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Collection Highlights

Contemporary American Literature and Excremental Culture

American Sh t Mary C. Foltz

Static in the System Noise and the Soundscape of American

Cinema Culture Meredith C. Ward

On the Plain of Snakes A Mexican Journey Paul Theroux

Cycles of Hatred and Rage: What Right-Wing Extremists in

Europe and Their Parties Tell Us About the US Katherine C.
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 Snakes in
American Culture
This page intentionally left blank
 Snakes in
American Culture
A Hisstory
Jesse C. Donahue and
Conor Shaw-Draves

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Jefferson, North Carolina
 AlSo of IntereSt
by JeSSe
C. D onAhue AnD
erIk k. trump

American Zoos During the Depression:

A New Deal for Animals (2010)

lIbrAry of CongreSS C AtAloguIng-In-publICAtIon DAtA

names: Donahue, Jesse, author.
title: Snakes in American culture : a hisstory /
Jesse C. Donahue and Conor Shaw-Draves.
Description: Jefferson, nC : mcfarland & Company, Inc.,

♾
2019 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lCCn 2018058333 | ISbn 9781476662657
(softcover : acid free paper)
Subjects: lCSh: Snakes—united States—history. |
human-animal relationships. | Animals and history.
Classification: lCC Ql666.o6 D5974 2019 | DDC 597.96—dc23
lC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058333

brItISh lIbrAry CAtAloguIng DAtA Are AvAIlAble

ISBN (print) 978-1-4766-6265-7
ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4766-3453-1

© 2019 Jesse C. Donahue and Conor Shaw-Draves. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

front cover images © 2019 iStock

printed in the united States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
 Acknowledgments

We wish to acknowledge several people and institu-

tions for their help with this book. marget Dykens, the
archivist at the San Diego natural history museum, was
a wonderful help during the two trips that one of us made
to read through the laurence klauber collection. ellen
Alers from the Smithsonian Institution Archives helped
us with the William and lucille mann papers and gregory
raml facilitated our use of the roger Conant papers at
the American natural history museum in new york.
John Caltabiano, ellen palm, and matt lanier at the
Staten Island Zoo were of help; and we thank Doris Wes-
ley and kenn thomas for help with the Western histor-
ical manuscript Collection at the university of St. louis,
missouri; thomas Donahue for his translation of Afranio
do Amaral’s work; and thomas Zantow, our interlibrary
loan librarian, who cheerfully tracked down hard to find
sources that our library did not own. We also wish to
thank the anonymous peer reviewers secured by mcfar-
land who pointed out errors in our scientific writing
about snakes. Any biological mistakes about these amaz-
ing creatures are our own.

v
This page intentionally left blank
 table of Contents

Acknowledgments v
Preface: Dangerous Neighbors by Jesse C. Donahue 1

1. bitten: poor Americans and Snakes 13

2. Cures: the Strange and often painful treatment
for Snakebite before American Antivenin 43
3. Antivenin: bringing the real Cure to the united States 72
4. on Stage: traveling Acts, Circuses and Zoos 98
5. on Screen: Snakes in the movies, reality television
and Documentaries 122
6. In Jesus’ name: holiness and the handling of Serpents 153

Conclusion: Has Anything Changed? 174

Chapter Notes 191
Bibliography 208
Index 215

vii
This page intentionally left blank
 preface
Dangerous Neighbors
Jesse C. Donahue

As a child in the early 1970s, living on Storm king mountain near

Cornwall-on-hudson, new york, accidental visits with snakes were com-
mon. rock walls surrounding houses served as homes for snakes. these
animals and I sometimes literally ran into one another as I walked or rode
my bike by a wall and they darted out from the safety of their small caverns,
fearing the approach of a large animal. these were frightening encounters
for a small child, so I always ran home after them seeking comfort from
a parent. being good environmental stewards, my parents informed me
that I had nothing to fear from snakes and that they were more scared of
me than I was of them. but I was not so sure. there were times when the
black snakes, in particular, seemed aggressive, rearing up threateningly
and darting toward me. the snakes clearly perceived me much the same
way I saw them. from their perspective, I was a threatening giant near
their shelter and they wanted to defend themselves and seek safety. other
times, large black snakes scaled trees in our yard, making their way to a
sturdy limb to sun themselves.
the place we lived was aptly named because of lightning storms in
the summer that hit the mountain and sometimes hollowed out trees. We
had a couple of these lightning strikes on our property that split trees
down the middle, so previous home owners had placed metal rebars inside
one of the trees to preserve it, even though much of the center had been
gouged out by lightning. the rebars were placed in a step-like manner up
the center of the tree, and black snakes used them as a kind of staircase
to get to holes near branches and climb out onto limbs to sun themselves.
During one summer, we gathered together as a family on one of our lawns

1
2 Preface

Face of a western black rat snake found in New York State. They have a painful
bite and they are excellent tree climbers (courtesy commons.wikimedia.org;
https://snappygoat.com).

