Katherine McHale was truly a woman of the Colorado prairie.
She was born July 25, 1893, in the log cabin home of her parents, Wallace and Albina McHale. The McHales had a homestead nine miles east of Longmont.
Kate was the couple’s second child. Her upbringing on the Colorado prairie would serve her well throughout her life.
Kate was a resourceful woman, which she demonstrated many times during her life. In 1923, she filed for a homestead of 640 acres. The land included a small irrigation pond, and was located about four miles east of Platteville and just north of Hudson.
Kate built her own cabin and proved up her claim.
This was dry land; farming was difficult and water was very precious. Through irrigation, the South Platte River and various tributaries supplied water.
Kate brought a few cottonwood saplings from the river which she planted near her cabin, hoping they would grow and provide shade on the hot dry prairie. Kate was able to grow various vegetables, wheat and rye. She raised chickens and sold the vegetables and chicken eggs for income. In time she was able to purchase a few milk cows. From the cows’ milk she made butter and sold it at the area market. It was a meager existence, yet Kate persevered.
As hot and desolate as dry farming was on the eastern Colorado prairie, the winters were also a trying time. The cold northern winds seemed unceasing, and the blowing snow often turned into blizzard conditions. That first winter spent on her homestead, Kate experienced the force of winter weather.
Despite the heavy snowfall, Kate chose to saddle her horse and attend to a few errands. Along the way, her horse stumbled and she fell. Knowing she had broken her arm, she made a feeble attempt to grab the horse’s reins. The startled horse kicked her and broke her collarbone.
Miraculously, Kate managed to make her way back to her cabin. With the help of her neighbors, she was able to seek medical attention.
One of those neighbors, a single father by the name of Adamson, who worked as a farmhand, offered to help Kate with her homestead as she healed. When Adamson later found himself in financial difficulties, Kate returned the favor he had granted her. She offered to take in his youngest child, an infant boy named Ernie.
In time, Adamson, seeing that his son was loved and well cared for, allowed Kate to adopt him.
Snakes In The Grass
Early on the morning of Oct. 28, 1925, Kate heard gunshots in the direction of the pond on her land. It was not an unusual incident, as duck hunters often frequented the area near the pond, despite the “No Hunting” signs Kate had staked around the pond on posts. Kate’s common practice was to saddle her horse and pack her .22 rifle after the gunshots ceased, and ride to the pond to collect the dead fowl left behind by the hunters. This day was no different.
After Kate saddled her horse and packed her rifle, Ernie, who was then 3, in front of her in the saddle and rode toward the pond. Leaving her son in the saddle Kate dismounted and tethered the horse to a bush about 40 feet from the pond. She grabbed her rifle and opened the gate to enter the pond area. At the gate, Kate saw a coiled rattlesnake ready to strike.
She shot it immediately.
Perhaps the report of firepower alerted the snakes in their nearby den. Three more emerged, slithering in Kate’s direction. Unflinching, Kate shot them all. Then, the rattlers began to appear from all directions.
Kate thought quickly. With no time to reload, she pulled the fence post from the ground and began beating and stabbing the slithering reptiles. The battle went on for an unbelievable two hours. During the horror, little Ernie’s cries must have been heartbreaking, but there was nothing Kate could do for her son but beat back the snake invasion.
Finally, when it seemed as if she had killed all the snakes, Kate cautiously retreated from the area. She rushed to comfort her child and gave her horse a grateful pat, relieved that the animal had not thrown the child from the saddle.
Nearly exhausted, her hands bloodied and bruised, her dress splattered with blood, Kate slowly rode back home. Along the way, she noticed a neighbor in his yard and stopped to tell him about the ordeal. The man offered to go back with Kate to the site and collect the dead snakes. The neighbor’s wife took little Ernie, while Kate and the gentlemanly neighbor rode back to the pond.
At the gate area to the pond, Kate and her neighbor gathered all the snakes together. They counted 140 dead, bloody reptiles. Several were over three feet long. They put them in three washtubs and took them back to Kate’s homestead.
Kate hung the snakes, one by one, on her clothes line to dry.
The news of Kate’s horrific ordeal quickly spread through the rural community. A local newspaper reporter hurried to the area. Kate’s neighbors directed the reporter to her homestead. After interviewing Kate, the reporter asked to see the snakes.
She led him to the yard where the reptiles hung, drying in the autumn air. Ecstatic over the photo possibilities, the reporter helped Kate hang the snakes over a nearby fence for a better photo opportunity. When this grisly task was completed, the reporter took several photos of the dead snakes and a few with Kate Slaughterback standing next to them.
Rattlesnake Kate
The photo of Kate and her snake kill was splashed on the front page of the newspaper. In the accompanying story, the reporter dubbed her “Rattlesnake Kate.”
The moniker caught on, as did the sensational photograph.
The Associated Press picked up the story and fed it to newspapers as far east as New York City. From there, the photo and story made headlines in England, France, Germany and Mexico.
Back at her Colorado home, Kate devised a way to capitalize on her newfound national fame. She took a few classes in the art of taxidermy. And she used the skill to cure the reptiles until she decided what to do with them. Then she carefully skinned the snakes and removed the rattle tails, preserving both.
Kate created a flapper style dress, a popular fashion of the 1920s. In her bizarre contribution to cultural fashion of the day, she used four of the larger snake skins to make the bodice of her dress and 43 more for the skirt. Then she carefully fitted the two pieces together, creating her snakeskin flapper dress. Kate kept the dress inside a trunk to preserve the reptile skin. Pleased with her new-found skill, Kate sent her design to the United States Patent offices in Washington D.C.
