Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

15. Colonel Crimmins, the Rattlesnake Venom Man

✥ 15 ✥ Colonel Crimmins, the Rattlesnake Venom Man In july 1926 a young man named Jesús Ramirez and a friend were walking down the highway from Asherton, Texas, to Eagle Pass, hoping to find work in the border town. The two men stopped to rest for a minute, and Ramirez was bitten on the arm by a rattlesnake. His companion flagged down a car and they were driven to the Eagle Pass hospital, where Ramirez was given first aid and put to bed. The next morning the Maverick County sheriff, Albert Hausser, was told about the incident and was also told that Ramirez was not expected to live through the day, as a rattlesnake bite in those days was considered to be fatal. Hausser recalled that he had read about a new rattlesnake-bite serum that was being developed at Fort Sam Houston. He got on the phone, called the San Antonio Light, and explained the situation . A few minutes later, he got a telegram from Colonel Martin Crimmins at Fort Sam that read “Major Scott with rattlesnake serum leaves Kelly Field immediately for Eagle Pass.” An hour and fifteen minutes later, an army biplane set down in Eagle Pass with the serum and Ramirez’s life was saved. The story made every paper in the United States and most of them in Mexico. The Piedras Negras paper carried it with an imaginative drawing of the young man lying in a hospital bed, clutching his arm and looking hopefully out the window at an approaching airplane. The caption below read, “The Airplane That Arrived in Time.” What the newspaper stories did not say was that it was Colonel Martin Crimmins who developed the life-saving serum, by exper60 ✥ imenting on himself. Crimmins, who was a frequent visitor to the Big Bend in the 1930s and a much-beloved docent at San Antonio’s Witte Museum until his death in 1955, was a professional soldier who first got interested in snakes when he was in Mexico in the Pershing Expedition of 1916. He was stationed for a while in the little town of El Valle, Chihuahua, and to relieve boredom, he started hunting rattlesnakes. He sent two live specimens of a variety he had never seen before to the Museum of Natural History in New York by shipping them in coffee cans. The hard part, Crimmins later said, was persuading the snakes to coil up inside the cans. After he finally got them in, an army photographer came by and wanted a picture of Crimmins holding up the snakes, and he had to shake them out and do it all over again. They were the first live rattlesnake specimens ever received by the museum. They were later classified as Crotalus lepidus klauberi, a lethal rattlesnake . Crimmins had collected the specimens barehanded by sticking one in an old sock and tying it to his belt; he put the other in an empty field-glass case he was wearing around his neck. Crimmins’s interest in rattlesnakes continued after he came back from Mexico and was stationed at Camp Bullis, outside of San Antonio. Colonel Harry Henderson recounted to Crimmins’s biographer, Chris Emmett, an unforgettable experience: he was once met at the padlocked gate to Camp Bullis by Crimmins, mounted on a magnificent horse and holding a writhing rattlesnake in each hand. “I am Colonel Crimmins,” he introduced himself. “I came to bring the keys.” He indicated which pocket they were in, and Henderson extracted them while Crimmins held the snakes at arm’s length. “I found these two magnificent specimens along the trail,” he explained. Crimmins became interested in developing an antisnakebite serum from snake venom when he learned that an average of five soldiers a year suffered snakebites at Camp Bullis. Doctors in New York and Brazil were experimenting with producing serum by ✥ 61 inoculating horses with successively larger doses of snake venom until they became immune, and then using blood drawn from the immune animals to manufacture the serum. After his retirement from the army in 1925, Crimmins became involved in these experiments , some of which included milking venom from live rattlesnakes . This was done by propping the snake’s jaws open with a clamp, holding its head over a glass or dish, and repeatedly pressing a gland in its neck, which forces the venom out of the fangs and into the container. Crimmins was milking rattlesnakes...