I’ll admit that I tend to shy away from topics that have been covered in more depth by far more adept historians than myself, and those topics which are more well-known by the general Rochesterian public. After all, I pretend to have neither any sort of special insight into history nor access to any special resources relating to it. My “thing” is looking at materials almost anyone has access to and picking out the choicest tidbits–even if those tidbits are achingly dull to anyone but myself.

But there’s a character in Rochester history who is so particular and so peculiar that I feel I must visit them, even if I’m not the first. Plenty of more knowledgeable historians than I have given him the treatment.

His name was Peter Gruber, but he was more well-known in our town as “Rattlesnake Pete”.

Peter Gruber was born in Oil City, Pennsylvania, in 1857.

Rattlesnake Pete literally made his name in rattlesnakes. In his boyhood, according to his own account, he had learned the art of capturing and milking rattlesnakes from Natives living in the countryside around Oil City. He soon became highly gifted at rustling the venomous reptiles from the underbrush and creek-beds where they posed a threat to life and livestock and removing them to his own collection. As a bit of foreshadowing to his future career, the young Gruber would display the snakes at his father Joseph Gruber‘s saloon.

Gruber came to Rochester in 1892 in the wake of a destructive fire and flood in his hometown.

Finding himself at home in Rochester, Gruber carried on his rattlesnake-catching, supplementing his display and impressing many locals.

Gruber found much use for his rattlesnakes; the collected snakes could be shown off, or milked for their venom to produce anti-venoms or patent medicines.

The snakes could also be used in a “medical treatment” for which Gruber became exceedingly well-known: a patient afflicted with a neck goiter would have a black snake wrapped around his or her neck, the contractions of which which were meant to somehow soothe the goiter. This, naturally, didn’t work at all but made for quite an image.

Being fairly evident bunko didn’t seem to prevent people from earnestly believing the snake’s therapeutic touch could reverse their bowling injuries.

Doubtless there were plenty of people who looked upon the whole thing with lofty Spock-style scorn, but I’m willing to forgive people of the era their hopes. In a frightening time when the old world was clashing against new technologies, myth and medicine conflated constantly in attempts to assuage people’s natural fear of sickness and death. I don’t feel comfortable making the call as to whether Pete was offering a good faith attempt to help, or if he was taking advantage of another revenue stream–the sick and ailing. Gruber at least claimed to believe that some scientific principle might be found explaining the mechanism of snake therapy, so we might give him the benefit of the doubt that he believed what he was doing was effective.

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A Snake Banquet

Pete Gruber held a “snake banquet” in Rochester in 1901. Though the following article has him stating that the year of this banquet was 1891 this would be a year before he supposedly moved to Rochester as a result of the 1892 Oil City fire and flood. I’m inclined to find Pete’s recollection of the year to be inaccurate, that the actual year was 1901, and I’ll tell you why in a moment.

Okay, so here’s my biggest reason for doubting the date of Gruber’s account. There is an article with a description of this dinner given in the Strand magazine, Volume 22, July-December, 1901, which names it as having taken place “a few days ago”:

Helping this case is that Gruber was actually living in Rochester and established in business there in 1901, whereas in 1891 he was not.

Therefore I’m pretty well inclined to believe ten years were subtracted mentally from the date, making it 1891 instead of 1901. It seems like a dramatic mistake to make but, as I get older, it makes more sense to me that one might lose a decade here and there. Of course, there’s the equal chance that the newspaperman badly transcribed Gruber’s testimony and it was published with the wrong year. Again, I don’t know. I just report things as I find them.

If it helps to solidify things somehow, here’s a report on the banquet from the Democrat & Chronicle, also on July 3rd of 1901:

This banquet took place in a most unusual and intriguing setting: Rattlesnake Pete’s Museum.

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Rattlesnake Pete’s Museum

The enterprise that really made Pete Gruber well-known around town was his unique saloon on Mill Street, which he touted as a museum and filled with oddities.

Gruber’s museum was at Nos. 8-10 Mill Street, on the corner of Corinthian Street. It was just across from the Corinthian Theatre, and kitty-corner to the northern entrance of the Reynold’s Arcade, giving it a place of high visibility and foot traffic despite being fairly tucked away from main streets.

