In real life, thirty-six species of the creatures known as rattlesnakes
are found across North America and many environments, from temperate forests in the east, to swamps and marshes in the south, to jungles and the plains of the heartlands right up into Canada. Many species can even be found in South America.
However, in pop culture, there's usually only one place rattlesnakes are found: deserts and scrubland of the southwestern US and Mexico, and it's usually the western diamondback rattlesnake or the horned or sidewinder rattlesnake one sees.
At any rate, you'll find them a lot in Westerns and works inspired by them, and always as a menacing symbol. The rattling noise made by the tips of their tails are unnerving warnings, and of course the snakes are venomous, which will at best make you hallucinate and at worst knock you unconscious, something you don't want when you're in the desert, especially if you're alone and parched in the wide open, desolate wastelands. On the other hand, the long winding and flexible shape of the creatures may also evoke a whip or lasso, tools of the trade used by cowboys.
It may help this trope that the range of rattlesnakes coincides with the origin point of Mexican culture, with rattling instruments like rattles and castanets sounding much like the snakes' tail rattles. note You can expect more lighthearted portrayals to use the snakes as such.
Even if they don't actually appear alive, you can still see rattlesnakes in Westerns if a character is wearing snakeskin just to really show how badass they are. If you want to stretch it, one could even include characters having Rattlesnake Animal Motifs to convey "I'm dangerous and you should avoid me if you know what's good for you."
Subtrope of National Animal Stereotypes, and for another animal synonymous with the West, see Wild West Armadillo.
Examples
- Rango: Rattlesnake Jake, one of the villains of the film, is a tough gunslinger with a gun in place of his rattle, and is insinuated to be from Hell.
- True Grit: One scene has Mattie Ross falling into a pit where a rattlesnake bites her arm. By the end of the film, she has to have her arm amputated.
- Wild Cactus: David, conked on the head and thrown down a ravine in the desert by evil Randall, wakes up and starts walking back home—only to come across a rattlesnake on the way. David is able to trap the snake in a bag, and during the final confrontation with Randall, David lets the snake loose, distracting Randall long enough for David's wife Alex to shoot Randall.
- This trope is Older Than Feudalism in Native American Mythology, specifically the Southwest, where it is said that a rattlesnake brought death into the world when it killed in self-defense, and they're often agents of vengeance against wrongdoers.
- One Pecos Bill myth says he wielded a rattlesnake as a lasso or a whip.
- The legend of "Rattlesnake Kate", a folk hero of the American West. Supposedly, one day in 1925, Katherine Slaughterback was riding a horse with her adopted son Ernie in the plains near Greeley, Colorado, when they wandered right into a rattlesnake migration route. Fearing for their lives, Kate killed over 140 snakes, first with a rifle, and then with an improvised club when she ran out of bullets. Afterwards, she made a dress out of their skins and rattlers. Some of the details may have been embellished, but regardless, Kate's story quickly found its way into newspapers across the country and made her a nationwide celebrity.
- Hank the Cowdog (which takes place in the Texas Panhandle) features the standard diamondback, with one book titled The Case of the Double-Bumble Bee Sting featuring Hank getting bitten and suffering the side effects, but denying it in favor of two bumblebees.
- Holes: The Camp Green Lake juvenile detention center is a Deadly Environment Prison in the middle of a forbidding Texan desert that's infested with rattlesnakes, scorpions, and deadly lizards. Some kids deliberately get bitten by rattlesnakes because being hospitalized in town is less awful than staying.
- InCryptid: In the Weird West short story "The Flower of Arizona", the Monster of the Week is a Questing Beast with the body of a mountain lion and the head and tail of a giant rattlesnake.
- In "Jackalope Wives" by Ursula Vernon, one of her stories set in the Weird West, after the protagonist's grandson accidentally maims a jackalope, the main character goes into the desert to seek help from the Painted People. The Patterned People are giant rattlesnakes who can take the shape of humans and whose bites have supernatural effects, but who sometimes ask for a life in return for their help.
- The Way West: Tod Fairman, a 10-year-old boy riding with a wagon train to Oregon, wanders away from the train one evening and is bitten by a rattlesnake. He dies.
- Magic: The Gathering: The Wild West-themed plane of Thunder Junction has rattlesnakes as a recurring animal motif. The local wurms and hydras both resemble rattlesnakes, while some of the plane's mounts are rattlesnake-horse hybrids.
- Deadly Creatures, set in the Sonora desert, features a rattlesnake as a twice-recurring boss for the playable Tarantula chracter. Both times, its up on a ledge where you have to dodge its strikes and get at its tail (which for whatever reason it keeps dangling out leaving a window for you to get). The second and final one at the end eventually has the tarantula scale up a gas pump, shoot webbing at its face, and uses it to bite the snake in the head before escaping.
- Fallout: New Vegas, set in the Mojave Desert and effectively the series' Cowboy Episode, introduces the Nightstalker, a half coyote and half rattlesnake genetic chimera, complete with the trademark rattle.
- Pac-Man: Adventures in Time: Rattlesnakes appear as dangerous obstacles in levels themed after The Wild West.
- In the yet-unreleased Adventure Game Rise of the Hidden Sun, which is set in the Wild West, the gunslinger protagonist Jake Dawson has the nickname "Rattlesnake".
- Skylanders: The playable character Rattle Shake is an anthropomorphic rattlesnake who dresses and acts like a cowboy.
- Striker from Helluva Boss is an Imp, but his design is clearly based on that of a rattlesnake. His leitmotif is even the sound of one. And he's just as trustworthy, too.
- Wild Kratts: One of the first episodes set in the Sonora Desert features western diamondbacks as the focus animal. The Kratts end up having to use rattlesnake powers, particularly heat sensing, to find particular crystals that power their ship. One is introduced rattling and scaring off horses the bros are riding on.
- Xiaolin Showdown: When the monks go to Clay's farm in Texas, a rattlesnake falls in love with Dojo, which terrifies him. This happens again in Xiaolin Chronicles.
- Many zoos display rattlesnakes in exhibits themed after the mines common in the Southwestern US, likely to do with how they burrow underground. The Omaha Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska has a good one in it's Desert Dome exhibit complex, called Rattlesnake Canyon.
