The Hangman Creek Snake Bite
A young girl is saved from a rattlesnake strike by a desperate, high-stakes remedy of local folk medicine.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The little daughter of James McGoven, who resides about fourteen miles from the city on Hangman Creek, while returning from school Thursday was bitten on the foot by a large rattlesnake. Her life was saved only by the prompt administration of the proper antidotes. The child was passing by a clump of trees on the roadside with a party of schoolmates when she was struck. She was carried to the house of a neighbor, where a poultice of black mud and saleratus was applied to the wound. She was given all the whisky she could drink. A half-pint of the fiery liquid was poured down the unconscious child's throat before it had any effect, but after several hours of hard work, she was pronounced out of danger.
“A half-pint of the fiery liquid was poured down the unconscious child's throat before it had any effect.”
This incident highlights the hazardous reality for children in rural Washington at the time, and the era's reliance on 'whisky cures' for envenomation, a practice now long discredited but common in the 19th-century frontier.
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