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…