and watched in amazement as one large black snake suddenly appeared

out of a hole in the middle of the tree. he or she had climbed up the center
of one of the lightning- stuck trees and made its way out onto a long
branch. the snake was as long as the large and substantial branch on
which it was enjoying the afternoon sun—easily as tall as our six-foot-tall
father. these encounters left a lasting impression and turned me into one
of the millions of ophidiophobics around the world.
Some 20 years later, in the late 1980s on the opposite coast, my envi-
ronmentalist fiancé convinced me to take a backpacking trip to a breath-
taking group of mountains called the trinity Alps, in northern California.
As a child, he had spent many a lovely day there admiring the beauty of
the crystal-clear streams, lakes, and redwoods. After reading the map, I
expressed concern about hiking alongside “rattlesnake creek,” but he
assured me that the name of our destination did not signify the fact that
large numbers of this particular reptile lived there. he was wrong. next
to rattlesnake creek were large piles of rock made by gold prospectors
over a hundred years ago. We were struck by the challenge that these ani-
mals must have posed to miners who sought their fortunes in this rugged
 Dangerous Neighbors (Jesse C. Donahue) 3

part of the world. like the new england walls, these rock piles had effec-
tively created snake condominiums. We saw the snakes sunning them-
selves on top of the rock mounds, trying to catch the sunlight filtering
through the redwood branches. this time, however, they were large,
almost emerald green, rattlesnakes. even in my state of sheer terror, I rec-
ognized that they were absolutely stunning. their vibrant color, size, and
inherent dangerousness gave them a kind of beauty that seemed almost
magical. on our four-day trip, we saw, and nearly stepped on, three of
them. the trip was supposed to last longer, but the sheer number of them
started to get worrisome, and we headed home early. As far as we knew,
we were prepared if a rattlesnake bit one of us. Although we were both
college educated, including one of us with a graduate degree, neither of
us came from a medical field and so we had not read the best and most
up-to-date literature on snakebites. Instead, like many Americans, we were
burdened with the advice of the past. According to hiking and recreational
wisdom, we were supposed to have a snakebite kit of some kind with us,
which we did. Inside the kit, we had a razor, a rubber tube for a ligature,
some antiseptic, and bandaids. If one of us got bitten, we understood that
we should tie a ligature around the bitten limb, slice open the bite area,
suck out the venom, and then head to the hospital. All of this was highly
unpleasant sounding to me. It sounded, in fact, worse than the bite itself,
and I suspected that the whole idea made little sense. I had seen a friend
try to pierce another person’s ears, and even that simple procedure had
not gone well. If I got bitten, I could imagine screaming in pain, tears,
perhaps a few curses, and then a struggle with my fiancé about who exactly
was going to make the cut on my arm. In short, we were typical Americans
in that we were the victims of poor medical advice from the past, coping
with one of the most interesting, and sometimes dangerous, animals
among us.
As readers shall see throughout this book, these encounters capture
several of the findings of this book that examines Americans’ complicated
relationship with snakes. first, and most obviously, I encountered several of
them near my home or during an outdoor recreational experience. there
was not just one memorable experience, but repeated ones. Second, whether
or not snakes are a problem depends upon one’s perspective. to someone
whose height is half the length of the snakes and who also climbed trees,
they were dangerous. to my white, east Coast parents who worked safely
inside buildings, snakes were an interesting and crucial part of nature. third,
the kinds of snakes one runs into depends upon where one lives. An obvious
point, but one, as we shall see, that was often lost on writers from the east
4 Preface

Coast in the 18th and 19th centuries. fourth, much of America still
remains rugged and remote, which leads to snake encounters, particularly
for the pioneers who work, live, or spend recreational time in these places.
the miners struggling in the California mountains in the past capture the
types of occupations that placed people into accidental contact with snakes
historically. fifth, the snakes entertained us when we watched the black
snake scale the tree, and although we did not use the animal for profit,
many other Americans have, as we shall see. but the snakes were also
opportunists, using the rebar in the tree, and the rocks on the miners’
mounds, to their benefit. Sixth, snakes are unmistakably fascinating. As
much as I feared the rattlesnakes in California, I couldn’t help but marvel
at their dangerous beauty. this fear and fascination is woven into the fiber
of our beings through systems of culture and faith. And finally, both types
of snake were life-threatening under the right circumstances. We consid-
ered their venom before we went into their environment, because getting
treated for a bite would be painful at best, and life threatening at worst,
even in the late 1980s. And the cure still recommended among lay people
at the time was itself a barbaric act. We would have had little choice, as
far as we knew, however, because snakes were all around us.
my coauthor, Conor, and I are not alone in writing about snakes. the
literature about snakes is voluminous, but overwhelmingly it is found in
fields outside of popular culture and the history of medicine. existing lit-
erature on snakes is largely found in the natural sciences. Its primary pur-
pose is to scientifically identify snakes and their habitats for amateur
collectors and amateur naturalists. We wish to make it abundantly clear,
however, that this is not one of those books. this is not a biological guide
to snakes in the united States. Another subgenre of the literature that
comes a little closer to the purpose of this book involves current collec-
tions of stories or field research experiences told either by amateurs or
professional herpetologists.1 there is also a single study about the strug-
gles over enforcing protection for snakes (and other reptiles) through the
Convention on the International trade of endangered Species.2 Another
subgenre are medical studies that focus broadly on the scientific nature
of snake venom, the demographics of snakebites, and sometimes some of
the treatment protocols that preceded antivenin. 3 the closest study to
this one is a more internationally focused one by Drake Stutesman, entitled
Snake, that examines some central aspects of the relationship between
humans and snakes throughout the world.4
unlike these books, our work examines snakes primarily in American
culture and history from the 1800s forward. It is at once a book that we
 Dangerous Neighbors (Jesse C. Donahue) 5

