The World's Sneakiest Snake: The Mythical Hoop Snake
Y'all ever seen a hoop snake? It's the oldest terrestrial cryptid in America.
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One of the most feared, venomous snakes in North America is the dreaded hoop snake.
If you, dear reader, have been unlucky enough to have seen one, you’ll know that, at first blush, our reptilian friend appears to be pretty normal-looking, black snake. Not at all uncommon, if you’re familiar with the Texas woods and prairies near where I live. You might mistake them for another one of the fastest snakes in the southwest — the coachwhip snake. Or you might think they’re a cottonmouth (called regionally the “water moccasin”).
But no.
These are different. They’re the only snake — not just in North America — but on the whole planet that has a highly venomous stinger on its tail. It’s rock-hard and looks like a horn at the tip of its tail. In fact, for many years in early colonial America, it was called the “horn snake,” for this peculiar spike that it uses to secure prey while it goes in for a ferocious bite.
Unlike other venomous snakes, the hoop snake’s venom glands aren’t in his fangs — though they’re fearsome enough — no, it has several attached to its tail spike that appears much like a rooster’s spur. They’re the only snake in the southwest with spurs, and much like the rattlesnake’s, well, rattles, this horn sheds keratin with each time a snake sheds its skin, growing larger with each molting.
In adulthood, this gives the snake it’s most unique evolutionary advantage. You see, when threatened or angered, the snake can take a chomp on its tail, securing its head to the horn on its tail, and form itself into a hoop.
Once it does, the snake begins rolling — and can reach incredible speeds. One of the few surviving early researchers reported the snake can reach speeds of nearly 60 miles per hour, and faster downhill (presumably where the scientist went).
The best way to escape a hoop snake is to jump a fence, as the fence posts and slats (because it’s traveling as vicious speeds for a snake) can confuse the snake — and cause it to think that the fence post is a much larger, meaner snake.
But sometimes, being as ornery as it is, the hoop snake just doesn’t care — and it’ll try to fight the fence post.
Now, you’ll recall that the hoop snake has a very potent venom. So potent, in fact, even a tiny dose — 0.001 ppm, smaller than the head of a pin — can cause near-instant death to whomever is unlucky enough to be in range of its horn. The hoop snake can range as far as Maine, to the northeast, and what few reports have come out have called it the “blasted” hoop snake — due to the severity of the wounds caused by the snake. The victim’s limb swells up like a balloon, and death comes soon after.
When someone can distract it by making it fight a fence post or a tree — the venom is so powerful it can cause the bark of a tree to shed right off. Some trees have a unique interaction with the snake’s venom, and when pierced by the hoop snake’s horn, it can swell and explode — looking as though the tree has been blasted by lightning.
One of the ways East Texas farmers learned to deal with the hoop snake’s incredible, boundless rage is to use bois d’arc wood for fence posts — one of the few kinds of trees immune to the snake’s venom, due to it’s high amounts of silica. Elsewhere, farms and ranches protect against hoop snakes by painting wood with turpentine.
In one account, an Arkansas man was unlucky enough to use a piece of shattered wood as a toothpick. He was dead before sundown. In another case, in southern Mississippi, local legend has it that a hoop snake was so upset after a coyote escaped from it that it took one look at a nearby rock and whipped it with its horn.
That rock promptly cracked open and began expanding. The snake kept whipping it, and eventually it grew into a large mountain that still stands today, called Hoop Snake’s Peak.
Now, you might think this is a tall tale —
And you’d be right.
But the hoop snake has been with Americans for most of our history. It’s our oldest terrestrial cryptid (creatures from folklore that nobody’s proven to exist — think Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster), and its history actually does cross over with American science.
The story’s been around nearly since the colonial era. And it’s spread in folklore and legend across the U.S., most famously rolling its way into the legends of Texas’ favorite son, Pecos Bill.
At a time, in the 1930s, there were so many reported sightings that herpetologists (snake scientists, but not just snakes — all reptiles) figured they needed to look into it. One of them, one Raymond Ditmars, put a bounty out for the snake, offering $10,000 (an absurd amount at the time), for the first person to produce definitive proof of the hoop snake.
He’s best remembered as the first truly definitive and exhaustive work on reptiles in North America — the aptly named Reptiles of North America in 1936. Fascinating guy. He was also a naturalist and early filmmaker. He’d follow up that bug-thumper of a work with the Field Book of North American Snakes in 1939.
Needless to say, nobody ever claimed his reward, but he did give it a scientific name and classification as a cryptozoological animal — Serpenscirculosus caudavenenifer.
Likely — it’s a case of mistaken identity. No native peoples are known to have their own hoop snake legends, though a similar symbol has existed in European folklore for many, many centuries (the ouroboros — the snake eating its tail, a symbol for eternity and cycles of nature) .
There’s been several potential candidates for the snake that inspired all these legends, but there too, none of them have been definitive. In the Southwest, the sidewinder (Crotalus cerastes) has been pitched as a potential. In the northeast, it’s the Eastern black rat snake (Antherophis alleghaniensis). Here in Texas, the common mud snake (Farancia abacura, which actually does have a pointed tail, though it isn’t venomous) and the quick-moving, black, eastern coachwhip snake (Masticophis flagellum) are other candidates.
And yes, if you’re wondering, Ditmars’ bounty for the hoop snake is still in trust in the original bank account — if you ever happen to catch one. Though, it seems that, even if anyone has encountered the hoop snake — nobody’s lived to tell the tale.
So what about you, happy campers? Y’all ever seen a hoop snake about? Have you lived to tell the sordid tale?
What’s your favorite local cryptid in America?
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Til next time, readers —
Happy tails, from A Boy & His Dog