The Mosquitoe

First Murmers

A rumble of murmurs, mutterings and gripes highlighted by a few grim anecdotes made up the jounalists’ records of their seasonal combats with mosquitoes. Clark casually marked the opening of the 1804 season with the matter-of-fact observation, appended to the workaday details that made up a busy Sunday, 25 March 1804 at Camp River Dubois: They were “verry bad” that evening. From there on the “musquetors” were just “bad,” or sometimes “very bad,” but by 19 June 1804, a little more than a month after leaving Camp Dubois, everyone had had enough—they thought. Sergeant Ordway reported, no doubt with a deep sigh of relief, “we Got Musquetoes bears [that is, biers or bars, all pronounced barz (see Mosquito Netting)] from Capt Lewis to sleep in.” Nevertheless, the mosquitoes continued to be more and more “troublesome,”—the adjective which in 1806 Noah Webster defined, as if he had mosquitoes on his mind, as “vexatious, tiresome, teasing”^[2]Noah Webster, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (Hartford, Connecticut: Sidney’s Press, 1806), s.v. troublesome.. As the summer progressed, they became “verry troublesom,” then “uncommonly troublesome,” or even “extreemly troublesome.” (Were the two e‘s just for emphasis?). They became “excessively troublesome,” and “more troublesome than ever,” topping out at “emencely noumerous and troublesom.” One evening, three months farther up the Missouri, Clark snarled that the mosquitoes were “more troublesom than I ever saw them,” although, in another few days they were merely “verry bad, wors than I have seen them.” His incredulity had outdistanced his working lexicon of mild invective for journalistic purposes. One wonders if he ever vented his frustration, off the record, with some choicer maledictions—those heartfelt words “by which the man of spirit is distinguished from the man of worth.”^[3]In those days the art of swearing with eloquence, grace and good humor was much more creative and colorful than can be achieved with today’s paltry dozen of overused, mostly monosyllabic … Continue reading Can we imagine the narrowing annoyance in his eyes? The helplessness in his tone?

On the best days “the Musquetors retired a little after dark, and did not return untill about an hour after Sunrise.” But their daybreak was defined by the ambient air temperature; on warm nights the females gorged themselves incessantly. And if a man sought even momentary respite in any shade available on a sultry summer afternoon, he had to contend with hordes of bloodthirsty mosquitoes.

Second Season Troubles

The situation seemed worse during the second summer on the trail, either because of the onerous monotony of the burden, or because the swarms were actually getting denser, for some reason. At the Great Falls of the Missouri in June-July of 1805, the men spent every moment for a full month under the constant threat of ambush by either the grizzly bear, the mosquito or, more likely, both at the same time.

On 13 July 1805 Lewis dispatched six heavily loaded canoes upriver from the upper portage camp, then set out overland with Charbonneau and Sacagawea, arriving mid-morning at Clark’s camp where some of the men were carving two more canoes. Meanwhile, high waves had compelled the crews of the six departed canoes to beach them until the wind died down. Such good news had a bad side. That evening Lewis groaned that

the Musquetos and knats are more troublesome here if possible than they were at the White bear Islands. I sent a man to the canoes for my musquetoe bier which I had neglected to bring with me, as it is impossible to sleep a moment without being defended against the attacks of these most tormenting of all insects.

Eleven days later he uttered his most eloquent oath, invoking a famous episode from the Book of Exodus, verses 7-12:

our trio of pests still invade and obstruct us on all occasions, these are the Musquetoes eye knats and prickley pears, equal to any three curses that ever poor Egypt laiboured under.”^[4]See Three Pests and a Yoke.

He continued with an unrelated but interesting sidelight:

the men complain of being much fortiegued, their labour is excessively great. I occasionly encourage them by assisting in the labour of navigating the canoes, and have learned to push a tolerable good pole in their fraize.

Editor Biddle read it differently. He omitted Lewis’s Biblical analogy and ran together the dim shadows of two different statements, missing both points altogether: “The mosquitoes, gnats, and prickly pear, our three persecutors, still continue with us, and joined with the labour of working the canoes have fatigued us all excessively.” Right, and tight, but tame.