hope will appeal to people interested in snakes, popular culture, history

of medicine, and animal studies. like History of Consciousness scholar
Donna haraway, we are interested in how these two species—humans and
snakes—have met. they are, in her resonant words, “entangled” with us.5
Writing about dogs, she (and others) note that they are the “other” who
have included “monsters, creepy crawlies, women, servants and slaves,
and noncitizens.” these “others” have a “capacity to induce panic in the
centers of power.” they induce “hyperphalia” and “hyperphobias.”6 Snakes,
and particularly dangerous ones, are the ultimate other in the animal
world. to examine this, we analyze how people encountered snakes, how
people tried to save themselves (or not) from interactions that went badly
(bites), how snakes have been used in entertainment, and the role of snakes
in American religious movements. this book draws on archival papers
from the San Diego historical Society, the American natural history
museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and circus archives. We make
extensive use of newspaper archives to share stories from around the coun-
try to illustrate what people experienced in the states that had the most
snakes. We also draw from medical journals, textbooks, and first aid man-
uals from a variety of organizations whose members came into contact
with snakes (particularly rattlesnakes) in the united States. through an
analysis of those texts, we show that some people were perceived as dis-
posable just as the snakes were. In this case, snakes did not cause panic
at the center of power, instead, we show that powerful voices downplayed
their danger to make themselves seem wise. there was a great divide
between humans and snakes, but it was primarily between white, privi-
leged writers from the east and snakes. Writers from the cities on the east
Coast either intentionally or unintentionally treated rural people, poor
people, children, and snakes as though they were either nonexistent or
disposable. We show that both species (human, and reptiles in the form
of snakes), however, have been opportunists and both have suffered dearly
for it, although some humans have clearly benefited the most. through
the use of these documents, we show that snakes have taken advantage of
our food, our shelter, and our water for their survival. humans, in turn,
have used snakes for economic gain in all kinds of ways, including enter-
tainment. unlike other animals who also benefited the human species,
however, snakes have fought back and inflicted significant damage on
humans in the united States and elsewhere.
Chapter 1 examines how Americans came into contact with snakes
in the 1800s forward, primarily by focusing on the encounters that went
badly. It is true that some people have always owned snakes as pets in the
6 Preface

united States and have had harmonious relationships with them. It is also
equally true that most snake encounters are nonviolent, and that both
sides leave one another alone and live together in harmony. newspaper
stories in the mid to late 1800s often covered the fact that parts of America
were inundated with snakes. rural pennsylvania and new york sometimes
found their hillsides swarming with black snakes or rattlesnakes. the
southwest was famous for its large numbers of particularly venomous rat-
tlesnakes, and the southeast and south had all of these snakes, plus a
healthy amount of cottonmouths as well. We are two species living among
one another constantly, and many times we can coexist.
however, many of the snake and human interactions did not end well.
And we begin by showing that self-appointed experts from the east Coast
perpetuated myths about human and rattlesnake interactions to make
themselves sound like reasonable, scientific, and fearless men. Contrary
to the facts, these authors made a variety of fictitious claims in newspapers
and other sources, including, for example, that rattlesnakes never bit peo-
ple. Americans who lived or worked outside of cities on farms, ranches,
railroads, the woods, and plantations, however, really struggled with ven-
omous snakes, particularly rattlesnakes, who bit them. poor people
encountered snakes during the day as they reached down to pick some-
thing up from the ground or to work the earth. And they met them at
night as both they and the snakes sought shelter in the slightly warmer
interiors of poorly constructed cabins or tents. these communities some-
times attracted more snakes than would have been present in the wild.
people brought grain for themselves and their livestock, the kernels
enticed rodents, and the snakes followed for the mice. later, in the early
1900s, when recreational hiking and outdoor wilderness sightseeing
became a trend, these kinds of Americans also learned about the sheer
number of snakes that surround us and they too attracted snakes to their
camps through food. 7 many of these interactions ended in bites that
caused dramatic pain and frequently death for humans and sometimes
the snakes as well. We review the many ways in which people were bitten
and the agonizing ways in which they died.
As a result of the frequent bites, many people needed medical treat-
ment for them, particularly from rattlesnakes and cottonmouth snakes.
In Chapter 2, we show that from the beginning, family healers, and later
doctors, in the united States had a variety of ways of approaching
snakebites, most of which were ineffective. early on, the treatment was
complicated by the fact that family medical providers, and later doctors,
were not herpetologists and sometimes struggled to know which snakes
 Dangerous Neighbors (Jesse C. Donahue) 7

were venomous. most could recognize a rattlesnake, but some venomous

snakes have mimics that appear like them. Were these poisonous too?
And how should doctors warn people about venomous snakes in the area?
Should they make it clear that venomous snakebites were a serious prob-
lem that they could not cure or would that call their medical credentials
into question? the answer was that they brazened it out. even though
they were not always sure which snakes were venomous and which were
not, they assured people that they could tell the difference. While almost
all of their cures were ineffective, they highly recommended them to others
in medical journals. this is explained, in part, by the fact that venomous
snakes do not always inject venom with their bites, so even when people
were bitten by a rattlesnake, they were not always envenonmated. part of
the problem, though, was that doctors during the 1800s simply provided
advice that was clearly not good. At their most benign, early doctors rec-
ommended herbal treatments that they claimed came from native Amer-
icans. Snakeweed wrapped around the wound was a popular option, as
was tobacco leaf in the south. much more commonly, however, doctors
recommended extreme measures, and instead of looking to science, they
took their inspiration from hunters who recommended violent and gen-
erally ineffective methods of ridding venom from the body. they suggested
shooting off bitten digits, placing hot irons on bites, injecting people with
strychnine or ammonia, and slashing the bite site and sucking out the
venom. everyone should drink whisky, they said, including small children.
most official group manuals recommended whiskey alongside the
other violent and ineffective treatments except two groups: temperance
advocates and outdoor organizations for girls. prohibitionists were par-
ticularly unhappy with the idea of prescribing alcohol and waged a long
war against its use for snakebites. they argued that alcohol addiction
ruined more lives than snakebites and bemoaned the “serpent” of the
saloon. they claimed, generally without evidence, that people faked their
snakebites to get whiskey at bars. they characterized working-class men
as drunkards who came to get some pain relief from alcohol when there
was little else around to help them. And they said that people should sim-
ply stay away from rattlesnakes, but offered no real way to cure bites. from
women’s recreational advocates we find no mention of the need to ply bite
victims with lots of alcohol and slash their bodies open with razors.
Instead, like the prohibitionists, they simply asserted that the girls should
just avoid snakes. If girls did not spend time around snakes, there was no
need to discuss how to cure bites. this evidence suggests that they
believed that, on some level, the people who were bitten must have
8 Preface

