Rattlesnake eggs and the passing of a torch in Winona County, Minnesota

Abstract

Although rattlesnakes give birth to living young, the belief that they lay eggs persisted in the midwestern United States until the end of the nineteenth century. This is illustrated by the writings of two prominent chroniclers of natural history in early Winona, a Mississippi River town in southeastern Minnesota. Lafayette Bunnell's accounts of a massacre of timber rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) included statements that a large number of their eggs were also destroyed. The college professor John Holzinger, however, dissected a female rattlesnake to reveal late-term embryos and suggested that the eggs found in the vicinity of rattlesnakes were laid by other species of snakes that share their dens.