Wednesday, May 8, 2024
Fifty-cent bounty was offered by Coryell County Commissioners Court for each rattler brought to the courthouse.
The word “bounty” has often been described as a sum of money paid for killing or capturing a person or an animal. Bounties were frequently paid for wildlife creatures such as wolves and coyotes who threatened livestock. In other cases, criminals who had broken the law often had a bounty hanging over their heads.
In the 1960s, an unusual bounty was put into place when the Coryell County Commissioners Court placed a bounty on rattlesnakes. Examining the minutes from the Feb. 23, 1960, commissioners court meeting, it was found that a bounty was placed on rattlesnakes and that rewards were to be offered to those who killed a rattlesnake with a bounty of 50 cents on “all such reptiles.”
To collect the 50-cent bounty, snake hunters were required to produce the snakes’ rattles with at least one inch of “green hide” attached, have a statement signed by the landowner on whose property the snake was killed, and sign an affidavit that the snake was in fact killed in Coryell County.
Coryell County Judge Norman Storm reported that the county commissioners voted to pay the bounty after receiving requests for such action from several area ranchers.
Storm said, “We hope it will help decrease the county’s rattlesnake population. We also ask landowners to cooperate with the snake hunters by signing the certificates when rattlesnakes are killed on their land.”
Coryell County rancher, L.C. Blackmon, was the first man to claim a rattlesnake bounty. His ranch, located five miles east of Evant, brought in twenty rattlesnakes he had killed on his property. It wasn’t the bounty offer which sent Blackmon hunting snakes. One of his prize Angus calves had been bitten by a rattlesnake and Blackmon decided it was “time to clean house.”
The biggest kills during the opening days of the 1960 bounty season were engineered by veteran snake hunters Roy Anderson and Herschel Wilhelm who brought in a total of 47 rattles. By March of that year, area snake hunters had brought in a total of 154 rattles.
An article written by Bess Brown, an Ohio-Liberty community resident and newspaper correspondent, mentioned that the folks in her community congratulated the commissioners court for offering a bounty on rattlesnakes. “The men of this area have killed hundreds and are still killing more,” Brown stated. She continued, “Woodrow Parrish located some dens on the Elam Ranch. He found four very large ones that were out sunning, and he killed them.”
Gatesville resident, Stan Esparza, remembered hunting rattlesnakes when the bounty was still being offered. He was about 14 or 15 years old at the time. When asked if there were a lot of kids snake hunting for the bounty money, Esparza said, “Not a lot. A few friends of mine would go out and do it all the time.” He continued, “We would go in caves and outcroppings to find snakes. On the Charley Liljeblad Ranch there was Goat Cave where we would hunt.”
When asked about how many he would kill on a hunt, he said, “Eight or 10 maybe.” Esparza admitted that this was spending money for young folks his age. “It wasn’t a lot then you know.”
Esparza, like others during that time, often used gas fumes to coax the snakes out of their cracks and crevices.
“I had a quarter-inch piece of copper tubing, because you could bend it and roll it up, and we’d take a chicken sprayer and put gas in it and pump it up and stick it in the caves and spray gas in it. With the gas fumes, the snakes would come out because they didn’t like the gas fumes. We had one pole about eight feet long with a hook on the end of it, and we would grab them with it, and we had a 410 or .22 rifle to kill them with,” he said.
The rattlesnake bounty was offered during the first few months of the year when the weather was cooler and when snakes would be found in a den. “At that time of year, they [the snakes] sunned to warm up, and cows would step on them and get bit and that would either make a cow real sick or kill it, depending on how bad it was bitten,” Esparza said.
An article appeared in The Gatesville Messenger in April of 1960 about Luther Mensch, a deaf snake hunter from Flat. At 60 years old, Mensch showed up at the Coryell County Courthouse where he presented four rattles and collected his money from the county judge’s office. Being deaf, he was asked how he located snakes. He replied, “I feel the vibration of their rattlers and have no trouble finding them.”
In 1961, F.O. Mitchell, a farmer living in the Harmon community, killed a batch of 37 rattlesnakes in a den on his property. Mitchell was assisted by Z.O. Robinett on the snake hunt. They sprayed gasoline into the den, and then shot the snakes with .22 rifles as they came slithering into the open. According to a newspaper account, it was Mitchell’s first snake hunt, and he was quick to admit, “I was scared.”
The following year, C.E. (Smokey) Moore of Gatesville, whose hobby was snake hunting, turned in the rattlers from 71 slain rattlesnakes at the courthouse where he collected $31.50 in bounty.
In January of 1964, it was reported that Bill Jones and O.B. Jones hauled a load of 377 rattlers to the county courthouse where they collected $188.50 in bounty money. They told Judge Storm they had killed most of the rattlesnakes in a stretch of rough country in the northeastern part of the county.
Between 1960 and 1962, the county had paid a total of $4,100 in snake bounty. Paying $1,650 in 1960, $1,850 in 1961, and $600 as of January 1962.
An article addressing the rattlesnake bounty appeared in the Gatesville newspaper in 1971. James C. Kroll, a wildlife biologist and editor of ENVIRON at College Station, said that the rattlesnake bounty contributed to the lethal invasion of wolves in these parts.
Kroll reasoned that, “Rattlesnakes are competitors of coyotes (wolves); that is, rattlesnakes and coyotes feed on the same prey. Reductions in rattlesnake populations ultimately result in the increased rabbit and rodent populations.”
Kroll said that the wolves and coyotes turn to domestic stock such as sheep and goats, and he said that Gatesville area ranchers were experiencing a predator problem.
As compared to the 1960s when the county was attempting to rid the area of rattlesnakes due to the loss of livestock, today, with rattlesnake hunts and shows, Esparza noted, “Today, the hunters are interested in hunting them for the rattles, the meat, and the skin.”