deserved it because they put themselves into contact with snakes inten-
tionally. this type of advice also showed that girls were not really deserving
of any actual information that might save their lives. If they got bitten
because they were hiking near snakes, then they should die.
luckily for Americans, some clear-headed scientists, soldiers, and
zoo directors took a more practical approach to the snakebite problem
and created an antivenin that finally worked. In Chapter 3, we show that
partly because soldiers and zoo workers were bitten, they realized that a
better cure was needed. unlike newspaper writers in cities who could dis-
miss the problem, these men saw the consequences of venomous
snakebites first-hand and experienced it themselves. they were inspired
by Albert Calmette’s famous experience with massive cobra attacks in
vietnam, which convinced them to seek a cure that used the relatively
new medical approach of creating serums to form resistance in patients.
this approach required injecting small amounts of pre-collected venom
in horses so that they built up an ability to fight the toxic effects of venom.
they worked with brazilian scientists who were already creating
antivenin—vital brazil and his protégé Afranio do Amaral. Do Amaral,
in particular, became the key figure in bringing antivenin to save Ameri-
cans even though other scientists, such as hideo noguchi, were conduct-
ing some important primary scientific research on the properties of venom
for the rockefeller Institute. but first, do Amaral, and later antivenin
researchers in the early 1900s, had to answer many questions. Was there
one kind of antivenin that would work for all snakebites in the united
States? or would they have to give snakebite victims antivenin from that
particular snake? Would antivenin from an American rattlesnake work on
rattlesnake victims from different countries with different kinds of rat-
tlesnakes? Did the same type of rattlesnake from different regions have
the same venom? Were some venoms more potent than others? Were there
different venom yields in different size snakes? how should they preserve
the venom? Did it have to remain a liquid, or could they dry it and recon-
stitute it later on? how long would it last? how much venom could they
inject into a horse or sheep at one time without killing it? how could they
keep getting the venom from snakes when they were working hard in their
laboratories and with animals in their stables to make the serum? And
who should get the antivenin? how would it get distributed? these were
some of the pressing problems that scientists, soldiers, professors, and
zoo directors faced in trying to help Americans bitten by venomous
snakes.
We show that to get the venom, antivenin researchers partly relied
 Dangerous Neighbors (Jesse C. Donahue) 9

on a network of amateur snake collectors who donated their snake col-

lecting work and venom extraction labor for free. men like martin Crim-
mins, a colonel in the u.S. military stationed in texas, and laurence
klauber, a businessman and amateur herpetologist in San Diego, captured
and milked thousands of snakes in their spare time. Sometimes they
shipped the snakes north, but typically they just sent the venom. like
those who preceded him, do Amaral found a significant source of income
in working with snakes at his state-sponsored butantan Institute in brazil.
he gave the antivenin to brazilians for free as a public health measure if,
for example, a plantation worker traded a venomous snake safely stored
in a bag. In this way he created his own free collection network to keep
venomous snakes coming to butantan. he and his associates milked these
snakes and created antivenin. the snakes were housed in what he called
a snake ranch that consisted of an enclosed area of small snake houses on
the grounds of butantan. his generous public health approach did not
apply as fully to the united States, however. Desperate for a cure in the
united States, zoo directors and a harvard university researcher invited
do Amaral to bring and distribute the cure to zoos rather than hospitals.
until the mid 1980s, zoos served as the holding places for antivenin
because they had workers who were bitten so often by a variety of poi-
sonous snakes, and because herpetology curators were among the very
small number of Americans who were publicly reachable and could cor-
rectly identify a snake. Significantly, do Amaral became the scientific voice
that also discredited the previous scientific dismissals of the snakebite
problem in the united States. he helped set up the first laboratory for
making antivenin at mulford pharmaceuticals, and he relied on his brazil-
ian connection with American railroads to help create a snake collection
process that kept venom flowing to his laboratory at mulford.
Americans used snakes for other commercial reasons besides
antivenin, however. In Chapter 4, we examine the ways that Americans
used black snakes, pythons, and rattlesnakes to make money through
entertainment as well. early newspaper articles, many of which come from
the east Coast, were often about black snakes. to some extent, this results
from the geographic fact that many of the earliest newspapers started in
the northeast where large black snakes sometimes outnumbered other
kinds of snakes. like the encounters with the black snakes discussed ear-
lier, Americans who lived in the rural northeast were repeatedly struck
by their size (black snakes can grow over six feet long) and their ability to
scale trees and other structures. they stressed the terrifying experience,
for example, of men working in the forest near their homes looking for
10 Preface

