Former Lumineers Cellist Joins Forces With Augustana Arts for Rattlesnake Kate Orchestra Show

Rattlesnake Kate slithered her way into the heart of cellist Neyla Pekarek when Pekarek was studying to become a teacher at the University of Northern Colorado, a few years before joining the Lumineers.

Pekarek wound up ditching the teaching career for music, but the story of the woman who faced, fought and killed 140 rattlesnakes in northeastern Colorado in 1925 remained persistent in her mind. "It was so much more than just a snake encounter," Pekarek says. "I found this incredibly compelling storytelling about this woman who was living very unapologetically herself, and as I read all these letters she was writing, I felt like I related to what she was talking about."

While she was touring with the Lumineers, Pekarek was aware of being a woman in a way she hadn't been at any other time in her life. "I was the only woman in the band, and there were only a few other gals amongst the whole operation," she says.

Slaughterback was progressive for her time — known for preferring pants over dresses, getting married and divorced several times, and being a bootlegger, according to City of Greeley Museums. "She really had to continuously prove herself as being as capable as her male counterparts, and I felt that a lot as a woman in the music industry," Pekarek says.

So she started writing songs about Rattlesnake Kate. "It started a little bit as a joke, just kind of writing songs for my friends, sending silly voice memos, and it got quickly out of hand," Pekarek admits. The result was a 2019 album, Rattlesnake (released around the time Pekarek left the Lumineers), and a 2023 EP, Western Woman.

In 2022, Rattlesnake became the music of the full-blown theatrical production Rattlesnake Kate at the Denver Performing Arts Complex. Now, 100 years after Slaughterback's snake encounter, Pekarek is working with Augustana Arts and its Stratus Chamber Orchestra to honor Rattlesnake Kate again with an immersive storytelling show complete with an orchestra and dancers on Saturday, June 7, at Stanley Marketplace. "I really want it to feel like a fancy campfire, telling this folklore in an intimate way," Pekarek says of the show, A Western Woman.

Pekarek and Augustana Arts will also bring A Western Woman to Greeley on Saturday, June 21. "We will be doing a second performance of this concert outdoors at the Centennial Village Museum, which is a reproduction of houses from the 1800s and 1900s," says Augustana Arts executive director Sara Hare. "The property actually includes one of Rattlesnake Kate’s houses that they took from her property and reassembled at the museum. We’re really excited to bring that concert up there and be performing it steps away from a house that she actually lived in."

Rattlesnake Kate got her nickname and fame from the October 28, 1925, incident when she and her three-year-old adopted son, Ernie, took her horse out to a lake near her farm after hearing gunshots from hunters. Slaughterback hoped to find ducks left by the hunters to have for dinner, but instead was met by more than a hundred rattlesnakes in a rare migration. Determined to protect Ernie and the horse, Slaughterback shot the snakes with her .22 Remington rifle until she ran out of bullets. With more snakes still circling, she grabbed a nearby "No Hunting" sign and bludgeoned the snakes one by one until they were all dead.
“I fought them with a club not more than three feet long, whirling constantly for over two hours before I could kill my way out of them and get back to my faithful horse and Ernie, who were staring at me during my terrible battle not more than sixty feet away," Slaughterback says in a museum recording.

Not one for waste, proficient at sewing and having recently taken a correspondence class from the Northwestern School of Taxidermy in Omaha, Slaughterback collected the 140 dead snakes and used the snakeskins and rattles to create a flapper-style dress with matching shoes and accessories. Legend has it that Slaughterback wore the dress while dancing atop a tavern bar in Jaurez, Mexico. The dress is now in a Greeley museum.

She also went on to raise rattlesnakes on her property, extracting their venom for profit and making and selling snakeskin souvenirs.

"She was really a trailblazer," Hare says. "She was brave, brave in the face of the rattlesnakes, of course, but also brave in her own life and in being her own person in a world that didn’t necessarily accept who she was at that time. ... I hope people gather her strength and resilience and bring that out of the performance."

A Western Woman is an amalgamation of all of the things that make Colorado cool, Hare adds: "Neyla, a dance stage and our conductor will be right in the center, and our audience will be sitting circled around Neyla. Think theater in the round, but with music. During the concert, Neyla will be telling the story and history of Rattlesnake Kate in between pieces of music."

During the song "The Attack," the six dancers from Life/Art Dance, a contemporary dance ensemble in Denver, will start outside the circle and work their way in. "The audience will feel surrounded by dance in the way that Kate was once surrounded by rattlesnakes," Hare says.

The orchestra includes a full string section, as well as woodwind, brass and percussion musicians. Pekarek is especially excited for a song near the end of the performance, "Will You Remember Me," which is meant to have big string parts. In the studio, she and violin and viola player Naomi Smith recorded layers to capture the feeling of an orchestra, but now that feeling is coming to life. "I think being able to sing over a live orchestra, especially on that song, is the big eleven o'clock number," Pekarek says.
Pekarek, a former "orch dork" who played cello growing up, has worked with orchestras before, including a Lumineers show with the Colorado Symphony at Red Rocks in 2013. "But this is totally unique to anything I've done with my own music," she says. "It sounds so dreamy. I've been playing the songs in a more folky style, and there's still a touch of that, but there's more class."

Hare describes it as "a beautiful combination of doo-wop, folk and indie, all combining with the orchestra."

While Pekarek has been living with this material for a long time, it's a new story for many people. "We're living in a world where we have so many of the same stories, reboots, or movies that are the same story we've already heard," she says. "So to hear a brand-new story that's...true and also from our own backyard in Colorado is pretty unique in terms of what we're absorbing today."

People will be hooked by the bizarre story of a woman fighting 140 rattlesnakes, but they'll stay to learn about the incredible resilience Rattlesnake Kate showed throughout her life. "She was struck by lightning, she was a really hard worker," Pekarek says. "I loved the way she was unwilling to compromise who she was."

A Western Woman, 7 p.m. Saturday, June 7, at The Local Drive at Stanley Marketplace, 2501 Dallas Street in Aurora; there will be an open bar, onsite cowboy hat customization by Urban Cowgirl, and a meet-and-greet with Pekarek, people from the Greeley Museum and other artists for VIP ticket-holders at 5:45 p.m. A second performance is set for 6 p.m. Saturday, June 21, at Centennial Village Museum, 1475 A Street in Greeley. Tickets are available at augustanaarts.org.