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I don't remember just how much I got paid, but I know
that my Grandpa Isern paid me for picking potato bugs. I think it was
so much for bugs (yellow with black lines) and so much for larvae (Venetian
red and soft). Drowning was the usual means of executing the bugs, of
which no honest count ever was kept, I'm sure.
Read the manuscript census from settlement times on the plains, and you
find that most every farm family had a half-acre or acre of potatoes.
Their European forebears knew potatoes from the late 1700s on, the tubers
having been greeted with suspicion after introduction from the New World
via Spanish conquistadores, but having eventually won acceptance as the
food of the common folk throughout Europe and the British Isles. It was
here in the middle of North America that potato-planting European-Americans
encountered potato bugs, an American insect.
If the potato bug seems like an insignificant subject for an essay, then
you need first to return to the time and frame of mind when a cellar full
of potatoes was the family's nutritional insurance; and second to consider
that America's greatest entomologist of the nineteenth century, Charles
Valentine Riley, devoted a whole book (The Colorado Potato-Beetle and
the Other Insect Foes of the Potato in North America, 1876) to the subject.
Riley describes the sort of potato-bug control I practiced under the heading,
"Mechanical Means of Destruction," but whereas I say it works
pretty good, he says it "is most effectual." Riley says also
it is "perhaps preferable" to crush the bugs on the vines instead
of gathering and drowning them. He describes how to make a potato-bug
pincher, like a big pair of pliers, out of two sticks of wood, a screw,
and two leather straps.
On a larger scale, Riley says, someone might go down the rows of potatoes
knocking the bugs off with a broom, to be followed by a horse and harrow
to kill the bugs on the ground. Some said that on hot days just contact
with the earth was enough to kill the pests. Many inventive souls, too,
concocted more elaborate devices to knock off and capture them.
Paris green, an arsenical poison, was the pesticide of choice against
potato bugs in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. (Modern
pesticides aren't much better; the Colorado potato beetle is often cited
by both pesticide specialists and environmentalist lobbyists as an outstanding
example of how a species can develop resistance to chemicals.)
Since potatoes were so important to European-Americans in general and
to subsistence-farming plains pioneers in particular, they were worth
having a good story about them, a myth of origin. The story is that either
Francis Drake, the sea dog, or Walter Raleigh, the colonizer--one Englishman
is as good as another in this myth--originally brought potatoes to England
(or maybe Ireland). A friend planted them, but ignorant of their use,
he cooked and ate the seed-heads of the resultant crop instead of the
tubers. They were awful, so he had his gardener destroy the patch and
burn the plants. The gardener tasted one of the tubers from the ashes,
and the rest of the story should be obvious.
If potatoes are important enough to have a myth of origin, then so are
potato bugs--in my next little essay. In the meantime, I’m going
out to check my little patch of spuds here in the Red River Valley. I
confess—and I’m glad nobody ever told Grandpa—I enjoy finding
and smashing the little devils.
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