firewood only to come upon snakes who were as large as the trees they
passed. given how startling these experiences were, it is perhaps not sur-
prising that a kind of mythology built up around the black snake in early
America that made its way into newspaper stories that were fictional, and
somewhat erotic. they combined elements of the biblical story of the
snake in eden and the red riding hood folk tale. the stories served as
entertainment much like the horror stories of our day, stressing the perils
of loving the long, phallic symbol of the black snake.
the snakes’ entertainment potential, however, was best exploited by
two other more formal organizations: zoos and circuses. When zoos
formed in the late 1880s and beyond, they quickly spawned a new occu-
pation of exotic animal importer that brought all kinds of animals from
around the world into the united States. large snakes were among those
animals brought to coastal cities in the northeast and shipped to zoos,
particularly after the turn of the century. boas were the snake of choice
because of their size, beauty, and relative safety compared to other animals.
Zoos exhibited the animals for scientific education reasons, but also some-
times took them out for entertainment. Circuses, in addition, immediately
recognized their potential for theatre and included them in sideshow per-
formances, frequently with women to eroticize them. In this case, we had
two outsiders, women snake charmers and the snakes themselves, scaring
audiences out of their money. here, too, their size, phallic symbolism, and
controlled danger were the lure of the show. Snakes, in short, entertained
a fair number of Americans.
this trend continues to the present day, as we show in Chapter 5, by
examining and analyzing selected snake horror movies, reality television
shows, and documentaries. here we again see the way in which snakes,
and particularly rattlesnakes and pythons, are exploited for a great deal
of money. by reviewing snake eco horror movies, we show that the basic
narrative of the movies is recreated in reality television shows and docu-
mentaries even when they are supposed to be educational. We also explore
the ways in which some of the entertainment methods of circus snake
shows are still employed in reality television as well as documentaries.
We illustrate how the woman snake charmer has been replaced by the
male snake hunter by American media, and we show the unabashed focus
on making money from snakes in these reality tv shows. We argue that
although most circuses no longer have snake side shows, this kind of enter-
tainment still exists and is broadcast through reality television shows and
documentaries. unlike circuses that had a vested economic interest in
keeping the animals alive for multiple performances, the new snake
 Dangerous Neighbors (Jesse C. Donahue) 11

hunters, the stars of reality television and some documentaries, are killing
snakes on a massive scale. Snake death has been corporatized and sanitized
for television viewers.
In Chapter 6, we take a look at how the southern pentecostal move-
ment in the late 1800s and early 1900s developed a new, American form
of religious expression based on the abundance of snakes found in the
wild, mountainous region of Appalachia and other parts of the south.
these “serpent-handling” faiths drew inspiration from the gospels of the
new testament (specifically the book of mark), and made the handling
of serpents a primary sign of individuals who had received salvation
through the baptism of the holy Spirit. In this chapter, we review three
documentaries—1967’s Holy Ghost People, 1974’s People Who Take Up
Serpents, and 1991’s In Jesus’ Name: Taking Up Serpents—to illustrate how,
unlike the reality tv examples in Chapter 5, this manifestation of faith
emphasizes a distinct lack of fear in snakes, minimizes the entertainment
aspect of their use in a circus-like environment, and shows individuals
actively working to preserve snakes rather than kill them for profit (in
fact, one of the biggest problems for these churches is keeping snakes alive
and on hand). Also, because the majority of the followers of these faiths
are from poorer, rural areas of the united States, and the actual practice
of these faiths serves to separate the adherents even further from main-
stream society, this chapter will examine how the minority nature of the
serpent-handling faiths enhances the types of otherness discussed in the
first few chapters of this book.
A close, and illustrative, analogy to snakebite victims are wasp or bee
sting recipients. through those experiences, we see a completely different
rhetorical and medical approach to both the animals and the victims. like
venomous snakes, bees killed many people in America. people were killed
when they were stung in the neck by wasps that they had accidentally
ingested while drinking cider. others were stung on the face while working
outside and died within 24 hours. Some Americans were killed attempting
to get honey for their families. bee sting victims, however, were offered
much more rational, humane advice, and were never told to suck out the
bee venom by slashing the site, cutting out the poison sack, or cauterizing
the sting site, even though many people experienced anaphylactic shock
that killed them. even in the 1880s, bee sting victims were told to use
tweezers to pull out the stinger and then place a solution of methylated
spirits and water over the site. keeping the victim comfortable was also
recommended.8 So why the significant difference in the approach to treat-
ing the two kinds of encounters? much like the snakebite history, the
12 Preface

answers are found in the animals and their relationship with humans.
first, bees had their own interest group dedicated to keeping them alive
and beloved. farmers actively cultivated them and had a vested interest
in making them seem benign. honey bees also gave us something tangible
that we enjoyed, unlike venomous snakes who at best provided cures for
potential illnesses for their own bites or kept some rodent populations
down. And finally, bees were democratic in who they bit. there is no
escaping insect bites, so there was no one to isolate and marginalize as
deserving of their bite. In contrast, from early on, people bitten by snakes
were treated as an entirely different class, one that on some level deserved
their fate. the snakes themselves were treated as outlaws and biblically
condemned animals. to their great peril and ours we have always been
entangled with them.
 1

Bitten
Poor Americans and Snakes

“Although I have been interested in the subject for many years, I have
never met a man who has seen a fatal case of snake bite. More than this,
my friend Mr. Stewart Edward White, a noted hunter and explorer of
untrodden ground in regions infested by reptiles, has known of but one
case terminating in death which he believes to be authentic.”1
Samual Hopkins Adams, a “sportsman” from the east in 1910, assured
Americans in no uncertain terms that the threat of rattlesnakes and other
venomous snakes was a figment of their imagination, a bugaboo. People
who were concerned about them were child-like, “beguiling [themselves]
with ogre tales upon the terrors which lie just beyond [their] ken.” He was
writing for an urban, white, male audience who mainly went to the coun-
tryside to hunt or fish for recreation purposes. Another turn- of-the-
century author assured urban readers that Americans shared snake stories
that filled “the remoteness of forest and mountains” with venomous snakes
that really did not exist there. And still another writer, who claimed to
spend a lot of time outdoors in Montana, informed readers of the New
Northwest News, published in Deer, Montana, that “nobody was ever bitten
by a rattlesnake and no one ever will be.” It was hard to find an animal,
the writer claimed, who was less able to bite. The snake, he claimed,
“couldn’t bite” because its jaws were not hinged. It had no leverage to close
its jaws against one another, and even if it attempted a bite, it could not
pierce the skin. Imagine the futility of a man striking a hook into a log,
and that captured the biting power of rattlesnakes in the United States.2
The authors claimed the moral high ground of rationality, sanity, and
masculinity. They were full of bravado because they knew something about
the wilderness that their peers did not know. They were men of science,

