Throughlong centuries of warring, certain weapons of the Old World, like King Arthur’s “Excalibur� and Siegmund’s great sword “Gram,� became the subjects of legends and of songs that have made them immortal. Their solitary counterpart in the New World, before six-shooter and law-abiding habits supplanted its use, was the Bowie knife. The knife’s origin is wrapped in fable as fantastic as that recounting how the dwarf smiths forged for the old Norse gods; its use is memorialized in a cycle of dark and bloody legends yet told all over the Southwest. And certainly the Bowie knifewas once as important to the frontiersman as a steady eye.
It was the rule to “use a knife and save powder and lead.� The Bowie knife was the best possible knife to use, and knife throwing and thrusting were arts to be excelled in, as well as shooting and wrestling. Indeed, many frontiersmen regarded any other weapon than the knife, for work in close quarters, as “fit only for the weakly.� Bowie himself, it is claimed, could juggle a number of knives in the air at the same time and at twenty paces send one through a small target of thick wood.
For dozens of purposes the Bowie knife was “as handy as a shirt pocket.� Its hard bone or horn handle was often used as a kind of pestle to grind coffee beans. The blade, sometimes as heavy as a Mexican machete, served to hack limbs from trees and to cut underbrush, as well as to dress and skin game. Tradition has it that in the battle of San Jacinto the Texans killed more Mexicans with the Bowie knife than with bullets. An Englishman named Hooten, who visited Texas a few years after the battle and straightway wrote a book, said: “I have myself seen skulls of Mexicans brought in from the battlegroundof San Jacinto that were cleft nearly through the thickest part of the bone behind, evidently at one blow, and with sufficient force to throw out extensive cracks, like those of starred glass.�
Of all the characters connected with pioneer history in the Southwest, James Bowie comes nearer being unadulterated legend than any other. He did nothing really great or constructive; yet his name has probably been more widely popularized than that of the truly great and constructive founder of the Texas Republic, Stephen F. Austin. He affected little, if at all, the destiny of a nation, and merely a scrap of his paper survives; yet the stories that sprang up about him are second in number only to those about the voluble and spectacular Sam Houston. He is remembered popularly for three things: first, his brave death in the Alamo, fighting for Texas independence; second, his supposed connection with a lost Spanish mine on the San Saba River, which came to bear Bowie’s name, and which today, after thousands of men over a period close to a hundred years have vainly sought to find it, is yet the object of ardent search; third, the knife which bears his name—and which, to many people, symbolizes his character.
All three of these claims to remembrance are wrapped in legend. The traditional tales, some of them truly extraordinary, centering around the Lost Bowie Mine, would, if compiled, fill a volume. History is clear as to Bowie’s part in the Alamo, but the best stories about him there do not get into documented histories. Nor do the tales of how he succored abused slaves, took the part of bullied preachers, and rescued wronged women. But our subject is the Bowie knife.
The known facts about James Bowie’s early life are that he was born in Tennessee in 1795, two years later than his distinguished brother Rezin P. Bowie, and that in 1802 he came with his parents and their numerous progeny to Louisiana. The name Bowie at that time was already more than a century old in Maryland and had been known for two generations in Virginia and South Carolina, the several branches of the family having shot out from a stout clan of Scottish Highlanders. The male members of it—hard riding, hard-headed, well propertied, decently educated, contentious in politics, and ready to die in adherence to the code of the Cavaliers—generally deserved the epithet given to them, “the fighting Bowies.�
The pair that reared James were equal to holding their own in a wilderness where turbulent men were made more turbulent by the confusion of land claims following the Louisiana Purchase. On one occasion Rezin Bowie, Sr., father of James, in defending his land against a gang of squatters, killed one of them. He was arrested, charged with manslaughter, and put in jail to await trial. Mrs. Bowie, accompanied by a slave, rode on horseback to the jail, demanded entrance, and entered. In a few minutes she and her husband reappeared, each armed with a brace of pistols. While the jailer retreated, they mounted the horses in waiting and rode away. It is not recorded that Rezin Bowie, Sr., was again molested. Years later when this wife and mother was told how her son had been killed by Mexicans in the Alamo, she calmly remarked, “I’ll wager no wounds were found in his back.�
In time, James Bowie and his brother Rezin came to own and operate a great sugar plantation on Bayou Lafourche, called Arcadia. Meantime, John J., a third brother, had moved to Arkansas and established a large plantation.