At the end of July, as he walked alone beside the Jefferson River ahead of the canoes, Lewis shot a duck for his supper one day, and remarked whimsically that after he finished eating he looked for “a suitable place to amuse myself in combating the musquetoes for the ballance of the evening.” The insects won again, according to the captain, who “should have had a comfortable nights lodge but for the musuetoes which infested me all night.” Lewis’s wording didn’t amuse Biddle, who abruptly summarized the little episode: “He suffered no inconvenience except from the mosquitoes.” On 7 August 1805, Lewis announced that the mosquitoes weren’t as troublesome as they had been recently, but were “still in considerable quantities”; the eye gnats had disappeared, but “the green or blowing flies [were] still in swarms.”

Winter Apparitions

At Fort Clatsop on 27 December 1805, Clark recorded an experience that must have stimulated a lot of awe and speculation among the men and, doubtless, shudders of horror on Clark’s part: “I Showed Capt L. 2 Musquetors to day, or an insect So much the Size Shape and appearance of a Musquetor that we Could observe no kind of differance.” However, his description is problematic. Although mosquitoes are summertime pests on the Northwest Coast, they probably would not have been present at Fort Clatsop in late December, so it is now presumed by some authorities that Clark had brought in specimens of the dipterous family Tipulidae (tip-POO-lid-eye, Latin for “water fly”) commonly called “crane fly” from its extremely long legs. If those supposed “Musquetors” were actually crane flies, that would accentuate the problem in his description: the comparison of his specimens with mosquitoes in terms of size. Superficially, a crane fly does indeed resemble a mosquito of comparatively gigantic proportions, being perhaps 2.5 inches (60 mm) long, with a wingspan of up to 3 inches (75 mm). Perhaps it was merely a slip of his pen; “proportions” would have been more accurate than size. Aside from that, what could account for Clark’s familiar, pale lament with which he closed his draft entry for the day—”Musquetors troublesom”? Did the spectres of those mammoth “musquitors” almost make him itch? Presumably he and Lewis quickly discovered that crane flies neither bite, nor sing in one’s ears.

Third Season Torturers

When the peak of the mosquito season approached in early July 1806, the captains devoted more space to the annual summer subject, especially when they took to the rivers again after the Bitterroot Mountain transit. Relieved from the two previous years’ exhausting uphill labor of breasting river currents, all the men had more time and energy to cope with the little hummers. On 12 June 1806, Lewis united his own hint of humor with Clark’s threadbare cliché. The days had grown quite warm, and “the Musquetoes our old companions have become very troublesome.” After sundown on 3 July 1806, in the valley of Clark’s River not far from Travelers’ Rest, as he and his detachment were about to turn up the Cokalahishkit, Lewis reported that

the musquitoes were so excessively troublesome this evening that we were obliged to kindle large fires for our horses    these insects tortured them in such manner untill they placed themselves in the smoke of the fires that I really thought they would become frantic.    about an hour after dark the air become so coald that the musquetoes disappeared.”

Biddle’s tone was more restrained and less literal: “The horses suffered so dreadfully from the mosquitoes that we were obliged to kindle large fires and place the poor animals in the midst of the smoke.”

Commonplace complaints swelled in an anguished crescendo that climaxed on the day when the mosquitoes were “verry troublesome indeed much worse than they were last year.” Back at White Bear Islands on 15 July 1806, Lewis groaned that

the mosquetoes continue to infest us in such manner that we can scarcely exist; for my own part I am confined by them to my bier at least 3/4ths of my time.     my dog even howls with the torture he experiences from them.    they are almost insupportable, they are so numerous that we frequently get them in our thr[o]ats as we breath.”

That was saying a lot. It’s hard to make the taciturn Newfie howl.

During the first four days of Lewis’s reconnaissance of the upper Marias River, 16-28 July 1806, mosquitoes were relatively scarce. They “have not been . . . troublesome to us since we left the whitebear islands,” he penciled, without venturing any explanation. Biddle’s phrasing was a little more creative for a change: “We slept in peace, without being annoyed by mosquitoes, which we have not seen since we left the Whitebear islands.” Lewis wrote his version on the 20th, just two 28-mile days from the camp he would name for one of his darkest discoveries, “Disappointment.” His relief came to an end on the night of the 23rd, however, when the “Musquetoes” were “uncommonly large and reather troublesome.” Small adult female mosquitoes may be 4-5 mm (0.19 in), and large ones rarely exceed 16 mm (0.6 in).

