I finally found out that I can use the following command to read the contents of a Snappy compressed file on HDFS:
hadoop fs -text /path/filename
Using the latest commands on Cloudera or HDP:
hdfs dfs -text /path/filename
If the intent is to download the file in text format for additional examination and processing, the output of that command can be piped to a file on the local system. You can also use head to just view the first few lines of the file.