13
14 Snakes in American Culture

not mythology and fear. And they were learned men who could write and
impart their wisdom on those around them the way a parent would tell a
child that there were no monsters under the bed. They described people
with concerns about snakes as child-like. Adams claimed to interview
ranchers and plantation owners who told him that snakebites were not a
problem.3 There were a few children killed, he acknowledged, but they
did not seem to count. Adams’ purpose seems to both demonstrate his
own virile outdoors masculinity and reassure other members of urban
areas of the northeast, who had no direct experience with snakes, that it
was safe to take up the new recreational pursuits championed by hunting
and outdoors groups in the early 1900s. William Hornaday, the director
of the Bronx Zoo in the early 1920s, also portrayed venomous snakes in
the United States as basically harmless. Rattlesnakes were unlike ven-
omous snakes in other countries in that they politely warned us about
impending bites through their tails. He had hiked many miles in Montana
and did not suffer a “moment’s fear.” The rattlesnake was a serpent with
a “timid and retiring disposition,” he reassured his readers. “If you
encounter one at a fair distance, say ten feet, it will either crawl away,
slowly and defensively, or coil and warn you to keep off. In its feeding
habits, in captivity, it is one of the most timid and nervous of all reptiles,
and seldom eats save when safe from observation and interruption. When
darkness falls, and the Reptile House is entirely quiet, the Rattler bashfully
swallows his freshly killed rat or guinea pig.” He described his “first exper-
iment” with a captive rattlesnake in which he placed a rat in its cage. The
rat ran over the snake several times and the rattlesnake simply moved
away. But then the rat ran over and bit the rattlesnake on the mouth.
Finally, like the classic American cowboy, the good-hearted snake was
provoked too far so it drew back and bit the body of the rat. Within about
13 minutes the rat was dead.4 The messages were clear: snakes were not
a real problem. They primarily wanted to live in peace and were quite
gentle. Hornaday’s message was again aimed at an urban, adult male audi-
ence, who at best might spend a few days in the wilderness.
The problem with the sportsmen’s arguments was that they were only
partly true. It was true that Americans were killing venomous snakes
whenever they felt even slightly threatened, and sadly sometimes just for
sport or their body parts. But it was equally true that Americans and their
animals were seriously injured and killed by venomous snakes on a fairly
regularly basis, until the invention of antivenin finally cut back on the
human and domesticated animal death toll. Not everyone was killed in
the same numbers, however. Urban, white, professional men, women, and
 1. Bitten 15

children were basically safe from the scourge of bites, unless they headed
out into the countryside. But everyone who lived and worked in the coun-
try—rural children, farmers, farm laborers, plantation workers, soldiers,
and livestock—to name a few, were seriously at risk. People who worked
directly with snakes because of their jobs, like reptile house curators or
snake collectors, were at significant risk as well. And contrary to the
puffed-up sportsmen, the toll that rattlesnakes and other venomous snakes
took in the United States and abroad was tragic.

Rural Children
Children in the country were particularly at risk because they were
frequently outside playing, exploring their surroundings, and less likely
to pay close attention to their immediate environment. Local newspapers
reported their deaths in brief obituaries, like the one from the Dodge City
Times that reported two children from the Medicine Creek area of Rooks
County in Kansas died from the effects of a rattlesnake bite.5 Sadly, how-
ever, there were many other stories of young children who were bitten. In
Montgomery, Alabama, on a Sunday afternoon in September 1886, three
children between the ages of two and six year old, “from a respectable
family,” were playing near their home around a hole in the ground made
by the roots of a tree torn out by a storm. The parents missed the children
as the evening progressed and went out to call them in for dinner. The
property was strangely silent when they found the children lying near the
roots of the tree. A rattlesnake had killed all three children sometime dur-
ing the evening. According to the newspaper report, the “bodies were ter-
ribly swollen and looked as if they had been bitten in several places.”6 In
another incident, a healthy eleven-year-old boy was bitten by “a viper” on
his left foot. Two hours passed before his parents knew that their son was
bitten and called the doctor. The doctor cauterized the bite area with
nitrate of silver and ordered rest. The boy barely slept, and his foot and
leg swelled grotesquely. The skin turned purple and by the next night he
was delirious. The following evening he was taken to a local hospital and
was unconscious. The attending physician wanted to amputate his foot.
When he regained consciousness he screamed in pain. The wound was
black at the site and violet and then lead colored as it progressed up the
leg. His stomach turned yellow. All of the blood vessels on one side of his
knee were swollen. Touching the area was agonizingly painful. He got
lucky and recovered, but spent several weeks in a very weak state.7 John
16 Snakes in American Culture

