5

A Hopper Cloudburst.

A gentleman just returned from a hunting and prospecting trip down Reese river valley, relates the following phenomenon which came very disagreeably under his personal observation. He was down below the canyon, some 40 miles from here, riding quietly along when an immense cloud of grasshoppers darkened the air. Directly he saw a similar cloud in the shape of a whirlwind coming from the opposite direction, and the two bodies came into a collision of peculiar violence, and with a roaring sound resembling that of a hail and thunder storm mixed. The dead hoppers poured down like the furious drops and streams of a genuine cloudburst, filling the atmosphere almost to suffocation. In less than fifteen minutes they covered the ground for over a hundred acres to the depth of from six inches to three feet. His horse fell twice before he got beyond the confines of the storm. Passengers on the narrow gauge railroad describe that thousands of crows and buzzards are gathered at the locality described, and the scent of the putrefying hoppers is terrific.