The most despised insect in North Dakota has been the mosquito. Always humming in your ear, with bites so itchy and painful, you slap yourself to kill one. One tale suggested that Dakota mosquitoes were especially unbearable because they had been cross-bred with wasps.
How did North Dakota fight mosquitoes in the past? There were four ways: a person could use a [head]-net, a smudge, stay inside, or – get used to it!”
At Fort Buford in 1877 every officer and soldier had to wear a “close-fitting head net,” and a hundred smudge fires were used to envelope the fort with smoke. Despite these measures, “there was no sleep or rest for the men,” and “some were nearly crazed by the torture.”
The smoke from the smudge fires came from throwing damp hay or straw or green wood or green grass on the fires, so that mosquitoes would stay outside the radius of the smoldering smoke.
But perhaps the best method of avoiding mosquitoes and their bites involved staying inside in the evening hours, but that required having tight-fitting window screens and effective screen doors.
But no matter how hard anyone tried to keep them out, mosquitoes came buzzing through the “twilight air” to become the “sleep-destroying bloodsuckers” inside bedrooms.
It was on this date in 1913, that the Bismarck Tribune published an article entitled “How to Fight the Mosquito,” advising that mosquitoes could be “kept away from porch or sleeping rooms” by using a “few drops of eucalyptus oil sprinkled on a cloth,” or “citronella” oil mixed with “oil of cedar” and “spirits of camphor.”
Some U.S. government experts advised, in 1901, that “chlorine gas,” made by mixing five spoonfuls of “chloride of lime” with 10 cubic-centimeters of “crude sulfuric acid” on a dinner plate would eliminate mosquitoes in a house. These poison fumes, later dreadfully used in World War I, were to be put “only in rooms not inhabited.”
More sensibly, homeowners burned pyrethrum powder, made from chrysanthemum flowers, which could kill mosquitoes – or to at least stupefy them.
In the 1950s, towns and cities across the state sprayed themselves with DDT insecticide and fuel oil, which was effective, but the DDT killed almost all living things.
The never-ending war against “Dakota mosquitoes” continues, with backyard bug-zappers, DEET repellent, and aerial spraying. But even today, we still say – “get used to it!”
The only victory comes in icy wintertime.
Dakota Datebook written by Dr. Steve Hoffbeck, MSUM History Department
Sources:
“How to Fight the Mosquito,” Bismarck Tribune, July 11, 1913, p. 8.
“Dakota,” Chicago Tribune, September 28, 1873, p. 7.
“Mosquitoes Bother,” Minneapolis Star, May 30, 1944, p. 1.
“Bighorn Stories,” Bismarck Tribune, July 20, 1877, p. 1.
“There is a Plague of Mosquitoes Upon Us,” Bismarck Tribune, July 12, 1908, p. 4; “Great Problem Solved,” Bismarck Tribune, August 8, 1911, p. 2.
“Fighting Mosquitoes,” Jamestown Weekly Alert, June 20, 1901, p. 3.
“City Launches Attacks on Mosquito Potholes,” Bismarck Tribune, May 3, 1952, p. 1; “Fighting the Mosquitoes, Minneapolis Tribune, June 1, 1947, p. 41.
