Now that it has cooled off, now that it is safe to walk the woods. . . .
I am a Kansan. I am an ophidiophobic. I come by it naturally. My ancestors were ophids. My descendants will be ophids.
When Kansas was settled in the 1850’s, many new arrivals came from the colder climates, especially New England. I can only imagine what these people from those regions thought when they arrived in Kansas and saw their first 10′ long bull snake. No, I don’t have to imagine; I mention their reactions in one of my books.
Even more than politics, slavery, Indians, or war, the folks who settled Kansas Territory were most concerned with the silent, slithering peril beneath their feet. Their diaries and mail back home aver as much. In a letter to those still in Ohio, one settler on the broad Neosho River in the southern part of the Territory wrote: “Mother, yesterday I saw a serpent crossing the river that was so long that when its head reached one bank its tail was still on the other!” Exaggeration or not, the man’s point was clear. Other settlers were shocked not only by the incredible size of the monsters, but by their nightmarish numbers as well.
In her rude woodland cabin near Baldwin City, Julia Lovejoy awoke one morning to find a huge rattlesnake coiled under her bed. After further search, she discovered another rattler “peering with sparkling eyes” from a cupboard just over the crib where her baby lay sleeping. One hot night a neighbor of Julia’s lay down to sleep on the cool floor with her baby. At some point during the night the woman rolled over and was bitten on the lip by a rattler. In a frenzy, the husband ran for help. Upon his return the man found his wife delirious; not only had her lip turned black and swelled to the size of her arm, but two more rattlesnakes were discovered in the cabin. Soon, the woman’s head and shoulders swelled to nearly twice the size. “As long as she could speak,” said a horrified witness, “she begged them to keep the snakes from biting her children.”
Not a guerilla raid or an Indian attack, but the event above was fully as traumatic as anything the frontier had to offer. “We can face a wild cat,” admitted Julia, “but let a copperhead or a rattlesnake make their appearance, and our courage is all gone.” Spoken like a true Kansas ophid.
Rare was that immigrant who was indifferent to snakes. Over time, however, reptiles became a normal, if frightening, fact of frontier life. Scratched James Stewart in his diary:
June Sun 10. Clear & beautiful, a good breeze. Killed a rattlesnake in the house this morning, wrote a letter and read.
For young Stewart, at least, poisonous vipers sharing a cabin had become almost too common to note.
I also ran across an account from an Ohio newspaper of the 1860s of a man mowing a railroad right-of-way with a two-handled scythe. Encountering a snake, the worker was so startled that he excitedly tried to club the reptile with the handle of his tool. Unfortunately, the business end of the sharp instrument came down like a guillotine and hacked off the worker’s head. Although this account took place in Ohio, judging by his reaction, I strongly suspect that the headless man was a Kansan who had fled east in hopes of escaping the serpents.
Related Articles |