Kate then used more dried snake skins to fashion a pair of shoes, a belt and a neckband. With the rattles of the snakes, she made jewelry including earrings, necklaces, and bracelets.
She became she was a favorite guest at local functions, where she always wore her trademark snakeskin dress, matching shoes and belt.
She expanded her new popularity as Rattlesnake Kate. She began an active campaign to hunt rattlesnakes. The live snakes that Kate managed to capture were then carefully placed in a pen she built behind her home. While it is not known if Kate utilized the snake meat in her cooking, she did use the snake skins from those she killed in her various odd creations, including stuffed snakes, which would then be sold to tourists. Kate charged two dollars for just a snakeskin and one dollar for the rattles. This was an incredible amount of money in 1925.
Kate managed to milk her rattlesnake reputation for more profit. Literally.
With her nursing background, Kate knew of the need for snake venom in medical treatment. So she contacted a research laboratory in Los Angeles, California, which gladly agreed to purchase her snake venom. From the snake pen, which held up to 30 snakes at a time, Kate would milk the live snakes by poking them with a stick that she had attached a sponge at the end. When the agitated reptiles put their fangs into the sponge, it absorbed the venom. This action was repeated with a new sponge each time, until most of the snakes had bit into the sponge. Then Kate would carefully squeeze the venom from each sponge, into a container to send to the California research lab.
She repeated this routine once a week.
This was both dangerous and time-consuming. She soon tired of the task and simply cut off the snakes’ heads shipped those to California. She soon learned from the scientists that they were interested in the venom, not the heads. It made no difference to Kate. At two dollars per snake skin, she was making more money without personal risk of milking the venom.
The dry plains of northeastern Colorado were part of the Dust Bowl area, and hard hit by the drought conditions of the early 1930s. Most crops died. The wind blasted the few that survived.
Kate experienced the force of the wind on many occasions. During a severe windstorm, her hay wagon was overturned, and her unbound hay blew across the prairie. During another major gust of wind, all of Kate’s baby chickens, nearly 50, were blown away and never recovered.
In 1932, Kate, then 39, received a jolt of a lifetime. She hurried on day to finish feeding her livestock before a storm rolled in, and opened the metal gate just as a lightning bolt struck the gate post. The bolt knocked her unconscious.
She lay at the foot of the gate post for nearly five hours, while her 11-year-old-son Ernie did what he could. To Ernie’s extreme relief, Kate woke, seemingly with no severe injuries.
As the Dust Bowl years gave way to the Great Depression, Kate, along with most Americans, felt the effects of a struggling economy. Without a steady income, she used her goat pen to hide a small still where she made "moonshine," which was illegal during the Prohibition era.
She instinctively knew that the stench of the goat pen would not only keep authorities from inspecting the area should she be caught in her bootlegging scheme, it would also conceal any alcohol smell. That is not to say that Kate was indifferent to her small goat herd. She was known to care for a sick goat in the warmth of her home.
Unfortunately, Kate’s foray with illegal homemade booze did not generate the needed income. She had to sell sections of her homestead. When she was forced to pay back taxes, she sold yet another section of land.
Then with only 80 acres remaining of her original 640-acre homestead, Kate, at the age of 43 faced yet another economic struggle. America had entered World War II. Determined to hold on to her remaining property, Kate managed to make a living by again selling her garden vegetables, goat milk, and fresh eggs.
Following the war, Kate continued selling her farm goods and even managed to save money. By the end of the decade, she began saving money to begin the construction of a new home on her land. In 1952, Kate began the process of building her house. It was to be her new home and she would build it herself.
It was a five-year ordeal during which she lived in a converted chicken coop.
Kate, weighing barely a hundred pounds, poured the concrete herself, erected the framing for the four-room house by herself, and roofed the structure by herself. Finally in 1957, Kate’s new home was finished. To celebrate the occasion, she bought a brand new potbelly stove.
She lived alone in her four-room house for the rest of her life. She was once asked in an interview by a reporter from the Rocky Mountain News if she was lonely. Kate replied, “I’m not lonely. I have a lot of people who drop in.”
In September 1969, Kate donated her famous flapper-style snakeskin dress and her various snake-made accessories, as well as the rifle she’d used to shoot the first four snakes, to the Greeley History Museum. Perhaps it was an act of nostalgia of days gone by, or maybe Kate knew her time was at an end.
Shortly after her generous gift to the museum, Kate was hospitalized at the Weld County Hospital in Greeley. Three weeks later, Katherine McHale Slaughterback, “Rattlesnake Kate,” died at the age of 76, on October 6, 1969. Several friends, admirers, and the curious attended her funeral. She was buried in the Mizpah Cemetery in Platteville.
The Greeley Tribune ran Kate’s obituary and a feature story recounting her rattlesnake massacre of 1925. The story brought new interest in Rattlesnake Kate. The City of Greeley’s Centennial Village group bought Kate’s four-room farmhouse with the intent to open it for tourists. However, the house had been neglected for years and needed costly repairs and refurbishing that was not in the budget.
In the summer of 2002, the Greeley Museum purchased Kate’s house for $495. The only item salvageable was Kate’s potbelly stove. This was retrieved and placed in storage. The home was then disassembled, with each piece of lumber being numbered. Museum staff as well as volunteers moved the lumber to the Prairie Section of Centennial Village.
There, with photographs of the original house as an aid, the numbered lumber pieces were reassembled. Kate’s prized potbelly stove was placed inside the completed structure.
Today, “Rattlesnake Kate’s,” home, is opened to the public at the Centennial Village in Greeley. Her family still shares stories with the local museum visitors in the town.