The space was chock-a-block with all manners of curiosities, from the historical to the natural. A 1932 Democrat & Chronicle article from the closing of this vaunted venue described the collection as including:

Relics of the Civil, Spanish, and World wars, weapons from the depths of savage Africa and from the South Seas, articles once used by the notorious James boys, Western desperadoes and by Oliver Curtis Perry, the train robber; a pipe once owned by John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln; the skull of the good steed that carried “Little Phil” Sheridan from “Winchester miles away“; a mummy with two heads, a cow, also with two heads; other freaks of nature too numerous to list; hundreds of odd and curious examples of the handiwork of man and accident, a number of “working exhibits”, including a miniature oil well and a gold mine, and the fireman’s helmet worn by the late George Pullman of Pullman car fame when he was a member of the village fire department of Albion.

I’ve added links to edifying articles regarding each of the named items above, if I could find them.

The advertisement card above shows glimpses of Gruber’s attractions, such as the Gold Mine, some of the snakes, and the working model of “Coal-oil Johnny’s Farm“, some of which are mentioned in the poem What Uncle Reuben Saw in Rochester, shared below, and transcribed below that for ease of readability:

What Uncle Reuben Saw in Rochester

Well, b’gosh, I’ve been to Rochester, and had a gay old time;
I’ve been out nights and seen the sights, Gee Whiz! but they were fine
But of all the interesting sights that ever yet was made,
Is at 8 and 10 Mill Street, in the rear of the Arcade.
Now PETE GRUBER is the owner of this very curious place;
When I went in he greeted me with pleasant, smiling face.
It’s surprising what an interest our friend Pete always takes,
In showing all his customers his famous rattlesnakes.
He handles rattlesnakes alive, as they come from the woods;
He showed me snakes of every land, of every clime and brood.
There’s Copperheads and Rattlers, and Spotted Adders too;
And of Black Snakes from the forest he possesses not a few.
He showed me lambs that have eight legs, and funny four-legged chicks
And alligators from the South, up to all kinds of tricks.
His shaking hands and strength machines are not a bit like “fakes”.
Then I saw his suit made from the skins of countless rattlesnakes.
In his interesting Museum I have seen all kinds of things–
Old relics of the battlefield, of Indians, and kings.
And in full operation, too I saw, with much alarm,
A perfect working model of “Coal Oil-Johnny’s” farm.
And he keeps those refreshments so congenial to mankind:
Ale and Beer, Cigars and Liquors, the best you’ll ever find.
So when you visit Rochester, by railroad or the lakes,
Don’t forget to see PETE GRUBER and his famous rattlesnakes.

The “Coal Oil-Johnny’s farm” was referring to the oil derrick and refineries of John Washington Steele, who made a fortune in inheritance from the McClintock Well near Oil City, and then frittered almost all of it away.

Another angle of Gruber’s museum shows the assortment of odds and ends dangling from the tin ceiling of the establishment. Coils of rope, stirrups, gloves, and chains are visible among the items, doubtless each given an astonishing story of provenance to entice and excite patrons.

I find myself most curious about the set of spoons in a rectangular frame at center-left in the photo. Where did they come from? What famous mouths had they been inside? Were they collected by Lewis and Clark at gift shops along their route?

Besides these attractions there were animal attractions; the many snakes and lizards, of course, but also Gruber’s beloved dogs.

As one can see from the above photo, Pete Gruber was extremely fond of dogs, having anywhere from two to three Saint Bernards at any given time.

One account has it that Gruber would have his dogs made into rugs when they died, which is definitely odd but not so odd when considered part of his whole “deal”.

Rattlesnake Pete’s was also home to the Largest Horse on Earth–albeit, dead and stuffed:

Bear with me as I try to identify this horse.

If we’re going by an accounting of weight alone, there’s a chance that this horse was Sampson, also known as Mammoth, considered the largest horse in the world and with a weight just over 3,300 pounds. Being British and not American makes this less likely.

A couple other articles identify the horse as a Percheron; Sampson/Mammoth was a Shire. In this case, it could be Dr. LeGear, who was Percheron, but the weights are quite different. Perhaps Pete inflated his numbers a bit.

The horse could also have been Morocco, a Percheron-Arabian, who measured 21.2 hands in height but was 2,835 pounds, well shy of the 3,300-pound measure given in the card. Morocco was a popular show-horse, and appeared at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

To complicate matters further, a 1933 Democrat & Chronicle article states that the horse–while still living, not while stuffed–took part in the first Rochester Industrial Exposition parade on October 14th, 1908, and in many triumphal marches afterwards. This seems to indicate it was a local horse of some note; but for the life of me, I have not found any direct references to a giant horse at the parade.

