Sweetwater: Blue Goose, Railroads, and Rattlesnakes

Sweetwater began in eighteen seventy-seven as a trading post on a creek whose water tasted clean and fresh, a rarity in the dry West Texas range. Early settlers knew it as Blue Goose, supposedly after a local cowboy mistook a great blue heron for some variety of edible goose. When the Texas and Pacific Railway arrived on March twelfth, eighteen eighty-one, the settlement moved to the tracks and took the sweeter name of the creek instead.

Nolan County organized that same year with Sweetwater as its seat. The town became a cattle-shipping hub, then an oil-service center, and eventually home to wind farms stretching across the Nolan County flats. Every March since nineteen fifty-eight, Sweetwater has hosted the World's Largest Rattlesnake Roundup, drawing thousands of visitors for an event that began as a practical effort to clear ranchers' pastures of western diamondbacks.