ESPN Hunting

Editor's note: This is the first installment of a four-part story about March 9-11 Rattlesnake Round-Up in Sweetwater, Texas.

Part II | Part III | Part IV | Photo galleries

SWEETWATER, Texas — Terry Armstrong's 75-year-old mother, Joyce, died overnight in this town's single hospital. And yet, on this Wednesday afternoon, the stocky, intense Jaycees president is stamping bootprints in the dirt floor of the Norman County Convention Center, busy, buzzing.

"Before she died," Armstrong says, "She told me, 'No matter what happens to me, you have to do the Round-Up."

This is Sweetwater, and the business of rounding up rattlesnakes is paramount.

So Armstrong is here, making sure this no-frills concrete-and-corrugated steel joint that hosts rodeos and flea markets the other 51 weeks a year will make a suitable showplace for a nightmareload of live rattlesnakes.

In a couple of days, this west Texas burg, 40 miles west of Abilene, 220 miles west of Dallas, 10 miles east of north Nowhere, will host one of the world's great herpetological depositories as snake hunters from parts near and yonder tote in tons — literally, gross tons — of squirming, striking, stinking western diamondback rattlers.

Those snakes will be weighed, measured, milked, taunted, held, stroked, reviled, admired, decapitated, skinned, gutted, beer-battered, fried and devoured while their hides, heads and rattles are converted to hatbands, key chains and knickknacks.

Mostly they'll anchor the 49th Rattlesnake Round-Up, a carnival and spectacle that will draw 30,000 visitors in this town of 11,000. Says Scott Cagle of the Jaycees, the civic group that throws this bash: "This is the thing that keeps this little town going."

Armstrong's dedication says it, the wall-length rattlesnake mural in the downtown grocery store says it, the World's Largest Rattlesnake Round-Up billboard at the city limits says it, but the marquee at the Dairy Queen summarizes the week most succinctly: "SNAKES ALIVE." For the moment, anyway.

The Snake Hunters

The Jaycees pay top price for only the first 1,500 pounds of snakes — $3 this year (down from $5 last year, and as much as $10 in the early '90s) while subsequent snakes fetch as little as 50 cents a pound.

To ensure their catch earns the full ransom this year, hunters Dennie Braswell and Steve Rives arrive two solid days early, at 4 a.m. Wednesday, with about 1,200 rattlesnakes.

Braswell, out of the nearby hamlet Bronte, is a wiry old cuss, 69-years-old going on 55, with bright blue eyes that stay narrowed and a head full of white hair he keeps tucked under a cap.

After 30 years of snake hunting he suffered his first bite about a month ago, when a stray fang from a sack of snakes caught his right side above his belt. Then, a week ago, the same thing happened to Rives, who got stabbed in the back through his burlap sack.

"You'd think we'd learn," says Rives, a stocky, 56-year-old one-time emu farmer from nearby San Angelo.

The fang hit him "like a supercharged yellowjacket sting." Antivenom is supposed to be applied to the inside of the wound within a few minutes, so Braswell slathered the goop onto a mesquite thorn and stuck it into the fang-hole over his friend's shoulder blade.

"That was worse than the actual bite," Rives says.

The friends stand in the shade of the pavilion, leaning against a fence, until Braswell's friend R.J. Millikin arrives at 5 p.m. with a feather bed and a case of Dr. Pepper to help him through his turn at snake-sitting.

Tall and boisterous, Milliken has known Braswell since childhood. The two were drafted together, flunked out of the Army's stenographer school together and like two good west Texas boys should, beat the other enlisted men at dominoes with an elaborate code of curse words that informed each man what his partner held.

When Milliken notices a black scab on the side of Braswell's face, he asks, "Did they have to burn some cancer off of you?"

"No," Braswell says. "Billy goat got me."

He takes from his pocket a small square of mirror to examine his scab.

"This is what every true snake hunter needs," he says. He shines the mirror to suggest looking into a den. "This is how you get 'em."

They get to talking about snakes, and Milliken tells of a man he knew who could twirl a bull snake around his head and in cracking the beast like a whip, pop its head plum off. People were videotaping it.

"I just imagined them going off and saying, 'Look what they do in Texas! I've got it on picture!'" he says.

The men decided that the most comfortable and practical place for Milliken to spread his mattress would be on the tops of the 24 crates that Braswell had spent all night stacking on his trailer. Together the low, flat boxes form a surface that will seem almost flat beneath the mattress, so long as Milliken doesn't mind the occasional, muted rattle noises coming from below.

Final Preparations

Sweetwater is named for the eponymous creek that borders its east side, which was itself named for the flavor of any water to a person who crosses the shade-poor scrublands that surround it. (There must be something in the water, though; the town lies just a few miles west of Stink Creek Road.)

The economy was built on oil and ranching. Now the pillars are the concrete plant south of town, the gypsum plant east of it and the hundreds of wind turbines, each up to 400 feet tall and visible for miles, that line the mesa south of town (T-shirt for sale at the roundup: "God Bless Our Wind Farms").

If you want to get into a multi-level marketing scheme to sell jerky or makeup, this is your place. "AVON sold here — ask for Yolanda," reads a sign in the front window of one bar.

The genius of the Round-Up is that it turned a rancher's nuisance into a bounty to everyone from hotel owners (which take the opportunity to gouge, and how), to the vendors who on Thursday afternoon set up their tables, arranging snake parts and using Sharpies to dot pupils onto dead snakes, which lose all eye pigment when they're freeze-dried.

On the evening before the Round-Up, the rattlesnake parade winds down Locust Street, full of Shriners and fire trucks and floats and hopefuls in the Miss Snake Charmer pageant waving like royals, vertical forearms swiveling.

A snake with spray-painted sheets for skin and hula hoop ribs and a dozen pairs of kids' legs visible underneath it shuffled along in front of a Corvette. Another kid under an oversized snake head and a pillowy costume held up with suspenders threw candy from a pickup bed.

Three hours later a couple hundred townsfolk cram into the municipal building to rally pep for the nine Miss Snake Charmer contestants. No word on whether the casual wear portion swayed the judges, or whether her gymnastics in the talent portion was the key, or her credentials as a pole-vaulter and power-lifter were the clincher, but Jim Ned High School senior Jessie Gibbs left with the tiara and a $1,250 toward her tuition at Texas Tech this fall.

According to the programs printed for the event, she beat out a bassoonist, a stock car driver and a majorette, among others. Also, according the program, the Round-Up last year brought in 13,552 pounds of live rattlesnakes, with a long snake of 80 inches.

As pageant programs go, this is among the greatest ever. Consider it a preview.
Part II | Part III | Part IV | Photo galleries