TRUE SNAKE STORIES.
Then we all got to telling true snake stories. Eatumup Jake said down on
the Republican River in western Kansas the rattle-snakes were awful
thick when the country was first settled. He said they had their dens in
the Chalk Bluffs along the Republican and Solomon rivers; said these
bluffs were full of them. It was nothing for the first settlers in that
country to get together of a Sunday afternoon in the fall of the year
and kill 15,000 rattle-snakes at one bluff as they lay on the shelves of
rock that projected out from its face. He said the snake dens were two
or three miles apart, all the way along the river for a hundred miles,
and when somebody would start in to killing them at one place, why all
the snakes at that den would start in to rattling. Then the snakes at
the dens on each side of where they was killing them would wake up and
hear their neighbors' rattle, and then they'd get mad and begin to
rattle and that would wake up the snake dens beyond them and start them
to rattling. And in an hour's time all the snakes for a hundred miles
along that country would be rattling. When these two hundred million
snakes all got to rattling at once you could hear them one hundred miles
away and all the settlers in eastern Kansas would go into their cyclone
cellars. But after the Populists got so thick in Kansas, if they did
hear the snakes get to rattling, they just thought five or six Populists
got together and was talking politics.
Then Packsaddle Jack told about a bull-snake family he used to know in
southern Kansas. He said the whole family had yellow bodies beautifully
marked below the waist, but from their waist up, including their necks
and heads, was a shiny coal black. The old man bull-snake would beller
just like a bull when he was stirred up. The old lady bull-snake had
sort of an alto voice and the younger master and misses bull-snakes went
from soprano and tenor down to a hiss. He said this family of
bull-snakes were very proud of their clothes, as there weren't any other
bull-snakes dressed like them, all the other bull-snakes being just a
plain yellow. And old Mrs. Bull-snake used to talk about her ancestors
on her father's side, and she called the scrubby willow under which they
had their den the family tree, and talked about the family tree half her
time. She never allowed her daughters to associate with any of the
common young bull-snakes, but kept them coiled up around home under the
family tree till they got very delicate, being in the shade all the
time. All the snakes in the country looked up to this family of
half-black bull-snakes and they were known by the name of Half-Blacks.
All the old female bull-snakes in the country around there, if they had
just a distant speaking acquaintance with Mrs. Half-Black, always spoke
of her as "my dear intimate friend Mrs. Half-Black." Old Papa Half-Black
set around all swelled up with unwary toads he'd swallowed when they
came under the family tree for shade, and while he didn't say much about
his ancestry and family tree, yet he was mighty proud and dignified.
Sometimes he would slip off from his illustrious family, and going over
the hill where there was a little sand blow-out and something to drink,
he'd meet some of the Miss Common Bull-snakes, and then he would unbend
a good deal from his dignity and treat them with great familiarity, and
after having a few drinks call them his sweethearts and get them to sing
"The Good Old Summer Time," and he would join in the chorus with his
heavy bass voice, and they would all be very gay. Of course, he never
told old Mrs. Half-Black about these meetings, cause she wouldn't
understand them.
But with all their glory this aristocratic family of half-black
bull-snakes came to an untimely end. One day there came along a couple
of mangy Kansas hogs and rooted the whole family out and eat them up as
fast as they came to them; rooted up the family tree also.
We all cheered Packsaddle Jack's bull-snake story.
We now all got to telling stories about fellows we knowed who had died
from mad skunk bites, said skunks creeping up on them in the night when
they were sleeping outdoors. When we got to the end of our mad skunk
stories we turned our attention to tales of friends of ours who had died
from rattlesnake bites. It seemed each of us had dozens of dead friends
who had met their doom by crawling into a roundup bed at night without
shaking the blankets only to find a couple of rattle-snakes coiled up
inside. The more we told the stories the more snake-bite antidote we
imbibed, till we got so full of the antidote it's safe to say that it
would have been sure death for any poisonous reptile to have bitten any
man in the crowd. Some of us wept a good deal over the memory of our
dead friends and other things, and all together this was about the most
enjoyable half day of our journey.