Cather utilizes the large rattlesnake at the prairie-dog town in several symbolic ways. Initially, the rattlesnake is a symbol of predators that prey on the vulnerable. Rattlesnakes live at prairie-dog town because they can snatch the prairie dogs or the brown earth owls that nest underground for their meals. Cather extends the rattlesnake symbol to the human world by describing Krajiek, who takes financial advantage of his fellow Bohemian immigrants, as a type of predator. The Shimerdas hate Krajiek, but because they speak the same language in a foreign land, Krajiek is their only ally. Cather explicitly compares Krajiek to the rattlesnakes: The Shimerdas “kept him in their hole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie-dogs and the brown owls house the rattlesnakes—because they did not know how to get rid of him” (32).

Jim Burden’s killing of the huge rattlesnake also symbolizes for Ántonia that Jim is no longer a boy. For Ántonia, Jim’s feat places him in the traditional masculine role of protector and she must defer to him. Jim actually felt sick and frightened when he killed the snake, recalling: “I didn’t run because I didn’t think of it” (46). Ántonia wants Jim to display the dead snake to all the neighbors, and Jim starts to feel he has done a heroic deed and that he is equal to anything in this “great land [that] had never looked to me so big and free” (48).