11•11•11 Rattlesnake Dispatcher, Take 4

November 11, 2011

Today is one of those weird numerical days, with the calendar allegedly doing this only once every 685 years:

11•11•11

In honor of this uno-alignment I switched gears on my "Not So Gentle Tamer" concept and did a black and white (actually scratchboard) of an Arizona Pioneer Woman dispatching a Mohave Ring-tailed Rattlesnake with a shovel.

This is in honor of several here, who remembered their grandmothrs dispatched rattlesnakes with a shovel rather than a hoe. Makes some sense. And yes, that is Thumb Butte in the background, so this is a Prescott pioneer woman. Here's the proposed text:

Not So Gentle Tamers

Although some have portrayed early Arizona pioneer women as being "gentle tamers" the image does a bit of disservice to the toughness of these women. Whether they were wrangling ornery kids, or dispatching, hogs, chickens, scorpions and rattlesnakes, the women who were in Arizona Territory had to be tough. Sometimes they didn't have time for gentle and we, their offspring, admire and thank them for their grit.

Or, something like that. Anyway, wanted to honor the pioneer women who made Arizona what it is today. Of course, not everybody agrees with our accepted history:

"History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there."—George Santayana