She started doing so with a solo album of songs about Slaughterback’s life that came out in 2019, right after she left the Lumineers. Now Pekarek and playwright Karen Hartman are sharing Slaughterback’s story through their musical Rattlesnake Kate, which will have its world premiere at the Wolf Theatre in the Denver Performing Arts Complex on Friday, February 4.
Rattlesnake Kate is enjoying something of a resurgence right now, as the focus of both the musical and a chapter in the 2021 book Colorado Curiosities: Rattlesnake Kate, The Crying Bridge, Kit Carson’s Last Trip & More, by Cindy Brick, who describes what happened on October 28, 1925, that made Slaughterback a legend.
She had ventured out with her horse and adopted son, Ernie, to a lake by her homestead near Hudson. She'd heard gunshots earlier, and was hoping to find some overlooked game killed by hunters. While Slaughterback was searching for dinner, she noticed a rattlesnake approaching and promptly shot it with her .22 Remington rifle. But the snakes kept coming, and she was running out of bullets. So she grabbed a nearby “No Hunting” sign and killed the rattlers with that. She took the dead rattlers home, and a neighbor counted 140 in all — most killed with that sign.
"I fought them with a club not more than three feet long," Slaughterback later told a reporter, "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 60 feet away.”
Although she was more partial to wearing pants, Slaughterback crafted a flapper dress and matching accessories from the snakeskin. According to the Greeley Municipal Museum, she wore her dress “to a few parties and supposedly wore the dress while she danced on top of a tavern bar in Juarez, Mexico.”
Slaughterback became a celebrity almost overnight, and even as her fame faded, she continued leading a resourceful and uncompromising life. She survived a lightning strike, worked as a bootlegger, and got locked up for a bar brawl in her sixties; she married six times. But she preferred solitude and living on her land, where she ultimately raised rattlesnakes and milked their venom to sell to labs.
“Later, she would lop their heads off and send them in the mail,” Pekarek says.
“I became obsessed with her and her story,” Pekarek admits. Because so little was known about Slaughterback’s personal life, she started poring through the Greeley museum's archives, which hold the majority of Slaughterback’s belongings — including countless letters.
“Most of the material came from a letter exchange with a man who lived in Iowa, Colonel Buckskin Bill,” she says. “They exchanged letters for forty years, so reading those, I really got a sense of her voice and tidbits from her life. A lot of material came from that.”
She started writing songs about Slaughterback in 2015, and finally recorded thirteen of them for an album, Rattlesnake, which she released in 2019. That's when Doug Langworthy, the late Denver Center for the Performing Arts director of new play development, suggested that she work with Hartman to turn the album into a musical. Pekarek and Hartman worked on the project for two weeks during a DCPA workshop.
“That made the bones for what is now a bona fide musical,” Pekarek says. “So much of this stuff is locked away in that archive, so it feels really exciting to tell the world about her.”
Karen Hartman wrote the script for the musical.
Courtesy of DCPA
The first full-scale production of Rattlesnake Kate has a cast of sixteen and around 35 musical numbers. That might sound like a lot, but the musical doesn’t just cover Slaughterback’s rattlesnake attack and the fame that followed. It explores many previously unknown characters and events that the production’s dramaturge, Heidi Schmidt, pulled from the Greeley archives.
The original snakeskin dress, on loan from the Greeley museum, will be on display at the theater.
“It was interesting figuring out who the other figures in Kate’s life are,” Pekarek says. "Of so many things about Kate, a really important one is that she spent a lot of time alone. She chose to live in rural Colorado. She had a son and six husbands, but otherwise, there weren’t a lot of other cast members in her real life.
“In those letters, she doesn’t talk about friends by name very often, but I know all of her horses’ names,” she continues. “She talks about them so affectionately, so we decided on Brownie, who I play as her noble steed and steadfast sidekick, as a key character in the show.”
Rattlesnake Kate explores sixty years of Slaughterback’s inspiring life in three acts, and three actresses play the titular role: Leana Rae Concepcion is Katie, who leaves her parents, stakes out her own farm and adopts Ernie; Alyse Alan Louis is Kate, who bravely kills a swarm of rattlesnakes and faces fame and its aftermath; and Andrea Frierson is Katherine, who confronts more metaphorical snakes from an empty nest and dreams about romance and her land.
“The attack is a particularly climactic part of the story, when she is fighting the rattlesnakes,” says Louis. “Then, of course, you’re later seeing her fight many snakes throughout her life: the patriarchy, the justice system, the idea that she can’t have it all but wants it all, and that she’s enough in her body, her mind and spirit and how she works the land.”
Choreographer Dominique Kelley brings the show’s layered, liberating overtones to new heights with dynamic dance numbers. He wanted to complement the subject matter with movements that were “wholly American" and accessible to people, he says. “I settled on stemming from American Sign Language. I figured that was something that is wholly American — it’s in the name, but not only that, there's the beauty of the movement.”
The movements emphasize Pekarek’s score, which includes tracks from her Rattlesnake album and folk sounds with jazzy flair. “Neyla has this really hooky, addictive way of getting at huge, important, heavy themes,” Hartman says. “It also makes you feel immediately inspired and connected to Kate.”
The cast and crew have certainly connected with Slaughterback’s story.
“When I interviewed for this position, the first words out of my mouth were, ‘I am Rattlesnake Kate,’” recalls Kelley. “Yes, this tall, Black, queer man from Connecticut feels like he’s Rattlesnake Kate. I guess they figured if I felt that way, other people would feel that way, too. Because we know what it feels like to have to battle snakes.”
“There’s something so bold about Kate,” Hartman adds. “That’s one of the adjectives I would use to describe her. And you feel it in the way that the show moves — I find it really surprising. The turn it takes and the size of the music and the ideas...but then with the intimacy, comedy and honesty of it, I feel like it tells you to want more: Dream bigger, be ambitious, have a bigger appetite — all that good stuff.”
Pekarek is excited for the audience to walk away as inspired by Slaughterback's saga as she was. “This show, at its core, is about being authentically and unapologetically yourself and what consequences come from that,” she concludes. “Especially what that means for a woman living in a patriarchy, what that means if you’re a woman who speaks her mind and asks for what she needs."
Rattlesnake Kate opens Friday, February 4, and runs through March 13 at the Wolf Theatre in the Denver Performing Arts Complex. Tickets are $30 to $74 at denvercenter.org.
