The facility was later renamed Pyote Air Base. Pyote Army Air Field was in active use as a B-17 base until the B-29 Superfortress came on line and became the focus of wartime training.
Due to an abundance of West Texas rattlesnakes in the area, it took on the nickname of “Rattlesnake Bomber Base.” For a time, it was the largest B-17 training base in the United States. At its peak, Pyote housed some 6,500 individuals and was used to train B-17 pilots on precision bombing methods. The air field featured two runways of 8,400 feet in a V and connected by a taxiway that completed a triangle. Pyote began its life as an air field when the United States Army Air Corps chose it (along with other locations similar to it) as the site of a B-17 training base, partly because of its sparse surrounding population and the usually aircraft-friendly West Texas weather. Many months prior to their fateful meeting in the skies above Germany, Pyote was casually mentioned in the book as the location where Brown had picked up his B-17 crew at this Texas air field, though there is no further discussion of the air field in the book. We came across the name of this air field while reading “A Higher Call” by Adam Makos, a wonderful book that relates the fascinating story of a wartime encounter between Charlie Brown, pilot of a wounded United States Army Air Corps B-17 Flying Fortress bomber and Franz Stigler, pilot of a German Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter. It has had two notable “boomlets” in its history, the first after oil was discovered in the area around 1920 and a second during World War II. Pyote is located roughly about halfway between Pecos and Monahans in Ward County, Texas. The origin of the name of Pyote, Texas is unknown, but possibly derived either from a mispronunciation of the word “coyote” by foreign railroad workers or it was a variation of the word peyote, the name of a local cactus plant. View texas-newmexico-history’s profile on Tumblr.View TexasHistoryNotebook’s profile on Twitter.View Texas History Notebook’s profile on Facebook.Follow TEXAS HISTORY NOTEBOOK on Recent Posts If your search doesn’t seem to work, try using fewer words.