Rattlesnake Butte

Duane's take

The way I hear it, this one comes straight off the official marker for Rattlesnake Butte, out in Upton County, and I'm gonna tell it just like the record tells it to me. Now, most places get their names from heroes, or battles, or some old settler who staked a claim. Rattlesnake Butte got its name the direct way.

In 1919, students and professors from the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology came out here to map the county's resources. And somewhere along the way, working this meandering formation that sits at approximately two thousand six hundred feet in elevation, they encountered the wildlife. The kind of wildlife that doesn't ask permission and doesn't move out of your way.

The name stuck. But those researchers weren't just naming things and jumping back. They were mapping something far older than any of them, older than Texas itself.

What they were walking across is part of the Central Basin Platform, and the rock beneath their boots told a story going back to the Lower Cretaceous period. Thick layers of sedimentary rock that once spread across this entire county, horizon to horizon, all of it. Time and wind and water have been working on those layers ever since.

Erosion took most of it. But some sections of limestone, tougher than the rest, refused to go. Those stubborn slabs are what you're lookin' at when you see the tops of Upton County's buttes, hills, and mesas today.

The land around them wore down. They held on. And here's the part that makes the whole story land a little differently.

Those same geologic formations, the ones the professors were documenting, the ones the snakes were already guarding in 1919, those formations represent the area's ideal conditions for the production of oil and gas. Turns out the wildlife wasn't the only thing of value out on Rattlesnake Butte. The ground underneath had been holding something a whole lot older than any of them knew.

What the marker says

Rattlesnake Butte was named for wildlife seen here in 1919 by students and professors of the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, who were working to map county resources. A meandering formation, approximately 2,600 feet in elevation, the butte and other nearby formations are part of the Central Basin Platform, which is represented by remnants of thick layers of Lower Cretaceous sedimentary rock that formerly extended across the entire county. The sections of limestone that have resisted erosion form the tops of Upton County's buttes, hills, and mesas. The geologic formations represent the area's ideal formations for the production of oil and gas. (1967, 2010)