Locust by Jeffrey A. Lockwood Read Free Book Online

submitted by the president of Hiwassee College. After completing a demanding training program and passing a rigorous exam (only the sixteen passing with the highest scores were assigned to the field, and Cline scored sixteenth in his class), he was asked his preference for a duty station. Cline requested to be given an opportunity for research that would benefit humanity. Investigating the link between weather and the Rocky Mountain locust’s outbreaks and movements was deemed to be one of the most urgent missions of meteorology. As such, Cline was assigned to Little Rock, Arkansas, with orders to determine the relationship between weather patterns and locust swarms.
    Unfortunately, Arkansas was at the eastern margin of the insect’s distribution, so Cline made little progress in this line of study. Instead, he found medicine most pertinent to his humanitarian interests. Cline earned his medical degree and was drawn into the nascent field of medical climatology, the study of how weather affects human health. He then became the officer-in-charge at the weather station in Abilene, Texas, and was then given the responsibility of organizing the Texas Section of the U.S. Weather Service and establishing the Galveston weather station. And so it was that his life collided with the deadliest storm in U.S. history—a story eerily reminiscent of another Signal Corps observer who was fated to witness a locust swarm of even greater force.
     
    Like Isaac Cline, Albert Lyman Child was born in the East, earned a degree in medicine, and served in the Army Signal Corps. But unlike Isaac Cline, Albert Child was remembered by no one. Perhaps this is because there was nothing that Dr. Child could have done to avert the natural disaster that he meticulously recorded in his duties as a meteorological observer. Dr. Child made no claims that his community of Plattsmouth, Nebraska, was immune to the ravages of locusts. There
was no tone of arrogance in his report, only a sense of near disbelief in what he had witnessed.
    Albert Child was a renaissance man on the frontier. After practicing medicine and serving as a school superintendent in Ohio, he moved to Cedar Creek in Cass County, Nebraska, to try his hand at farming. If Cline had been a meteorologist who wanted to be a doctor, then it seems that Child was a doctor who wanted to be a meteorologist. As soon as he arrived in Nebraska in 1857, Dr. Child began keeping weather records. In 1861, he began providing reports to the Smithsonian Institution, and his work was transferred to the U.S. Signal Corps when it took over as the country’s weather service in 1873. By then, he’d been elected county judge and moved to Plattsmouth, but his passion for meteorology was unabated. This is how Albert Child came to be the right man, in the right place, at the right time to provide a definitive report of the most immense swarm of locusts in recorded history. He began his account with the objective tone of a trained and experienced observer:
    The extent of the swarm is difficult to ascertain, as the observer can only see a small belt. They may extend indefinitely right or left. During the flight from June 15 to 25 of 1875, I telegraphed east and west. I found a continuous line moving northward of 110 miles, and then somewhat broken 40 miles farther. The movements of the winds for five days (15th to 20th) averaged about 10 miles per hour; and the locust evidently moved considerably faster than the wind, at least 15 miles per hour.
    To determine the height of the swarm, Dr. Child used a rather clever approach. He focused his telescope on various objects of similar size to a locust placed at known distances across the rolling hills. Then, he aimed the instrument into the sky, and if the locusts were in focus he’d conclude that the swarm must be at least as high as the horizontal focal distance that he’d just determined. The method only yielded coarse approximations, so Dr. Child was cautious in his