Lewis again observed the effects of the winged pestilence upon animals when, on 6 August 1806, he and his hunters killed eleven deer, only two of which were fat, “owing as I suppose to the Musquetors which are So noumerous and troublesome to them that they Cannot feed except under the torments of millions of those Musquetors.” The Canadian explorer and trader David Thompson, who spent twenty-five years in Canada and the northern latitudes of the U.S., observed that “All animals suffer from them, almost to madness, even the well feathered Birds suffer about the eyes and neck.”^[5]David Thompson’s Narrative of His Explorations in Western America, 1784-1812, ed. Joseph B. Tyrrell (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1916), 25. It was nothing new. A fourth-century Roman historian reported that in the valleys of the Tigres and Euphrates Rivers, lions were said to have clawed their own eyes out or drowned themselves to escape the mosquitos’ tortures.^[6]Leland O. Howard, Harrison G. Dyar, and Frederick Knab, The Mosquitoes of North and Central America and the West Indies, 4 vols. in 3 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1912), … Continue reading

It was mosquitoes that delayed the timely reunion of Lewis’s and Clark’s respective contingents after their month-long separation in the summer of 1806. Clark arrived at the rendezvous point, the confluence of the Yellowstone with the Missouri, on 2 August 1806. The next morning, groggy from lack of sleep, he complained that

the Musquetors was so troublesome that no one of the party Slept half the night.    for my part I did not sleep one hour.    those tormenting insects found their way into My beare and tormented me the whole night.     they are not less noumerous or troublesom this morning.

Very early that morning he climbed a hill near the river to shoot one or two more bighorn sheep specimens, but “the Musquetors were So noumerous that I could not Shute with any Certainty and therefore Soon returned to the Canoes.”

Yellowstone Exposures

Ever since leaving Long Camp west of the Bitterroots, the enlisted men‘s leather clothing had been disintegrating from sweat and daily wear-and-tear, and there had been no time to make repairs or replacements, so that by the end of July many of them were nearly naked. Clark and his contingent had anticipated that when they reached the mouth of the Yellowstone they would have some respite that would allow them to make new shirts and pants, but they paddled into the worst clouds of mosquitoes yet. On 4 August 1806 Clark described the dismal conditions at length.

Musquetors excessively troublesom So much So that the men complained that they could not work at their Skins for those troublesom insects.    and I find it entirely impossible to hunt in the bottoms, those insects being So noumerous and tormenting as to render it imposseable for a man to continue in the timbered lands and our best retreat from those insects is on the Sand bars in the river and even those Situations are only clear of them when the Wind Should happen to blow which it did to day for a fiew hours in the middle of the day.    the evenings nights and mornings they are almost [un]indureable perticelarly by the party with me who have no Bears to keep them off at night, and nothing to Screen them but their blankets which are worn and have maney holes. The torments of those Missquetors and the want of a Sufficety of Buffalow meat to dry, those animals not to be found in this neighbourhood induce me to deturmine to proceed on to a more eliagiable Spot on the Missouri below at which place the Musquetors will be less troublesom and Buffalow more plenty.

At five P.M., Clark moved their camp a short distance downriver to what he hoped would be a better location. It wasn’t. “The Musquetos were So abundant that we were tormented much worst than at the point” where the two rivers met. What’s more, “the Child of Shabono”—whose bier had been lost in a flash flood the previous summer—”has been So much bitten by the Musquetor that his face is much puffed up & Swelled.” Conditions on the 5 August 1806 were identical with those of the previous two days. Clark complained:

The Musquetors was So troublesom to the men last night that they Slept but very little.    indeed they were excessive troublesom to me.    my Musquetor Bear [bier] has a number of Small holes worn through they pass in.    I Set out at an early hour intending to proceed to some other situation.    I had not proceded on far before I Saw a ram of the big horn Animal near the top of a Lard. [larboard, left bank] Bluff    I assended the hill with a view to kill the ram.    the Misquetors was So numerous that I could not keep them off my gun long enough to take Sight and by thair means missed.^[7]At the close of the 20th century, one of the few places in North America where mosquitoes were still that numerous was the subtropical wilderness of Everglades National Park in the off-season. One … Continue reading    at 10 a.m. the wind rose with a gentle breeze from the N. W. which in Some measure thinned the Misquetors.