Moon, a young boy, was killed by a rattlesnake in Washington State. He

and his family ate groundhogs, and he was one of the members of the
family responsible for bringing them home. He had gone fishing one morn-
ing and then headed out to do this chore for his family. He had a sharpened
stick that he used to put into the holes in the ground where the groundhogs
lived. Unfortunately, he apparently reached into one of the holes and was
bitten by a rattlesnake. He wandered around for a while trying to make
his way back home. He had set out on a Saturday, but when he did not
return that day, the family assumed that he had gone to some of his nearby
relatives and did not look for him. Two of his brothers set out on Monday
to hunt for groundhogs as well and found his body, which by that point
was badly discolored.8 Murdyum D. Murphy, a nine-year-old girl, was sit-
ting outside in her yard in Arizona with her brothers and sisters. They
were chatting as they sat together when she reached her hand back to
steady herself. A rattlesnake struck her on the middle finger of her right
hand. The family sent for a doctor who tried his best to save her, but she
died in great pain.9
Children sometimes thought they could handle the snakes and unfor-
tunately were bitten. Thirteen-year-old Norman Wyman, of Lakeland,
Florida, went off early to school one morning and on the way there found
and caught a rattlesnake. He brought it to school to show the students
and teachers before classes started. Sometime during that period, he was
bitten, but continued to want to show the snake to his peers and teachers.
His teachers sent him and the snake home, pointing out that it was against
the school rules to allow them around people, and they urged him to get
medical help. In the process, he started to feel pain and by the next day
he was dead.10
In contrast to the fictional portrayal of an insignificant number of
rattlesnake bites by sportsmen, doctors who actually lived and worked
with rural people found the opposite. Robert Marshall, a doctor, reported
that his county had “quite a number of snake bites” that season in 1885.
And “many of the cases” were “fatal.” One boy was bitten by a very large
rattlesnake, presumably on the foot or leg region. He was unable to stand
on the foot, was nauseated and vomiting, had a feeble pulse, and was gen-
erally deteriorating. This boy recovered, unlike the others who died in his
county.11 In Volga City, Iowa, a little girl named Nellie Klugman was bitten
and killed by a “huge rattlesnake” in her backyard on August 2, 1889. She
was walking from her house to the backyard when a rattlesnake “over ten
feet long” rose up and bit her.12 The venom from the large snake killed
her. Twelve-year-old Maynard Sheldon, from Sioux Falls, South Dakota,
 1. Bitten 17

was bitten and killed in the same way. He too was just playing in a field
when he stepped on the rattlesnake and it bit him. It was the largest people
had seen in years.13

Poor Rural People

Rural people lived and worked in areas throughout the country where
venomous snakes had not yet been exterminated, as they had in cities in
the Northeast. These were poorer people who lived in areas spread
throughout the country from rural Pennsylvania to the midwest, and
throughout the southwest. They primarily encountered rattlesnakes, but
also had dangerous experiences with water moccasins, as they carved out
a living for their families, built poorly constructed houses in the relatively
uninhabited wooded areas, and hung out laundry to dry on the prairie.
Sometimes it was not clear to people on the prairie whether they were lis-
tening to the “ominous clicking” of grasshoppers or the rattle of a rat-
tlesnake. To be sure, occasionally the experiences of westward-moving
settlers was dramatized for effect. There were too many reports of snakes
crawling into tents and into beds for the sake of warmth. Men were sup-
posed to have slept quietly all through the night, perfectly aware that a
rattlesnake shared their tent, understanding that at first light it would go
on its own way if they left it alone.14
Newspaper articles from the mid 1800s forward, however, show that
many people were bitten. Frequently there is little to the story because
the person died and there is simply a note about his or her passing. Stories
generally amounted to a line such as this one (paraphrased): B.F. Whittick
of Fort Wingate was killed by a rattlesnake.15 Or, in their news about people
in other places, the Day Book paper from Chicago reported that Dr. Von
Ossinski was “dying from [the] effects of rattlesnake bite.”16 When the sto-
ries were more elaborate, their purpose was often to share “cures” with
others in that region who might find themselves in the same predicament.
In these cases, the victims often lived, although it is not at all clear that
the treatment they received helped them, but the stories give us insight
into who was bitten. A rattlesnake bit a 24-year-old young man named E.
Madrigal on the back of the hand near the little finger. The man lived in
Bibo, Arizona, so the Holbrook Argus paper (from Holbrook, Arizona)
relayed the story in great detail as part of the work of a Santa Fe surgeon
named Dr. O.S. Brown, who made a “super human effort” to save the man’s
life. He was bitten one day and it took a full day to reach Winslow, Arizona,
18 Snakes in American Culture

where the doctor resided. In the meantime, his arm had swollen so much
that the skin was bursting.17
But we do get longer descriptions of the ways that rural people were
bitten. Sometimes they came into contact through their poorly con-
structed homes. This was the case of a woman from Texas. On May 30,
1927, a Texan woman was sleeping on a pallet with her nine-month-old
son and husband on her screened back porch. She awoke with a terrible
pain in the middle of her forehead where she had was bitten by a rat-
tlesnake that had come in through a hole in the floor of their newly con-
structed house. She woke her husband and asked him to look for what
had stung her so that it did not get the child. The husband lit a match and
saw a rattlesnake near his child’s head. He tried to kill the snake with a
hammer, but it escaped through the hole in the floor.18 She was not in a
tent, but the story suggests that if she had been, the snakes could easily
have gotten in there as well.
Other times poor people were bitten while trying to get food for their
families, either through some kind of gathering activity in the woods,
hunting, or farming. Some people in the 19th century were “bark peelers,”
an occupation in which they worked in the woods of West Virginia, har-
vesting the bark from hemlocks and oaks for leather tanning. Hemlock,
for example, had a high tannic acid content that was used to make the
leather less water soluble and gave the leather its deep reddish-brown
color. Oak was used for the same purpose, but gave the leather a lighter,
yellowish color. In the process of gathering the bark in the woods, the
peelers came across rattlesnakes and copperheads, who liked the cool,
fresh bark and curled up inside small openings at the base of the trees.
When the peelers pulled back the bark they were bitten by the snakes.19
A doctor reported that there was a “fatal case of rattlesnake bite” in his
own neighborhood when a man shot a rabbit for dinner and then saw the
rabbit try and get away by dragging itself into a hole in the ground. The
man placed his hand in the hole to feel for the rabbit, but found a rat-
tlesnake instead who bit him on the bottom of the palm of his had, where
the joint joins the wrist, a location where there are significant veins that
could carry the venom quickly throughout his body. He died from the bite
in about twelve days.20 Geo Manly was bitten on his ranch in Kingman,
Arizona, when he was turning flood water out of his irrigating ditch into
the river about 100 yards north of his house. The snake bit him in the
throat while he crawled under a bush. His family found him dead less than
half an hour after he was bitten. He was swollen grotesquely. The under-
taker came for the body, but would not let the family see him because of
 1. Bitten 19

