.
In a more jocular vein, jokes of exaggeration sprang up to relieve the tragic tension. There was the man hoeing corn who, when the swarm settled, had the straw hat eaten from his head and the wooden handle of his hoe eaten in two as he ran for shelter. In another variation, an ax handle at the chopping block by the kitchen door was eaten, leaving only the metal head of the ax stuck in the block. (I wondered why they didn’t eat the chopping block, too. Well, it’s a story).
All of this was recalled not long ago when I saw a reference to the grasshopper plagues in a magazine article. It involved Dr. Arthur Hertzler, the famous Kansas “horse and buggy doctor” who founded the well-known clinic at Halstead.
Dr. Hertzler was an innovator, not only in medicine but in any field which caught his attention. He tried various financial endeavors and was apparently moderately successful at most of them.
The grasshopper connection occurred when Dr. Hertzler had an idea about how to use the insects rather than fight them. He bought several hundred young turkeys, call “poults.” After a reasonable start in a poultry shed, he would turn the birds out to be “herded” like sheep or cattle. The herdsmen were teenage boys, hired for the summer job of turkey-herding. Each was armed with a long bamboo fishing pole, a red bandana tied on the tip. The boys would turn out the herd each morning and drive the birds out into grasshopper-infested open country.
There was apparently a standard route which they followed, a big loop at a quiet pace that took all day. Any strays were encouraged back into the flock by the flags on the long cane poles. It apparently worked relatively well, because grasshoppers were in abundance, fattening the birds by the end of the summer.
That’s a great example of an idea that would work one time, in a special circumstance, and maybe never again. Probably there were a lot of people who asked themselves “why didn’t I think of that?” Or, who thought it was a great idea when they heard of it later. It takes a special genius to see an idea and act on it, in time to make good. Dr. Hertzler was one of those people.
This recalled a similar story from the era of the “great buffalo hunts” in the 1870s. An entrepreneur in Tulsa saw that the animals were being slaughtered by the thousands for only the tongue or the hide. The rest was left to rot.
His idea was to take advantage of the situation. He bought several hundred young hogs in Tulsa and hired a crew to herd them out onto the prairie. For all summer they followed the hunts, moving in behind the skinners to allow the herd to feed on the abundant repast scattered across the plains.
At the season’s end they drove the now-fattened butcher pigs back to the stockyards to sell. Of course, either of these men could have lost his shirt. But they didn’t.
See you down the road.