My folks bought a house up on the foothills on the east side of the Salt Lake Valley when I was a kid. Lots of rocks, sage brush, scrub oak, gullys, washes and undeveloped land. A boom was coming to the area and new subdivisions and commercial enterprizes sprouted around freshly excavated roads bulldozed from the hillsides. Houses got bigger and more expensive as they went further up the hillsides.
Building the big houses required a great deal of excavation, lots of rocks moved and snakes displaced. Then the big rocks were used as landscape features. I was into my Boy Scout years by then. Some of our camping trips were out into the desert instead of up into the forests. We saw lots of snakes, mostly garter snakes but a fair share of western rattlesnakes, some quite big. We learned the difference between them. All snakes then were non-protected wildlife, subject to the whims of whatever human the snake encountered.
Our first active scoutmaster had served in the Army in the Pacific in WWII. His philosophy was to generally leave the snakes alone as they would flee or hide. Those which didn't flee and were of any size could be killed, skinned, cooked and eaten, much as the rabbits and fish we shot and caught. We took a few big rattlesnake skins home to make things out of them but nobody ever succeeded making usable snakehide.
The second Scout Master had a more recent experience in the Marines, where he had trained as a long-range patrol scout, and he had considerably greater experience with converting wildlife to vittles. I learned to chop heads off with a shovel, gut and clean the snake, skin it and then cook the meat. Big snakes needed to have their flesh par-boiled for a while, to tenderize them, and then fried with bacon if bacon was available. Or, butter and some onion. They got dry and chewy without the added fat of bacon or butter. I found I much preferred eating rattlesnake to trout. Cottontails were somewhere in between.
A Saturday tour of the nearby University of Utah included a high point of seeing the researsch conducted using animals. We encountered cats and dogs with electrodes in their skulls. We saw cages of monkeys that were loud screamers and anxious to throw their feces at us. Then we encountered snakes, big snakes! in large glass terrariums. We were told that the snakes were collected and kept to obtain rattlesnake venom, which was used both in research and for manufacturing snake bite anti-venom. They "milked" the snakes for thier venom. They said all of the rattlesnakes in the lab had been caught within the confines of the Salt Lake valley, primarily in the rocky foothills of the east side, fairly near the hospital.
Three or four of us decided that we could supplant our lawn mowing and nightcrawler/worm selling businesses with catching live snakes to sell the U of U. Some time in the library taught us about snakesticks with lassos of heavy cord, which we made from broomsticks and screwed in eyelets and some good heavy cord. We read that the snakes could be dropped into white pillow cases and the cases knotted shut; the rattlers seemed to not to try to bite through the linen, which amazed me.
We commenced crawling around the rocky areas, particularly towards the end of the afternoons, when the big snakes emerged to lay on the hot, flat rock and sun themselves. We caught six or 8 middle- to big-size rattlers the first week and one of our older brothers agreed to drive us and our pissed-off prisoners up to the U of U's reptile wranglers. We were amazed at what we were paid for them!
The next week produced another dozen rattlers. On our arrival at the snake store this time, however, was a manager of the clinic and project. He examined and weighed our snake booty, counted out a small wad of bills, and then told us that these were the last snakes he would buy from us. We were juveniles, he couldn't do business with juveniles, the snakes were dangerous and he would be canned if one of us got bit during our rattlesnake squirm-ups.
I remember Jack O'Connor writing about an incident involving the eating of rattlesnakes. He was a professor at a university in Arizona. They lived in a flagstone house on the fringes of town. Ratlesnakes would slither onto their slate patio to sun themselves in the afternoon and O'Connor's wife would chop their heads off with a sharpened garden hoe. She cooked them and made them into the rattlesnake equivalent of chicken or tuna salad.
The professors' wives had developed a social circle that involved a rotating coffee klatch held at the homes of the couples. The women would discuss world events or the literature of the day while consuming cups of tea served on fine china, and small platters of finger foods, such as small sandwhiches, quartered, with their crusts trimmed off. When it was her turn to host the even, Mrs. O'Conner got out her best tablecloth linens, her fine china and silver and prepared a fine assortment of little pastries, trays of cut vegetables and dips, and a few plates of little meat salad sandwiches, on a beautiful white bread, quartered and with the crusts neatly trimmed away.
The highly cultured professors wives, many of them having advanced educations themselves, chatted as they sipped and nibbled. The little quartered sandwiches were a particular hit, and the women began a guessing game, trying to prompt Mrs. O'Conner to reveal her recipe and ingredients. She demurred, saying it was an old family tradition. The women began to guess, and were able to name some of the vegetables and spies in the salad, but not the meat. Guesses ranged from the obvious chicken to some form of tuna or white meat fish. Some of the women's husbands were bird hunters, they knew O'Conner was also a wing shot, and they began to guess if the meat may be some gamebird, such as quail, chuckar, pheasant or dove, to which she continually smailed and shook her head.
The party ended, the leftovers were divided to go home with some of the women. Finally, the informal but acknowledged leader of the group of wives said, "Eleanor, we are simply NOT leaving without the knowldege of the mystery answered as to what meat you served us in those remarkable sandwiches."
Mrs. O'Conner smiled demurerly and said, "Well, if you must know, the sandwiches were filled with a salad I made primarily from prepared Western rattlesnake, snakes I obtained on the very patio we lounged on, by killing them with my weed hoe. I could share the technique and the complete recipe with anyone who..."
The women all reacted strongly, yet differently from one another. One screamed loudly "RAAAAATTTTLESNAAAAAAAKE!" and ran outside. Some turned white, a couple vomitted, although they made it outside to the front steps and garden first. All left in distress.
Eleanor O'Conner wasn't asked to host any of these get-togethers ever again.
I can understand you city folks getting upset with a snake in your yard, just understand they do provide a good service in vermin control. We occasionally get snakes on the property, Mojave greens, sidewinders, and Western diamondbacks. The M.Greens are the only ones I will kill, just too dang dangerous to have around. I went out to the garden area one morning and found the sidewinder having breakfast, after it finished eating it was transported back out to the desert. The M. Green is now hanging on my grandsons' bedroom wall. To keep the snakes away, keep the rats and mice away, no food for the snakes, they'll stay away on their own.
