Rattlesnake Nightmares

 I had rattlesnake nightmares for years after I moved away from  my childhood home.  The reality of the dangers that faced barefooted children as they invented ways to spend summer school vacations came to mind again when a cousin emailed a story of his experiences on my grandparents sheep ranch.

Thanks for the snake pictures. They remind me of the "snake hunts" we had at the Tuovinen place in the 1940s. We hunted the dens on Sheep Mountain and Liisa Butte in the spring when the rattlers were coming out and in the fall when they were returning to the winter dens. I regret that we didn't take more pictures but on a good day we would get anywhere from a few rattlers to close to or more than 100 of them. In more recent years I did get a couple good snake pictures. Roger always kept track of where the good dens were and let us know when the snakes were active. The snakes seemed to use the same dens year after year but I suppose we never did find all of their dens. We drove nails into sticks made from small trees, usually chokecherries, and bent the nails over to use them as rakes to rake the snakes from the den areas. A couple of us would "sling" them down the hill and a couple others would kill them with sticks as they landed after flying through the air. It was advisable to stay awake when the snakes were being thrown down the hills so as not to get tangled up with them! It is interesting that, for some reason, only a few bull snakes would den up with the rattlers.
After the rattlers left the dens they would scatter over the surrounding prairie. I recall killing up to 20 of them in a day when lambing for Rudy and Mabel Mick in the Sheep Mountain Area. The sheep would let you know if a rattler was in the area as they would split around the snake and leave plenty of room. It was interesting that some horses were very frightened of snakes and others were not. I recall that a horse of Lahti's was bit in the nose two or three times - the fang marks were quite visible. The nose swelled up to about twice the normal size and it was difficult for the horse to eat for quite a while but it did usually did survive. I was using a small white horse that had respect for the snakes and managed to evade them, sometimes very quickly! When spending all day in the saddle I used to alternate one leg and then the other around the saddle horn. There is little or no chance of staying aboard when the horse moved quickly and I ended up on the ground more than several times as a result. A State snake hunter named Jackley used traps in the den areas and caught many rattlers with his method. The snakes would push a cellophane - covered entrance aside to get in but were unable to get out.

It reminds me of when we talked Aunt Jennie Tuovinen into cooking rattlesnakes for us (Roger Kuoppala and I). We, of course, had to prepare them for cooking. They actually didn't taste bad if a person could forget what one was eating. As I recall she fried them and the meat was light colored and tasted something like chicken. Also we saved the skins and tanned them to put over belts for effect. We used to get the rattlesnakes in the spring and fall when they were denning or coming out of the dens. On good? days we would get from 50 to 100 rattlers along with a few bull snakes which apparently denned with the rattlers. I recall on one of our trips to Sheep Mountain Uncle John Tuovinen was herding sheep in the area and when a rattler started into a hole Uncle John grabbed it and pulled it out. We thought that was either very brave or simply a not very intelligent thing to do.

This is a very abbreviated summary of some of my snake hunting adventures,