Snake Oil: A Bit of Arizona History

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As a proud Arizonan, I am always happy when I discover another area in which my native state has distinguished itself. I am pleased to report, then, that snake oil, as we understand the term today, was invented in Arizona. Sorta.

According to this item, snake oil was introduced to the United States by Chinese laborers on the Transcontinental Railroad, who used oils from Chinese water snakes to relieve muscle pain. Recent research indicates that such oils are high in Omega-3 and may actually work.

However, the snake oil that gained widespread fame being peddled by travelling salesmen in the late 19th/early 20th centuries was generally made from rattlesnake oil, which doesn’t have the same value. And some such products contained no snake oil at all.

Walpi at roughly the time Clark Stanley
would have been there (late 1870s).

Which brings us to Clark Stanley, the most famous snake oil salesman of the period. Stanley was a Texas cowboy who migrated to Arizona in the 1870s, where he met up with a Hopi medicine man (is that a politically-correct term?) in Walpi (on the First Mesa up in the northwest part of the state) and learned how to make snake oil from rattlesnakes. Stanley sold this snake oil from town to town, finally hitting it big at the Columbian Exposition here in Chicago in 1893, where he killed rattlesnakes as part of the demonstration of his product, and became known as The Rattlesnake King.

Stanley did quite well, it seems, until the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, subsequent to which an analysis in 1915 indicated that his product consisted of mineral oil, a small amount of fatty oil (presumed to be beef fat), red pepper, turpentine, and camphor. He was fined twenty dollars.

I’m always pleased to see a local boy make good.