They moved on. That night they pitched camp under a high Bluff, where they were “exposed to a light breeze of wind which continued all the forepart of the night from the S W, and blew away the misquetors.” Temporary relief came with a change in the weather on the seventh. After sunrise a heavy rain drenched the party and forced a stop until 11:00, then resumed and “Continued at intervales all day.” They camped on a sand bar at 6:00 p.m. after which the wind blew very hard for about two hours. That night “the air was exceedingly Clear and Cold and not a misquetor to be Seen, which is a joyfull circumstance to the Party.” A cold night’s sleep under thin ragged blankets was better than a warm one shared with mosquitoes.

Delayed Reunions

Mosquitoes delayed the timely reunion of Lewis’s and Clark’s respective contingents after their month-long separation in the summer of 1806. Clark arrived at the rendezvous point, the confluence of the Yellowstone with the Missouri, on August second. The next morning, groggy from lack of sleep, he complained that

the Musquetors was so troublesome that no one of the party Slept half the night.    for my part I did not sleep one hour.    those tormenting insects found their way into My beare and tormented me the whole night.     they are not less noumerous or troublesom this morning.

Very early that morning he climbed a hill near the river to shoot one or two more bighorn sheep specimens, but “the Musquetors were So noumerous that I could not Shute with any Certainty and therefore Soon returned to the Canoes.”

On 8 August 1806, having passed the mouth of the Yellowstone but still pushing hard to catch up with Clark’s party, Lewis and his detachment underwent a similar crisis: “The men with me have not had leasure since we left the West side of the Rocky mountains to dress any skins or make themselves cloaths and most of them are therefore extreemly bare. I therefore determined to halt at this place.” Although the air was cold that night, Lewis had to admit that “the Musquetoes continue to be troublesome.” By the eleventh they were out again in full force.

Final Respite

On 2 September 1806, as they neared the end of their journey, the battle was still being waged, with intermittent triumphs. “The woods being the harbor of the Musquetors,” and the party “without the means of Screaning themsevles from those tormenting insects”—their “mosquito bars” had long since fallen to pieces—the only recourse was to camp on sandbars in the river where “the wind which generaly blows moderately at night blows off those pests and we Sleep Soundly.”

As the captains had predicted, mosquitoes continued to plague them almost daily for the rest of the way down the Missouri, until 9 September 1806, when Ordway noticed “the musquetoes Scarse.” Clark reserved his judgment for two more days before admitting that the little demons were no longer so troublesome. “From what cause they are noumerous above and not So on this part of the river I cannot account.” He reconfirmed it on the fifteenth: “We are not tormented by the Musquetors in this lower portion of the river, as we were above the river plat [Platte] and as high up as the Rochejhone [Yellowstone] and . . . above its’ enterance into the Missouri.” He wrote finis to the curse of the Culicidae on the seventeenth: “Day worm, but fiew musquetors.” Six relatively mosquitoless days later it appeared that they would be able to celebrate their return to civilization in relative peace from the accursed “musquetors.”

Considering the rages of mosquitoes that rose up to meet the Corps of Discovery head-on, day after day for three interminable summers, and for whose survival those 33 souls and a dog grudgingly surrendered countless cubic millimeters of their lives’ blood, one may wonder why Lewis didn’t take any scientific interest in those “interesting little animals”? To begin with, he was not specifically directed to do so by his commander-in-chief. Jefferson was confident that Lewis wouldn’t waste his time with species that were already familiar, and Lewis confirmed that in his journals many times. Besides, who could find anything new and interesting about mosquitoes.

