part0018

Might I suggest that you consider a companion column, “Rural Legends,” to be published alternately?

That’s a great idea. Several readers have sent me old stories that I would love to tell, but that scarcely fit my idea of urban lore .

The premise of this column is that the ancient art of oral storytelling continues in the present, with updated subject matter. So while I cannot simply alternate archaic and contemporary legends, I will devote an occasional column to a timeworn traditional legend that continues to circulate in new variations .

I begin with the story of “The Fatal Boot,’’ an American frontier legend which three readers have sent me recently .

“There is a rancher or cowboy who stomps the head of a rattlesnake after stunning it with a rope or quirt. The man sickens and dies within days .

“The man’s son or nephew inherits the boots, and he too soon sickens and dies. Then yet another male relative begins to wear the boots, then dies. And so it goes until someone takes a good look at the heels on the boots and discovers the rattlesnake’s fangs broken off and still seeping venom! ”

T.R. of San Antonio, Texas, says that he heard “The Fatal Boot” from his stepgrandfather, who was born in Kentucky. This version concerns hunting boots rather than cowboy boots. Three brothers are killed by the snake’s venom beginning with the oldest and proceeding to the youngest, just as adventures occur to three siblings in sequence in European fairy tales .

Speaking of the number of the deaths, T.R. remarked, “That has to be a record for one snake. ”

K.H. of Pasadena, California, received the story in a letter from a friend in New Mexico. A cowboy is killed by the rattler biting through the boot, and returns from a day of herding, dead in the saddle. It is assumed that he died of a heart attack .

In this variation, the cowboy’s older son dies next. But the boots are too large for the younger son, so he survives. Eventually the old boots are examined closely, and the lethal rattlesnake fang is discovered .

The variations in these three “Fatal Boot” stories, as well as the neat pattern of three generations or three brothers dying, mark this amazing yarn as folklore .

To check whether rattlesnake venom actually remains potent for years, I consulted Laurence M. Klauber’s definitive two-volume work Rattlesnakes: Their Habits, Life Histories, and Influence on Mankind (2nd edn., University of California Press, 1972), which tells all there is to know about rattlesnakes .

Debunking “The Fatal Boot,” Klauber examines both the structure of rattlesnake fangs and data from some actual experiments made with skin scratches from dried fangs. He contends that the legend wildly exaggerates the slim possibility of being poisoned from a broken fang of a rattler. The flaw in the story, he writes, is “the belief that the point of a fang could contain enough dried venom to do serious damage. ”

Klauber collected dozens of versions of “The Fatal Boot” legend from several Western states. But the earliest American example he found surfaced in the East, appearing in St. Jean de Crèvecoeur’s book Letters from an American Farmer published in 1782. There are also foreign antecedents for the story .

An updated American tall-tale version, collected in Texas, brings “The Fatal Boot” into the realm of modern folklore. A cowboy drives his pickup truck over a rattler, and one of the snake’s fangs becomes embedded in one of the tires. The driver takes the truck to a garage, where two mechanics die after being scratched by the lethal fang .