Famed snake roundup offers a look into Texas’ culture wars
Sweetwater fends off calls to reform bloody event that injects pride, drives local economy
SWEETWATER — Miss Texas gripped the body of the decapitated Western diamondback rattlesnake, blood trickling onto her pink acrylic nails. Her silver crown glittered from the white overhead lights. The crowd cheered.
She looked focused as she pulled to separate the meat from the hide. “You got this, Averie!” someone shouted from behind her. “Put some muscle into it, girl!” another called. She wore a yellow plastic poncho to protect her Miss Texas sash from blood spatter.
Tens of thousands attend the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup each year, which this year collected 2,595 pounds of snakes from hunters around the state. Besides the snakes, there’s a carnival, flea market and gun show. There’s a halfmile row of vendors selling funnel cakes, corn dogs and even alligator-on-a-stick. Inside, you can buy deep fried rattlesnake.
It’s been a tradition for about the last decade for Miss Texas to attend the event.
This year’s honoree, Averie Bishop, donned camouflage waders and walked through the snake pits, handling the snakes, milking one and skinning one. But one tradition she decided to skip.
Behind her was a white wall decorated with the bloody handprints of children. Attendees could pay $20 to skin a snake, after which they were encouraged to press their bloody hands against the wall and sign their name. Most were kids.
“There’s an internal conflict, at least for me,” Bishop said, standing in the skinning pit. “Their intentions are good, to support farmers. But at what point does it become sport?”
“If someone’s going to do it, I’m not going to tell them not to,” she said. “We’ve all got to draw the line somewhere, right?”
Those seeking a distillation of Texas politics in 2023 could do worse than the rattlesnake roundup, even without the obvious snake references — a frontier hardship built into an unlikely economic engine.
Visitors now come from around the country, even the world, and it’s a source of deep pride for the community. But the exposure has brought pressure to reform.
Like Texas, Sweetwater has stubbornly resisted those efforts. The Jaycees who put on the event have successfully fended off political efforts to
stop or change the roundup for 65 years, mirroring the state’s conservative politicians, who are fighting to preserve their power and values in the face of a rapidly changing state.
More than one Confederate flag was on display on the grounds, and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott won 80 percent of the vote in Nolan County, where it is held.
About 10 paces from where Bishop skinned the snake, a teenage boy with a badge saying “official vendor” sold merchandise mocking Black Lives Matter, deriding President Joe Biden and promoting Donald Trump for president in 2024.
Yet now the same festival also featured Bishop, the first-ever Asian American Miss Texas. For her “year of service,” Bishop chose to promote diversity and inclusion.
She has visited the state Capitol to meet with lawmakers, she said, pushing back against political efforts there to censor books in school libraries or ban colleges and universities from instituting diversity, equity and inclusion policies, efforts that have been championed by Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
Bishop said her projects have been difficult given “the state’s challenging political climate.”
‘The Sweetwater Machine’
“You ready, gas man?” one Jaycee said, standing under an overhang of rust-colored rock on one side of a small canyon.
A number of Jaycees led a group of visitors from the roundup on a rattlesnake hunt on a ranch several miles north of Sweetwater. For $50, folks could learn the methods that have made Sweetwater the biggest — or at least the most famous — rattlesnake roundup.
The designated gas man held a plastic container attached to a hose with a mister on the end. Gasoline dripped onto the red dirt from the connection between the container and the hose. He fed the copper into a hole in the rock and pumped gasoline. Then they waited for the snakes to come out. When wind blew through the canyon, the smell of the gasoline still hung in the air.
Pumping gas fumes into rock cracks to chase out snakes still bunched together and lethargic from hibernation is the traditional way of rounding up rattlesnakes in spring. But as with other Sweetwater traditions, the practice has faced blowback in recent years from modern sensibilities.
There are 26 species of bugs classified as endangered that live in the rock features commonly gassed for snakes. An additional 130 bug species are rare and only found in those rocky habitats, known as karst.
Research shows that gas fumes are more lethal to bugs than they are to reptiles, so while rattlesnakes may be dazed and driven from the dens, it could be killing the bugs inside.
About 10 years ago, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department moved toward prohibiting snake gassing, not only to protect more susceptible critters but also to head off an onerous federal declaration under the Endangered Species Act to protect the karst bugs that could then stifle development in the rapidly growing Hill County.
The agency convened a task force of experts, with representatives of Sweetwater and of the Jaycees, to study the issue. Immediately, they faced resistance.
“The Sweetwater Machine is well rehearsed because many have tried to shut them down for many reasons. We were not trying to shut them down, but we were treated immediately as though we were,” said John Davis, a retired biologist from TPWD who led the multiyear effort to ban gassing. “We were met with the attitude that you’re just the latest person to try to shut us down, and you’re going to fail like everybody else.”
Sweetwater and the Jaycees made many arguments against the policy, saying the gasoline wasn’t actually hurting the bugs and that they gas the same dens and pull snakes out each year, so the fumes can’t be contaminating the areas.
