Grasshopper Cross

The parish's own account differs from the bronze. The 1989 National Register nomination for St. Peter's Church dates Father Boucher's pilgrimage to 1874 and makes it thirteen miles, a chanted triangle from the church cemetery to the Montagne farm two miles west, on to the Morin farm six miles north, and back again, with the three crosses raised a short time afterward. It adds that two years later Boucher led a Rogation Day procession and the crops were spared once more. Father Joseph Barre renewed the pilgrimages from 1931 to 1933.

What the plaque says

Grasshopper Cross The second rude cross erected on that miraculous day in May, 1876, when Father Pierre Boucher led his pilgrimage of Catholics & Protestants on an eleven mile trek seeking Divine Intervention in the grasshopper plague, was where you see the large white wooden cross a few rods south. Their prayers were answered, the grasshoppers up and left. Erected 1966 by O.E. LaFleur and wife in memory of Adelor & Sarah LaFleur and State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ponca State Park — 5.7 mi
  Oak ravines and bluffs at the downstream end of the Missouri's last unchannelized reach in Nebraska, with a three-state overlook and the river's resource and education center.
• National Music Museum — 18 mi
  One of the great collections of musical instruments in the world, on a college campus in a prairie town, built around a band teacher's thousands of horns, fiddles and curiosities.
• Spirit Mound Historic Prairie — 23 mi
  A lone hill north of Vermillion that Lewis and Clark walked to on a scorching day in 1804, now one of the few places left where you can stand exactly where they stood.

More markers nearby

• First Election in Northwestern United States — 3.8 mi
• Elk Point — 4.0 mi
• First Flour Mill in Dakota — 4.5 mi
• St. Peter's Church Jefferson — 4.6 mi