If snakes, dogs and giant horses weren’t enough animals for you, how about a monkey or two? Around 1895, Gruber’s Mill Street saloon boasted a monkey named “Fanny”, and in 1898 her baby monkey was born there.

The baby monkey’s father, “Jocko”, also lived there some of the time, when he was not on animal road shows.

And for the truly discerning animal lover, there’s whatever the hell these things were:

As one can see from the above advertising card, Rattlesnake Pete was gifted with a powerful handshake, to the point where people would challenge other strong grippers to shake Pete’s hand.

Yeesh, those nails!

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Pete’s Rambler

Rattlesnake Pete loved to ride around in his red rambler, a custom car with a rattlesnake coat-of-arms on one side and a decorative brass rattlesnake head horns on the fenders, visible in the photo below:

Looking at the above, the car lacks the iconic fender serpents, so it’s likely a different car. But I doubt a guy like Rattlesnake Pete would have only one car. He is wearing his famous rattlesnake skin coat and vest in this.

The below is definitely his custom rambler, however:

Gruber ran into an unexpected bit of trouble in his car in 1914 when something went awry on the elevator of the “Patterson Garage” on Fitzhugh.

Gruber would return to his home at No. 687 Averill Avenue to recover. This was Gruber’s long-time residence, where he would live until his death in 1932.

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Fangs and Fortune

Pete Gruber’s occupation came with a fairly foreseeable downside: getting bitten quite often by venomous snakes.

Gruber had a go-to remedy for snakebite: drinking milk until he puked. Sometimes he substituted it with liquor, if it was nearer-by. I’m not sure how that helped rid his bloodstream of venom but it does seem to have prevented his death, if he was indeed in danger of dying. Perhaps his impromptu gallon challenge had no impact on the situation.

The rock band Great White would have to eat their words if they witnessed Rattlesnake Pete at work: he was far from “once bitten, twice shy”. Necessarily level-headed and cool in the face of possible death, Pete was willing and able to go back to the snakes again and again.

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The Rattlesnake King

The title of Rattlesnake King was not merely bestowed upon Pete Gruber by dint of his predilection towards rattlers. Gruber was far from alone in the snake-catching occupation, and he had to defend his crown against challengers and pretenders.

Now and then, someone like “Stub” Valentine would come along and claim to be the equal of Rattlesnake Pete, or to have killed some snake of unlikely type or size, like “Cy” Thornton. Gruber was always quick to reach out with just the words to slap them back down a couple pegs.

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Old “Stub” wasn’t apparently all he was cracked up to be, or possibly even real at all. An article in the Dalton Enterprise of July 19, 1895 suggests that Valentine would frequently foist fictions upon the papers, coming in with grand fibs about his successes against snakes.

For a time the pretenders to the Rattlesnake King’s throne were silent, but in 1898 a new challenger from Texas raised his head, a man named Jim Bancroft. Bancroft opened his missive by impugning Gruber’s honor, suggesting his excuses to not compete were just that, and any further attempts to not meet his challenge would show that Gruber was “a lobster and crawling”.

Pete Gruber, incensed by the disrespect, met Bancroft’s challenge with a sum for forfeit; Bancroft never put up his own, nor did he show up at all. Bancroft was bluffing, as so many of Rattlesnake Pete’s pretenders had done before.

If you come at the Rattlesnake King, you best not miss!

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The Water Bicycle

Like most odd people, Gruber did far too many odd things to neatly categorize. For instance, having a “water bicycle” built for him so that he could ride it upon Lake Ontario. Basically a large bicycle frame on floats, rigged to a steering rudder and outfitted with paddles driven by the pedals.

The “water bicycle” functioned admirably for quite a while, to the delight of spectators ashore, until a pin fell out of a shaft into the water, and the pedals were no longer able to turn. Left without propulsion, Gruber could do nothing but rotate in the water and shout for rescue until it arrived.

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Not With a Bang, but With a Slither

Illness began to overtake the old snake charmer in earnest in the early 1930s; in 1931 he was forced to withdraw from active business entirely, leaving his manager Martin Smith in charge. To add to the museum’s troubles, Federal prohibition raids had closed the venue for a long period of time and forced Smith to appear in court to answer charges of providing alcoholic beverages for sale. Something had to give, and that something was Rattlesnake Pete.

