Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 September 1883 — The Jumbo of Crickets. [ARTICLE]

The Jumbo of Crickets.

Throughout the whole Territory of Utah the cricket is one of the common objects of the country, but there’ are crickets and crickets, and it is just as well when in search of the best article to “see that you get it.” For a consideration, therefore, I will put the speculator on the track of some of the grossest locusts that ever devoured green stuff—locusts, moreover, that squeak when pursued. Poets (American poets, especially) are very partial to what they are pleased to call the cricket’s merry chirp. But the poet’s cricket is the insect of the domestic hearth, a pale-colored ghost of a thing, all voice, and with an irregular midnight appetite for the kitehen cloths that are hung out to dry before the stove. The Piutes’ cricket is very much otherwise. It is the Jumbo of crickets, and just as black. It lives on the slopes of the Utah hills, among the sage-brush, afid when alarmed tries invariably to jump down-hill. But, being all stomach, and therefore top-heavyj so to speak, the ill-balanced insect invariably rolls head over heels, and every time it turns a somersault it squeaks dismally. To walk down the hillside, driving a whole herd of these corpulent crickets before me, used to amuse me immoderately, for the spectacle of so many fat things simultaneously trying to jump downhill, simultaneously rolling head over heels, and simultaneously squeaking, was mirthful enough to drive the dullest care away.— Phil Robinson, in Harper's Magazine.