Rattlesnake Dan

I never met Dan Panko, but my wife did.  He lived in her family’s rural neighborhood on the west side of the Missouri River and on occasion would drive into their farmyard to visit with her parents.  In addition to the impression he made on my wife, he wrote a short biography from which we’ve learned much of what we know about him.  He triggered an episode that became a newsworthy event because of the unique action he took.  Here we’ll imagine him telling something of his life based on what is known, plus the episode for which he went down in history.

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I was born Dionis Potapenkowa in 1895 in Schenderovka, Russia.  Fortunately over here, I was renamed Dan Panko.  When I was ten my siblings and I accompanied our mother to the United States when she decided to emigrate.  We landed in the state of Virginia, but after a few months, the lure of free homestead land hooked us and we traveled to a wild-sounding little place called Dogden, North Dakota.  School was difficult for me because I spoke very little English, so I didn’t go.

I loved to run and entered every foot race I could find.  I kept in pretty good shape by hopping on freight trains, riding for several miles, and then getting off to run back home.  One day I didn’t return home but kept going, only to end up working on a farm in Minnesota.  The farmer said I wasn’t yet a man and paid only half-wages.  I never learned what more a man could’ve done for him; I’d get up at 4:30, feed and care for eighteen horses, milk ten cows, and clean the barn, all before breakfast, and then work in his fields the rest of the day.

Finally after a couple of years I’d saved fifty dollars and spent thirty of it buying a new bicycle.  One day I rode it into town and experienced a chance meeting with an acquaintance who told me one of my brothers had been killed in a horse accident.  Since Mother and I hadn’t been exchanging letters, the news was a shock to me.  It was time to go home.

It took me one day to reach Moorhead, Minnesota on my bike where at a fair I entered a bicycle race and won ten dollars.  From there it took me four hard days to pedal to Dogden, only to learn my family didn’t live there anymore.  They’d moved somewhere south of Mandan.  After a rest, I pedaled for a day and a half to Mandan where in a cafe I luckily found someone who knew where they’d settled.

On the road again, I only made it to the tiny town in the rugged country southwest of Mandan called Dogtooth where the next morning a Russian speaking man directed me to my mother’s home.  It was quite a homecoming, she and the others thought I was dead.  Well, that’s how my life began.  I went to work building railroads, cooking, even boxing and wrestling for prize money.

It is true that I had an independent spirit.  World War I came along and I joined the army.  It wasn’t long before I learned a lesson about discipline.  A corporal handed me a broom and told me to sweep the floor.  “Sweep it yourself,” I told him.  I got by with it, but only until a sergeant explained the facts of life about following orders.  I survived the battlegrounds of World War I and returned home after the war.  But then, was it something I’d contracted along the way?  I got very ill, was in and out of the VA hospital, and bedridden for several months.  I finally recovered, built a house, married, and began a political career.

In 1932, FDR won the presidency.  In our voting district, Hoover received just two votes.  When people wondered from whom, I told them, “It was my wife and I, and we don’t care who knows it, because I am still a Republican.”   That’s the way I lived my life, not afraid to let people know where I stood.  Now as for that overnight stop I made at Dogtooth, I’ll tell why it’s noteworthy in my story.  In one word - rattlesnakes.

I’d been elected to the state legislature and couldn’t sit still without getting involved.  A bill was introduced to establish bounties on wolves, coyotes, and magpies.  I wanted to amend the bill adding rattlesnakes.  I argued magpies don’t hurt children, rattlesnakes do.  The idea didn’t gain traction, but I didn’t give up.  I brought in a doctor who testifified he’d treated several cases of snakebite.  Still my amendment was in danger.

Those foot-draggers needed something to shock them into action.  I went out and collected about fifty rattlesnakes from their winter dens.  When I set their cage in front of the lawmakers and dumped some out, the warmth of the chamber woke them and they started crawling around.  It was enough to get my bounty approved and forever after I was known as “Rattlesnake Dan.”

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A headline in a Eugene, Oregon newspaper proclaimed, “Legislators Are Rattled.”  As for the town of Dogtooth, it no longer exists.  It sat in a rugged area west of Flasher called the Dogtooth Hills because they look like a dog’s jawbone and teeth.  Rattlesnakes like it there.  Dogden was a little town in McLean County now known as Butte.