In the end, the Jaycees were unable to present any evidence that their event would be ruined without gassing. On the proposed policy, there were 9,312 comments in support and 743 in opposition.
But, on the day in November 2016 when the TPW Commission was preparing to enact the policy, Davis dressed up and drove to the meeting, preparing to present, and his phone rang.
“They said they’re tabling it indefinitely. It had been pulled. It was literally that close,” Davis said.
For decades, the Jaycees have visited the Capitol during each legislative session, bringing their rattlesnakes. Lawmakers love handling and taking pictures with the snakes, and past visitors have included Gov. Rick Perry and Abbott. The Jaycees’ goal is to promote the roundup but also to build relationships. And when the state government considers a policy the Jaycees oppose, their spokesman said, they send a member back to Austin to meet with the lawmakers and talk with them.
The state Senate Committee on Water, Agriculture & Rural Affairs has jurisdiction over hunting policies put forth by parks and wildlife officials. Its chairman — then and now — is Sen. Charles Perry, who represents Sweetwater. His high school is less than 1 mile from the Nolan County Coliseum, where the roundup is held.
Davis said that Perry called TPWD and told them to drop the gassing proposal.
“It had nothing to do with science, it had nothing to do with public opinion. It had nothing to do with what, quote, the people wanted. It was all politics, very specifically one individual,” Davis said.
Perry’s office did not respond to requests for an interview or comment. Nor did the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
“At this point there is not enough support from either the community or legislative oversight for the department to move forward with regulating the use of gasoline to collect rattlesnakes,” says the last update on the official TPWD webpage.
“Environmentalists like to be lobbying against things like this.
But it’s what’s done, what’s always been done,” said Jeffrey Cornett, a member of the Jaycees, shortly before last weekend’s hunt.
‘Nice and pertective‘
Hotels in the town of Sweetwater sell out months in advance. An economic impact analysis commissioned by the local chamber of commerce estimated that it injects more than $8 million into the community each year, and the money raised by the event goes to local charity.
But this month, about 1,000 Sweetwater residents also received handwritten letters from schoolchildren around the country calling on them to transition the roundup from an event where the snakes are killed to one where they are not.
Like a lot of unpopular ideas in Texas, the idea came from California.
“We had always said when we write letters to Sweetwater they’re not going to listen to hippies from California,” said Emily Taylor, a biology professor at California Polytechnic University who organized the letter-writing campaign. “I don’t know, maybe they’re more likely to listen to these kids who love snakes and don’t want them to die.”
The letters included cartoon drawings of snakes, or simple messages such as “Rattlesnakes are really shy creatures” and “snakes actully are really nice and pertective animals.”
There were once roundups all over the country, but today, those where snakes are killed only happen in three states: Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama. Sweetwater’s is by far the most famous and is probably the largest, although data is scarce.
There is scant evidence the deadly roundups are affecting the snake population. At the same time, however, organizers’ attempts to portray the event as anything other than a bloody spectacle don’t always add up.
For example, the Jaycees frequently claim the event supports science, claiming that they collect data on every snake to provide to the state.
But “I don’t believe that has happened for some years,” said Paul Crump, the state’s herpetologist with the parks and wildlife department. Such information would be useless because hunters can come from anywhere to provide rattlesnakes to the roundup and that information is not tracked, other experts said.
Then, in the milking pit, venom is drawn from snakes into a glass vial. The Jaycees say it’s provided to the medical industry for use in research or the production of antivenom.
But the companies that produce antivenom or use venom for research say they don’t buy from rattlesnake roundups. They said they either have their own captive populations, or they source venom collected only under lab conditions, such as some zoos.
Sweetwater organizers disputed the characterization of their venom as useless, though they also declined to provide specifics.
“We kind of keep that private because companies don’t want y’all to know they’re buying from us,” said Dennis Cumbie, while standing in the venom pit last weekend. He said the Jaycees sign nondisclosure agreements about who purchases the venom.
Even the premise for the event is questionable. The event started, the Jaycees say, because there were so many snakes in the town; and that even today, without the roundup the town would be overwhelmed by snakes, threatening kids, pets and livestock. Experts are skeptical.
“I think that we have a deep ingrained fear of snakes as a species that transcends the particular culture of Texas,” Crump said. “And I think that Texans are disproportionately, especially historically, exposed to rattlesnakes and venomous snakes through the way the state developed over the past couple hundred years.”
In other words, Texans may have a particular dislike for rattlesnakes.
No argument, said Karen Hunt, president of the Sweetwater and Nolan County Chamber of Commerce.
“In West Texas, the mentality is that rattlesnakes are not our friends out here. Pretty much anybody would tell you if we see a rattlesnake in our yard, someone is going to get called to come in and kill it for you,” she said.
“There’s not anybody that I know of who’s going to say when you catch all those snakes, come and put them on my property.”