The World’s Largest Rattlesnake Roundup in Sweetwater, Texas, is held at the Nolan County Coliseum. The address is 220 Coliseum Drive, and the event takes place annually on the second weekend in March.  

The High-Stakes Hunt in Sweetwater, Texas

The West Texas sun beat down on the Nolan County Fairgrounds in Sweetwater, making the dust shimmer above the asphalt. This wasn’t just the annual Rattlesnake Roundup; this was the home field of Rattlesnakes R Us, and to a certain kind of mean rich man, it was the biggest game of the year.

Our motto wasn’t “Safety First.” It was “Ten Thousand Dollars for the Hunt. Fifteen Thousand if you wanted a real show.” In a manner of speaking, my company was the engine room of the Roundup, but what made us world-famous wasn’t the number of diamondbacks we pulled from the den—it was the unbelievable level of high-stakes betting tied to every single hunt.

On this particular Saturday, the air was thick not just with dust and snake musk, but with anticipation. A single hunt crew was about to head out, and the Vegas action on which “City Slicker” would take a bite had swollen past $35 million.

In our Hunts, two different men had gotten Bitten on the Head of their Dicks. But they said their Old ladies claimed it was the best Sex for three months until the Dick Swelling went down.

The Rattlesnake R Us Breakfast

The day always started the same way. We gathered the hunting party, a mix of genuine snake enthusiasts and the usual crop of arrogant financiers looking for a thrill money couldn’t normally buy. We’d start them off right with a real ranch breakfast—scrambled eggs, thick-cut bacon, and biscuits so heavy they’d anchor you to the earth.

But lunch? That was strictly old-school, served at high noon: Vienna Sausages right out of the can, sharp Rat Trap Cheese, Saltine Crackers, and half an Onion—the kind of simple, pungent fuel that reminds you you’re alive.

The Hunter and the High Rollers

Today’s target was a man named “Bunker,” a fast-talking investment banker from New York who had a reputation for arrogance and a wallet thicker than a firehose. Bunker was the target of the $35 Million bet, courtesy of three former partners he’d swindled. They’d paid my fee—the $15,000 “show fee”—with a wicked, expectant glee.

“Ready to find some leather, gentlemen?” I asked the group, pointing toward the rugged pasture outside the fairgrounds.

The veteran hunters, my core crew, exchanged knowing glances. They knew the routine: keep the kids and the ladies safe, let the rich folks stumble, and make sure the ones with a target on their back took the fall.

We found a deep den, the kind that held a colony. The moment the gassing tube was in place, the earth began to pulse. When the diamondbacks started pouring out, it was chaos—a shimmering, rattling flood of venom and muscle.

Bunker, trying to show off, ignored my warnings and attempted to step over a coiled snake instead of around it. That was my cue. A quick flick of a specialized prod, known only to my crew, nudged the diamondback just enough.

ZZZZZT!

The bite landed not on his leg, but lower, right on the buttock, forcing him into a clumsy, howling ballet. He was immediately yanked back by my crew chief, the poison extracted quickly and efficiently—nobody died; it was all about the story, the thrill, and the payout. Or our big payoffs.

The Sunset Confessional

By 1:00 PM, the job was done, the snakes were safely contained, and the real party started. I hauled out the two massive coolers, packed with ice-cold cases of PEARL, BUDWEISER, and SCHLITZ BEER.

With the sun dipping low, casting long, dusty shadows over the empty corrals, the hunters turned into storytellers. The beer flowed like a slow-moving river, and soon, everyone was gloriously, happily drunk.

I walked over to the makeshift medical station where Bunker sat, nursing his bruised ego and his bandaged backside.

“I can’t believe I fell for that,” he slurred, a massive grin splitting his face. “Worth every penny.”

“It always is,” I replied, watching the desert sunset. “It’s all in good fun. Now pay your Vegas losses, Mr. Banker, and don’t come back until next year.”

He laughed, a genuine, joyful sound. It was an unbelievable way to make a ton of money, selling the thrill of the hunt, the promise of danger, and the certainty of a good story. And for one more year, Rattlesnakes R Us ensured that the greatest drama at the Sweetwater Roundup wasn’t the snakes, but the people who paid handsomely to get up close and personal with them.

But the Texas Rangers learned what we were doing and shut us down. Shut us down hard.

Two Chins O’Tony just barely got out of Texas and is still in hiding. The Lies that man told are still Legendary in Sweetwater Texas.

The Ballad of Two Chins O’Tony and the Sweetwater Sky-Rattler

They say the lies Two Chins O’Tony spun in Sweetwater, Texas, were so thick you could use ’em for fencing wire. But nothing—nothing—compares to the absolutely brazen nonsense he cooked up on the day he claimed to catch the legendary Sky-Rattler. It’s the reason he’s still hiding, somewhere between here and a believable story.

The hunt began not in the dirt, but in a cloud of pure, unadulterated hot air. O’Tony had spent his last million dollars, which he’d won betting a coyote could solve a quadratic equation, on a custom-built hunting rig. It wasn’t a truck. It was a hot-air balloon made entirely out of repurposed bull-riding chaps and tethered with cables spun from the world’s finest sugar-free licorice. He called it The Chinzano.

The target was the Crotalus Gigantus Aeros, or what the locals called the “Lightning Rattle.” This snake wasn’t 45 feet long; that’s amateur talk. The Lightning Rattle was 45 feet wide, and only God knew how long it was, because it spent all its time soaring between thunderheads, using the supersonic vibrations of its thousand rattles to navigate. It didn’t strike with fangs; it struck with localized, low-humidity cloudbursts.