As if Rattlesnake Pete and his museum were one and the same, Peter Gruber died on October 11th, 1932, and the museum died with him. Family members who received the Mill Street property expressed no interest in continuing the cabinet of curiosities, and arranged for the items to be auctioned.

All of the items in the museum were sent to auction.

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The Collection

On Friday, November 25th, 1932, an auction took place at Rochester Storage Warehouse, No. 25 North Washington Street. The many weird and wonderful elements of the late Rattlesnake Pete’s collections were brought out for purchase, one-by-one, evoking wonder in youths and wistful reminiscences in elders.

A lawyer from East Rochester, William L. Clay, was the purchaser of many items auctioned off from Gruber’s lot.

With the planned razing of the century-old building that had of late been Rattlesnake Pete’s museum, Clay removed the considerable contents of the museum’s collection to storage, in a barn on Adams Street. [And yes, I tried to locate the barn, but there was not enough info to make a solid identification.]

One disturbing revelation from the above article was that one of the attractions of Pete’s museum was a dying, rattlesnake-bitten Native, with bellows inside of it to simulate his dying grunts. This rather macabre display gives a benchmark for the level of class one could expect to find from the venue.

Clay presented Pete’s signature rattlesnake skin suit to the Rochester Museum and Science Center.

Clay’s Rattlesnake Pete collection included the giant stuffed horse; in 1946 pranksters would bring the horse out of storage and put it next to the Flying Red Horse sign of a new Socony-Vacuum gas station.

Apparently this so damaged the old stuffed horse that William L. Clay was forced to junk it:

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The Fate of Nos. 8-10 Mill

Despite plans to raze, the building was given a longer lease on life with a renovation. A series of restaurants would operate there afterwards, including a steak place in the 1940s and a restaurant called The Kasbah Restaurant in the late 1950s.

Arch Merrill was forever nostalgic about the old museum:

The run-down of museum items above honestly makes the place sound slightly less charming and a bit more gruesome, but curiosities are curiosities, even if they’re a family-slayer’s weapon.

None of the articles really give me a clue as to which axe murder the axe was supposedly used in, and there were–dismally enough–plenty of candidates from the late 19th and early 20th centuries to pick from.

Arch Merrill would go into even more loving detail in his book, Shadows on the Wall:

According to the above, Gruber’s famous friends were many. Circus man Dexter Fellows was a frequent visitor. Gruber apparently won a golden watch charm from animal trainer Frank Bostock for saving the life of Clyde “Phoebe” Powers, a snake performer in Bostock’s Wild Animal Show. The circus was performing at Coney Island in 1903, when Powers was bitten by a rattlesnake.

Part of the building complex at Nos. 8-10 had already come down in favor of a filling station and auto parking by 1950, leaving the main section of No. 10, the core of Rattlesnake Pete’s.

The remainder of the former Rattlesnake Pete’s building at Nos. 8-10 Mill Street was slated for demolition around 1959 or 1960:

By this point the building was a century old and extremely run-down. Though its passing caused nostalgia to explode in Rochester like a poignant bomb, no efforts were made to save the structure, and it was destroyed in favor of parking.

The shadow of Rattlesnake Pete’s memory was very long indeed; even decades later the museum would linger large in the mind of a woman who was once a little girl, Marie Metz Blake, whose father was a tattooist there.

The spot where Rattlesnake Pete’s museum stood is still parking today,

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A Snake in the Past

Like so many of the fun public spectacles and interesting buildings of yesteryear, we instead today have a smooth expanse of asphalt. It makes it difficult to imagine that this spot was once a hive of social activity. Look at this parking area and imagine all the people stopping in to see the amusements, and all the people staggering out full of liquors. Imagine the laughter and hubbub when someone gets decked in the face by a mechanical boxing glove. Imagine the tobacco-chewing men swapping snakebite stories with Pete Gruber in-between spits towards the cuspidor.

Only one other man in my research has been renowned for the strength of his handshake besides Peter Gruber, and that is police chief Copenhagen. It’s that sort of detail that makes you feel a bit like you know a person. If I could, if it were possible at all, I should love to shake the hand of Rattlesnake Pete. I’d like to thank him for being interesting. I’d like to think him for being a part of our city.

Rest in peace, Rattlesnake Pete.

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