The other day, I found a book, The Cattlemen, by Mari Sandoz, that had been given my father as a birthday present by employees of the hospital way back in 1966.
Now, The Cattlemen is a classic written by the best author ever to come out of Nebraska, but for one reason or another, I never read it until now--although I've read pretty much all the rest of Sandoz's books.
(dutch508 by the way lives only a few miles away from the Sandoz homestead, on the western slope of the Sandhills of Nebraska.)
There was one comment she made, concerning rattlesnakes, that seems preposterous to me.
Now, I am probably one of only six or half a dozen native Nebraskans who has never in his life seen a tornado or a live rattlesnake (most, even those living in urban Omaha and Lincoln, have seen both); I dunno why that is, it just hasn't ever happened.
And Mari Sandoz (1896-1966), because of where she was born and grew up, was practically on a first-name basis with rattlesnakes, although for obvious reasons it wasn't any associations she was enthusiastic about.
I also must add that Mari Sandoz was notorious for being a very careful fact-checker, obsessed with ensuring that whatever she wrote was wholly accurate.
Okay, so in the book, she describes cattlemen from Texas trying out the Chisholm Trail after it was first devised during the late 1860s, when the land was still wild and raw. One time they came upon a herd of stampeding mustangs, barely escaping damage from that fracas.
I'm assuming this was in northern Texas or southern Kansas.
And then she goes on to describe the sight of the cowboys and cattle being spooked by the tell-tale hiss and rattle of something all too familiar to them. Upon cautious investigation, they find a nine-foot-long rattlesnake, its back broken by the hooves of the mustangs, but still very much alive and spitting venom.
She writes that it was as thick as a man's thigh.
No way.
But it's Mari Sandoz, remember, who was scrupulous about checking facts and avoiding hyperbole. She doesn't have it in quotation marks--"as thick as a man's thigh"--as of the speculation of a first-hand observer of the phenomenon, but rather as a clear and straightforward statement of fact.
I can't believe it, but it was Mari Sandoz who wrote it.