O’Tony, looking pasty-white in his brand-new, oversized white Stetson and boots so new they still squeaked “Howdy, partner” with every step, ascended into the blue. His plan was simple and insane: He had fashioned a lasso out of three miles of hardened, day-old lasagna noodles (the only material he claimed was both “grippy and spiritually fulfilling”).

When he finally spotted the Sky-Rattler—a shifting, brown-and-gold cloud of muscle weaving between anvil-shaped cumulonimbus clouds—O’Tony knew this was the capstone of his career.

He threw the lasagna lasso. It missed the head, but in a stroke of absolute, preposterous luck, it looped perfectly around the snake’s gigantic, diamond-shaped, perfectly polished silver belt buckle (a detail O’Tony insisted on later, claiming the snake must have been a former state senator).

The battle was instant, tearing a hole in the troposphere. The snake didn’t pull; it rewound the tape of reality. O’Tony found himself not fighting a beast, but arguing with a time-dilated version of himself about who had the bigger bull-rider belt buckle, all while the Sky-Rattler towed his chap-balloon through a hailstorm of frozen pecans.

Finally, in a move that strained the credibility of the entire space-time continuum, O’Tony didn’t kill the snake. He convinced it to trade places with the hot-air balloon. The Sky-Rattler, tired of the high-altitude politics, became the new balloon, gliding gracefully over Sweetwater, while The Chinzano, now sentient and extremely annoyed, took the form of a scaly, cloud-dwelling reptile.

The proof? O’Tony descended with a single, massive 45-foot rattlesnake skin, which, upon landing, immediately unfolded into a fully valid, notarized deed for ownership of the Pacific Ocean.

He tried to explain it all—the time-traveling argument, the pecan hail, the nautical land deed—but the townsfolk had had enough. The lie was too large; it broke the sound barrier of belief. They didn’t chase him out of town; they simply realized Two Chins O’Tony no longer existed in the same reality as them. He grabbed his impossibly clean cowboy boots, tucked his brand-new pants into them (still white!), and vanished into the nearest low-lying fact-free zone, leaving behind only the scent of new leather and a lingering doubt about the true origins of salt water.

That one is certainly too wild to be true! It’s got everything from pecan hail to the snake trading places with a chaps-balloon.

The Legend of Dusty ‘The Dust Bunny’ Rhodes: The $250M Curse

Ask any bookie on the Vegas Strip why the odds are so astronomically high against Dusty “The Dust Bunny” Rhodes, and they won’t talk about his hunting skills. They’ll talk about the curse. They say the only way to win the legendary $250 million payout is for Dusty to receive a fatal rattlesnake strike. But Dusty doesn’t just avoid danger; he transmutes danger into financial chaos for the betting syndicate.

Dusty is the crew’s designated “Systems Analyst” and only wears cowboy gear because he lost a bet to Two Chins O’Tony involving a flock of pigeons and a miniature pool table. He approaches snake hunting like auditing a spreadsheet.

His moment of infamy came during the pursuit of the Silicon Rattler.

This was no ordinary snake. The Silicon Rattler was a mythic, invisible serpent that lived entirely inside the fiber optic cables connecting the major casinos. It didn’t eat mice; it ate loose binary code and the “0” from expired slot machine jackpots. Its rattle wasn’t sound; it was a rhythmic, incredibly fast packet loss that could destabilize entire banking networks.

Dusty, pale, clad in his squeaky clean white Stetson and cowhide gloves, approached the server room beneath the Golden Nugget. While the rest of the crew used lassos and nets, Dusty’s arsenal consisted of a vintage, modified shop vac and a graphing calculator taped to a broom handle.

“The snake’s signature is a 404 error and the smell of stale Cheeto dust,” Dusty mumbled, staring at the snake’s “trail”—a rapidly oscillating red line on his calculator.

His plan? To “vacuum the error code.”

He fed the shop vac hose into the main trunk line, expecting to suck out a handful of binary fuzz. What he actually did was accidentally create a quantum singularity inside the vacuum bag.

The singularity didn’t just pull the snake in; it pulled in everything adjacent to the internet:

1. Three days’ worth of untracked cryptocurrency transactions from a hidden server farm in the basement.
2. The entire original source code of the 1980s video game Zork (which instantly materialized into a 15-foot bronze statue of an adventuring troll).
3. The physical manifestation of every forgotten email password from 1999 to 2004 (which took the form of a sticky, grey goo).

Dusty failed to catch the Silicon Rattler, which simply hissed a brief, digitized “Access Denied” and moved into the 5G network. But he succeeded in doing something far worse for the bettors: He didn’t get bitten, and he unleashed $500 million in untaxed, untraceable crypto and a troll statue onto the floor of the casino.

The pit bosses weren’t mad that he missed the snake; they were furious that he had introduced unregulated assets onto the floor and caused the blackjack dealers to argue with a talking bronze troll about inventory management.

Dusty, now a quarter-billion-dollar headache, simply picked up his squeaking boots and walked out. The $250 million bet against him remains the safest bet in Vegas, because everyone knows: Dusty Rhodes will never catch the snake, but he will always find a way to make the house lose a bigger, stupider fortune.

I hope that explained why the house is so desperate for Dusty to just get tagged once! He’s a walking, talking, systems-analyzing money-laundering disaster who just happens to wear a new Stetson.

What wild artifact or creature should Dusty accidentally unearth next? Maybe a snake that lives in the static electricity of his new gloves?