Folklore of the rattlesnake

The purpose of this project was to collect, preserve, classify, analyze, and place in historical context the rattlesnake stories now circulating in North Central Texas. By studying man's lore and lies, one can learn important truths about mankind. Because a major requirement for scholarly collecting of folktales is careful transcription of the language of informants, the stories included in this thesis are phrased as they were when they were presented to the collector. The thesis, therefore, also preserves a nuraber of representative syntactical patterns common in the folk speech of North Central Texas.