RATTLESNAKES 



389 



snakes, yet he had never known personally of any one 

 being bitten by one of these reptiles and dying from its 

 effects. 



Personally out of a dozen casies of people being bitten 

 by rattlesnakes coming under my direct observation, two 

 of them have died. 



Among my business ventures was a "Curio" store in 

 the city of Phoenix, Arizona, where we bought many 

 hundreds of baskets from the nearby Indians. One day 

 an Indian brought in n gunny sack two large wicked look- 

 ing rattlers. He seemed so cast down at our refusal to 

 buy them that he was finally given two bits for the two 

 which for safe keeping were dumped into a box covered 

 with wire netting. 



Phoenix was full of winter tourists and the two snakes 

 attracted considerable attention, so much so, that we had 

 a glass covered case made for them and they were regu- 

 larly installed as part of our "scenery" and they cer- 

 tainly justified their cost. 



Unfortunately, however, for our peace of mind the 

 Indian who sold us the first two, spread the good news 

 and we soon found ourselves facing a serious problem, 

 for snakes were daily coming to us in large and small 

 assortments, covering every kind of snake known in that 

 part of the world. 



We wanted to encourage the Indians into bring- 

 ing us their basketry work, so to keep them good natured 

 we established a regular price of twenty-five cents a 

 head for rattle- 

 snakes, no mat- 

 ter how large or 

 small, but we 

 had to draw the 

 line at all other 

 kinds of snakes. 



Thus we soon 

 acquired so 

 many that we 

 began to seek an 

 outlet for them 

 which we did 

 through an ad- 

 vertisement i n 



an Eastern sporting paper. This brought us orders from 

 every part of this country and many cities in Europe. 



Gila Monsters were added to our live stock invest- 

 ments and it was seldom we had less than fifty rattlers 

 or a dozen Gila Monsters on hand at once. Occasionally 

 the demand would be so great as to leave us without a 

 single specimen. 



We kept the most of them in a large open cage out of 

 sight of the public but had a fine glass covered cage which 

 held half a dozen unusually large specimens which we 

 placed in the store for public inspection. 



Ajmong other visitors to the snake case was a French 

 man named Michael Bourgenon. He was an educated 

 man with a scientific bent, who had travelled all over the 

 world, being especially interested in animals of all kinds. 

 He was a regular correspondent of several scientific 

 journals. 



A few weeks before the incident here related Bour- 

 genon attended the wonderfully interesting and im- 

 pressive Snake Dance given by the Hopi Indians of 

 Northern Arizona. He came to Phoenix from this cere- 

 mony thoroughly convinced that he could handle rat- 

 tlers quite as easily and safely as did the Hopi devotees 

 in their rites. 



At that time we had an unusually fine specimen of a 

 Diamond Back rattler, full six feet in length and as 

 large about the "waist" as a man's arm. Of all the rat- 

 tler tribe the Diamond Back is the most surly and savage. 



HE CROSSED IT x\OT ONLY ONCE, BUT SEVERAL TIMES 



Photographs by Will C. Barnes. 



ANOTHER MYTH EXPLODED 



The lower picture shows the rat- 

 tler well within the hair rope, 

 which legend has always claimed 

 he would never cross, a fallacy of 

 which the upper insert is "docu- 

 mentary evidence." 