his swollen state. Even after the undertaker did his best to preserve the
body, the family could “never imagine a human being looking so terrible.”21
The family was too poor to pay for the funeral, so they reached out to oth-
ers to help them cover the costs. Another case was that of Antonio Fer-
nandez, who was cutting johnson grass near Frio City, 12 miles from San
Antonio on August 31, 1946, when a rattlesnake “jumped at him and
caught him on the left forefinger and hung on until he shook it off.” He
had to walk about two miles to get a ride to the R.B. Green Hospital.22
Professional and amateur fruit pickers were bitten by venomous
snakes in the United States, as they were in the rest of the world. Fruit
pickers supplied hotels and grocery stores with berries at a time when
large farms that grew berries were scarce. Poor people who lived in rural
areas earned money in this way. The problem was that the berries that fell
off of the bushes attracted mice, and the mice attracted snakes. As a result,
patches of berry bushes were rich with snakes of all kinds. Huckleberry
pickers in New York, for example, risked bites from copperheads that hid
in the bushes waiting to ambush the mice that fed on the berries. People
bitten by copperheads sometimes became unmanageable during the sub-
sequent fever. Frank Fritz and a friend were picking blackberries in Penn-
sylvania on the York County side of the Susquehanna River, in a place on
a mountain known as “Devil’s Hole,” when a copperhead bit him on his
finger.23 Later two men had to hold him down in his bed when he devel-
oped a fever. A woman was gathering strawberries, and was crawling along
on her hands and knees to do so, when she was bitten in the lower part
of the leg by a snake. She saw the creature, and recognized it as a large
yellow rattlesnake, common in Iowa. She was more than half a mile from
home, but she made it to a creek where she washed the bite and “made a
sort of plaster of clay, and tried it on, then walked home.” Henry Gravers
from Winslow, New Jersey, was in a field in back of his house picking
blackberries. While he was picking he found a rattlesnake lying in the
bushes a few feet from where he was working. Instead of simply backing
away, he found a heavy stick to use to kill the snake. He tried to kill it a
few times, but it defended itself and bit him. He went home in severe pain
where he tried every kind of cure he knew, but in a short time he was in
agonizing pain and he died late that afternoon.24 Luther King, better
known in Florence, Oregon, as the Rattle Snake King, was also bitten while
picking blackberries in the mountains of Idaho. He disturbed a rattlesnake
which then bit him near the knee. It was extremely painful, but he dragged
himself home. He recovered, but was one of many people who claim after
being bitten that he suffered other negative health effects for years until
20 Snakes in American Culture

he died. He called it the “serpent’s curse” and had deep pain in his leg,
struggled with his appetite, and had sleeping problems. At the end of his
life, he said that he looked forward to dying to be rid of the long-term side
effects of the bite.25
The story that nicely captures the economic divide of human and
snake interaction comes from Pennsylvania in 1880. There was a pictur-
esque little village there called Erwinna that was set among hills that over-
looked the Delaware River. The New York Times reported that “prominent
people” went there to vacation in the summer, including “Judge Woodhull
of Camden; Mrs. John Drew of Philadelphia” and Colonel Scovel, the south
Philadelphia politician. They stayed in hotels that local people supplied
with fresh blackberries. The columnist interviewed a man, nicknamed
“Rattlesnake Pete,” who the unnamed columnist described as a “tramp
naturalist” who had grown up in the Blue Mountains, near Sussex County
in New Jersey. He was one of eight children, and they lived in a cabin in
the woods. Their house was surrounded by snakes, including at times rat-
tlesnakes, so he got used to fearing them and heading for the house when
he heard them rattle. Once he was out playing with the neighbor children,
and one of the boys was bitten on the leg by a rattlesnake and died within
a day. His father, who “peddled” berries, showed him how to kill them
when necessary. There were “millions of berries” near their home, but
they had to keep their eyes open because the area was thick with snakes
as well. They always carried big sticks, and he had sometimes heard a few
of them rattle at the same time. He was almost bitten during a picking day
with his family. His sister was picking berries and startled a black snake,
who in turn scared her. She took off running, and in the process ran by
and surprised a rattlesnake who then wanted to defend itself and started
rattling. Pete chased down and killed the rattlesnake with one of the sticks
they brought to protect themselves. Later in his life, Pete made money by
catching the rattlesnakes and skinning them to sell their hides to the same
wealthy tourists who ate the berries in the hotels.
Farmers were also at significant risk. G.E. Martin, a farmer in Lub-
bock, Texas, was plowing his farm when he hit a rattlesnake den. He
reached down to get an object to kill the snake, but the snake bit him on
the hand instead.26 In another case, two brothers, working on different
farms, were bitten on the same day. They were in the fields on their respec-
tive farms; one was bitten on the ankle and another on the wrist. A third
man, located nearby, was building a fence around his farm and was bitten
when he stepped on a rattlesnake.27
Pennsylvanians were sometimes inundated by snakes. Reading, Penn-
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