Chapter 2. Insect Foods of North American Indigenous Populations ...

Chapter 239 of 68 9/20/2012 1:34 PMquoted relative to the use of crickets and grasshoppers by the tribes in the Salt Lake Valley. Henderson alsoquotes from an article titled "Feasting on Crickets" in the September 1904 issue of "The Improvement Era":An echo of early times is reported from Rush Valley. It appears that millions of black cricketshave appeared, coming from Death Canyon and Skull Valley. Near Harker's Canyon themountains for miles about have been denuded of every vestige of green. The pests are headedtowards Vernon. The Indians are gathering them to eat, preserving them for winter use, while thecoyotes have stopped killing sheep and are feasting on crickets upon which, like the prairiechicken, they are growing sleek and fat.Leechman (1944: 451), drawing on an earlier report by Coville (1897), suggests that the tubes describedby Drews were used as receptacles for Mormon crickets or other food stored for winter use.Chamberlin (1950: 8-9) gives a description by John R. Young of how the Indians collected Mormoncrickets when they were attacking Mormon farms in 1848 and the irrigation ditches were often full of theinsects: "Baskets purposely made to put in the creeks to catch the loathsome insects as they floated down thestreams, and they caught them by the tons, sun-dried them, then roasted them and made them into a silage thatwould keep for months. Their skill in this convinces me that the coming of the crickets had been continuous forages."Whiting (1950: 17-19) reported that the Harney Valley, Oregon, Paiute gathered crickets: "About thefifteenth of July, families began to congregate at Cow Creek, about five miles east of Harney. Families from allover the valley and from the Hunibui Eater band to the north came to gather crickets. The women went out earlyin the morning and caught them, were back by sunrise, and spent the rest of the day roasting, drying, andpounding them and putting them in bags to be cached for the winter." Whiting continues: "In the fall some of thefamilies went up to Canyon City, the men to hunt elk and the women to pick huckleberries. During thesewanderings they were technically within the terrain of the Hunibui Eaters and Elk Eaters, but inasmuch as thesepeople wandered to the south to get crickets and sometimes to get wada there was reciprocal exchange."Wakeland (1959: 4) relates that in 1890, northwest of Reno, Nevada, S.B. Doten (pers. comm. toWakeland, 1952) "stumbled onto a number of burlap bags filled with dried Mormon crickets. He later sawIndians grind these with dried grass seed in stone grinders and then make a paste which they baked and ate."Dillon (1966: 40) mentions that the Indians near Mary's River (later called the Humboldt) brought driedcrickets into the camp, which they tried to trade for food.Frison and Huseas (1968: 22) found evidence of insect utilization in Leigh Cave on the west flank of theBighorn Mountains in Wyoming. Charcoal from a hearth or roasting pit produced a radiocarbon date of about2220 B.C. The authors state: "In and near this fire were the cooked remains of several hundred large insects ofthe order Orthoptera and more commonly known as the Mormon cricket (Anabrus simplex). The contextsuggests that the cave occupants were roasting these insects for food."Olmsted and Stewart (1978) reported that in northern California the Achumawi Indians remembered theperiodic plagues of Mormon crickets as times of plenty. They roasted the insects and formed them into cakes forstorage.Lanner (1981: 148) quoted a Northern Shoshoni consultant on the historical collection of unidentifiedcrickets: "In the spring we would collect lots of young crickets when they are young. We used to mash them anddry them between stones and eat them in pine-nut soup. That's very rich food."Madsen (1989: 22-25) gives a more popular account of the grasshopper studies reported by Madsen andKirkman, and adds information from studies on the rate of return per unit of effort expended in collectingMormon crickets in the same area: Crickets were collected from bushes, grass, etc., at rates of 600 to 1,452 perhour, an average of nearly two and one-third pounds or, at 1,270 calories per pound, an average of 2,959 caloriesper hour. The crickets often reached greatest densities along the margins of streams or other bodies of waterwhich lie in their line of march and which they will attempt to cross. In two such situations, they were collectedat the rates of 5,652 and 9,876 per hour, an average of nearly 18 1/2 pounds of crickets or 23,479 calories perhour. The first number (2,959 calories per hour) surpasses the return rate from all local resources except smalland large game animals, while the latter compares favorably even with deer and other large game.Madsen places cricket collecting in a modern context by saying, "One person collecting crickets from thewater margin for one hour, yielding 18 and one-half pounds, therefore accomplishes as much as one collecting 87chili dogs, 49 slices of pizza, or 43 Big Macs." He concludes, "Our findings thus showed that the use of insects asa food resource made a great deal of economic sense."According to Jones and Madsen (1991), ethnographic and ethnohistoric data suggest that A. simplex wasthe most commonly collected insect resource in the eastern Great Basin. Collection strategies varied, butincluded driving the crickets into trenches, brush corrals, or streams, or less efficiently, picking them by hand. Todetermine the range in return rates that might apply to the Mormon cricket, Jones and Madsen conducted