What might Lewis have learned about them, had he sought to? What might he have discovered that would have inspired and delighted Thomas Say? Setting aside the issue of medical importance, which was as yet no more than casual curiosity by the most advanced scientists of the time, consider the character and variety of the experiences that the German naturalist and explorer Alexander Humboldt (1769-1859) and his botanist, Aimé Bonpland (1773-1858) recorded about mosquitoes on their journey through Mexico, Columbia, and the valleys of the Orinoco and Amazon rivers from 1799 through 1804.^[9]Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the years 1799-1804, written in French by Alexander de Humboldt, translated and edited by Thomasina Ross; 3 vols. … Continue reading For example, Humboldt wondered whether the Indians of the Orinoco valley painted their bodies with grease mixed with red and orange dyes primarily as decoration, or to repel mosquitoes.

Humboldt noticed that “an atmosphere filled with venomous insects always appears to be more heated than it is in reality.” The two men were severely tormented during the day by a species that Humboldt called a mosquito (perhaps a black fly, or Simulium), “and at night by the zancudos, a large species of gnat, dreaded even by the natives.”^[10]Zancudos, or “long legs” (see Figure 1), is a Spanish name for the species we call mosquito, and the English call gnat. He observed that in the Indian villages on the banks of the Orinoco, “the plaga de las moscas, or the plague of the mosquitos, affords an inexhaustible subject of conversation. When two persons met in the morning, the first questions they address to each other were: ‘How did you find the zancudos during the night? How are we today for the mosquitos?'” Lewis and Clark asked many questions of the Indians they met along the Missouri, but apparently not a single one about mosquitoes. If Lewis and Clark ever queried Indians as to how they coped with mosquitoes, or what they thought when they looked at the moon, there is no record of it. Humboldt heard from a missionary that a Salive Indian remarked, “How comfortable must people be in the moon. She looks so beautiful and so clear, that she must be free from mosquitos.”

Lewis didn’t look closely enough at mosquitoes to realize that he was swatting different species at different times and places. Humboldt, however, quickly learned at least to distinguish between the sexes. “Here as in Europe,” he wrote, “the males, which are distinguished by their feathered antennae, are extremely rare; you are seldom stung except by females. The preponderance of this explains the immense increase of the species, each female laying several hundred eggs.”

The geographical distribution of various species of mosquitoes along the rivers fascinated Humboldt. “It were to be wished,” he urged, “that a learned entomologist could study on the spot the specific differences of these noxious insects, which . . . in spite of their minute size, act an important point in the economy of nature . . . . The different species do not associate together, and . . . at different hours of the day you are stung by distinct species.”^[11]Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 276. Carl Linnæus refined the late-17th-century doctrine of the “economy of nature,” which embodies the concept that nature’s universe is complete; … Continue reading He could distinguish some of the differences between species: “I carefully examined and described upon the spot those zanducos, the stings of which are most tormenting. In the rivers of Magdalena and Guayaquil alone there are five distinct species.” Lewis might have made personal acquaintances with up to fifty different species between the Missouri and the Pacific Ocean,^[12]Richard F. Darsie Jr. and Donald A. Ward, Identification and Geographical Distribution of the Mosquitoes of North America, North of Mexico (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 217-221. … Continue reading including Aedes vexans and Anopheles quadrimaculatus, but it didn’t occur to him to look at them that closely. On the vernier of his sextant he had a magnifier of perhaps six power—a “microscope,” he called it—with which he could at least have discovered a few of the obvious distinctions between those two species (Figures 1, 2), but evidently he never thought of using it that way. On the other hand, it wouldn’t have made much difference if he had. There weren’t many scientists in the United States who were ready to face the mosquito’s music.

Humboldt’s discoveries in Central and South America, as well as in Cuba, were first published in French, in 23 volumes, between 1805 and 1834. He was a pioneer in the sciences of physical geography and meteorology; he observed the relation between altitude and temperature; his knowledge of astronomy and his curiosity about meteor showers soon led to some important discoveries by others. He introduced the technique of mapping climates by charting isotherms; he studied tropical storm patterns; he recorded variations in the earth’s magnetic intensity; and observed relationships between geographical environments and plant distribution. If Lewis had been as gifted a naturalist as Humboldt, the natural history of the American Northwest might have been quite different after 1806 than it was when the young Virginian left it. On the other hand, Humboldt’s writings on mosquitoes were not among his most valuable legacies, for the science of entomology, although far from new, was still in a disorganized condition during the decade when he and Lewis were exploring their respective, far-flung corners of the Western Hemisphere.