A venomous snake; the Trigonocephalus contortrix.
1796. Of the venomous kind, the most common are the rattle snake, and the copper or moccassin snake.… The copper snake … is … active and treacherous, and, it is said, will absolutely put himself in the way of a person to bite him.—Isaac Weld, ‘Travels through North America,’ pp. 115–6 (Lond., 1799).
1817.
| And near him the she-wolf stirr’d the brake, | |
| And the copper-snake breath’d in his ear. | |
Mass. Spy, Nov. 5. |
1821. Who has not heard of the rattle-snake or copperhead? An unexpected sight of either of these reptiles will make even the “lords of creation” recoil.—Mass. Spy, June 6: from the Microcosm.
1822. A few days since a woman in Salisbury township, Bucks county, discovered a copperhead snake on her dresser. In the same township, a woman setting her foot out of the door was bit in the heel by a copperhead.—Mass. Spy, July 31.
1825. Lest he might set his lifted foot, upon the loitering copper-head, or the coiled rattle snake.—John Neal, ‘Brother Jonathan,’ i. 215.
1829. “There are some copperheads and a few mocassins,” replied Philly, “whose bite is not altogether harmless.”—John P. Kennedy, ‘Swallow Barn,’ p. 205 (N.Y., 1851).
1843. John Glenville, in moving a piece of bark to throw under the wheel, was bitten in the wrist by a copper-head coiled under the bark; but, by a timely application of proper remedies, he escaped very serious injury.—B. R. Hall (‘Robert Carlton’), ‘The New Purchase,’ i. 150.
1850. The most terrible of all American snakes is the copper-head.—S. Judd, ‘Richard Edney,’ p. 382.
1854. The copper-head, so called, is a terrible serpent, supposed to inflict a more dangerous wound than the rattlesnake.—Lambert Lilly, ‘History of the Western States,’ p. 23 (Boston).
