Bushmaster by Dan Eatherley

Bushmaster by Dan Eatherley

Author:Dan Eatherley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2014-12-31T16:00:00+00:00


Raymond Ditmars extracts venom from a cottonmouth pitviper (Agkistrodon piscivorus), c. 1935. “It’s part of my job,” he once said. (© Wildlife Conservation Society)

ONE Sunday afternoon in July 1893 a twenty-two-year-old woman was bitten by a diamondback rattlesnake. Newspaper reports told of an “immense” serpent advancing on the girl, “writhing, curving, and bending,” rattles sounding, “little beady eyes . . . aglow with anger.” Before the victim could react, the creature had “whipped itself into coils” about the “thoroughly alarmed young woman,” then sank “venom-tipped fangs” deep into her delicate neck just below the left ear. The reptilian assailant was a native of Florida but the shocking incident occurred in the heart of New York City. And in front of a paying audience.

The victim was a snake charmer known as Dot Sonwell and the serpent, five feet in length and almost three inches thick, one of her props. Dot, who was portrayed as “dark-eyed, frail,” and “comely” with “yellow fluffy hair,” had been free handling venomous snakes for several years in a number of East Coast cities. At the time of the accident she was drawing crowds at George H. Huber’s vast dime museum on East Fourteenth Street in lower Manhattan alongside bear wrestlers, a pig circus, and an armless and legless man. Appearing on a small platform in a short yellow dress, the entertainer was preparing for the latest of six routines she performed daily. Dot gently drew snakes one by one from a perforated wooden chest. Fondling each in turn, she fixed them with a hypnotic stare before draping them over a rail. But the large diamondback, one of three recently shipped north, was in no mood to be charmed. It wriggled free from her grasp and struck.

Dot is said to have given “one terrible scream, and with the slimy coils about her fell to the floor unconscious,” her neck and face swelling “to enormous size.” As one hundred and fifty panicked spectators along with several “freaks” dashed for the exits, George M. Jansen, the museum’s superintendent, carried Dot to the dressing room. There, Eagle Bill, a fellow performer, tried sucking venom from the wound while a pint of whiskey was forced down the patient’s throat and ligature applied to her upper arm. Dot was rushed “dying” to St. Vincent’s Hospital, although later recovered, which surprised everyone; several newspapers had reported her death.

This wasn’t a first for Dot, who had suffered bites four times previously, including one at Huber’s not three weeks before, leaving her “weak, and in no condition to handle the deadly diamond-back rattlesnakes.” Asked why he allowed Dot to perform again just two days after she’d been discharged from hospital, Jansen, himself a former snake charmer, replied, “We felt bound to re-engage Mrs. Sonwell to give her a chance to recoup the heavy expenses of her recent illness. I particularly asked her if she were ready to go through her performance and although her arm was still black and blue from her last bite she assured me she was perfectly recovered.



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