Jim Bowie was a man of surpassing vigor, of headlong energy, and of great ambition to lead.He was six feet tall and all muscle. He roped and rode giant alligators for fun. Generally polite and courteous, in anger he appeared “like an enraged tiger.� He was somehow connected with Dr. Long’s filibustering schemes against Mexico, and with one or more of his brothers he seems to have carried on an extensive business in slave smuggling. The Bowies are said to have bought blacks from the pirate Lafitte on Galveston Island at a dollar a pound. On one occasion, says the historian Thrall, Jim Bowie, while driving ninety of his purchases through the swamps of Louisiana, lost the entire band. Thereafter he prepared himself against a similar disaster by wearing “three or four knives,� so that he could transfix any Negro that tried to run away. Jerking a knife was quicker by far than reloading a horse pistol at the muzzle. “Big Jim,� as they called him, showed the “knife men� among Lafitte’s crew several things in the art of knife throwing.
And this brings us to our theme—a theme concerning which history must stand abashed before the riot of legend. Who made the first Bowie knife? How did it originate?
According to an unpublished letter, writtenin 1890 by John S. Moore, grandnephew of James Bowie, and preserved among the historical archives of The University of Texas, the original knife was modeled as a hunting knife by Rezin Bowie, Sr., and wrought by his own blacksmith, Jesse Cliffe. Some time later Jim Bowie had a “difficulty� with one Major Morris Wright, in which a bullet from Wright’s pistol was checked by a silver dollar in Bowie’s vest pocket. While Wright was in the act of shooting, Bowie “pulled down� on him, but his pistol snapped and the two foes parted, expecting to meet another day. When Jim told his father of this, the old gentleman got out his prized hunting knife and presented it to his son with these laconic words: “This will never snap.�
In the “Sandbar Duel� that followed, the knife fully met all expectations. This duel was in reality a free-for-all fight that took place among twelve men who met on a sandbar in the Mississippi River near Natchez, September 19, 1827. In it two men were killed and three badly wounded. Bowie was down, shot in four places and cut in five, when his mortal enemy, Major Wright, rushed upon him, exclaiming, “Damn you, you have killed me.� Bowie raised himselfup and stabbed Wright to the heart. At once Bowie’s knife became famous and copies of it were widely disseminated.
According to notes kept by another scion of the Bowie family, Dr. J. Moore Soniat du Fosset, of New Orleans, now deceased, it was Rezin P. Bowie, the brother of James, who devised the knife. The occasion for it arose thus:
The Bowie brothers were very fond of riding wild cattle down—a sport popular among planters of Louisiana at the time. There were two ways of dealing with the maverick animals. One was to shoot them from horseback, as sportsmen on the plains shot buffaloes; the other was to ride against them and stab them with a largecouteau de chasse. Sometimes the cattle were lassoed and then stabbed. The chase with knife and lasso was wilder and more exciting than the chase with pistol or rifle. Hence the Bowies preferred it.
One day while Rezin P. was thrusting his knife into a ferocious bull, the animal lunged in such a way as to draw the blade through the hunter’s hand, making a severe wound.
After having his hand dressed, Rezin called the plantation blacksmith, Jesse Cliffe, and toldhim that he must make a knife that would not slip from a man’s grasp. Using a pencil in his left hand, he awkwardly traced on paper a blade some ten inches long and two inches broad at its widest part, the handle to be strong and well protected from the blade by guards. The model having been settled upon, Rezin gave the smith a large file of the best quality of steel and told him to make the knife out of that. With fire and hammer the smith wrought the weapon—just one. It proved to be so serviceable in hunting, and Rezin came to prize it so highly that for a long time he kept it, when he was not wearing it, locked in his desk.
Then one day Jim Bowie told his brother how his life had been jeopardized by the snapping of a pistol while it was pointed at a man firing on him. After hearing the story and learning how the final reckoning between the enemies was yet to be made, Rezin unlocked the desk, took out his prized personal possession, and handed it to his brother with these words: “Here, Jim, take ‘Old Bowie.’ She never misses fire.�
Another story has it that in preparation for the “Sandbar Duel� Jim Bowie himself took a fourteen-inch file to a cutler in New Orleans,known as Pedro. Pedro had learned his trade in Toledo, where the finest swords in all Spain were forged; and all his skill went into the making of a blade which was to be, in Bowie’s words, “fit to fight for a man’s life with.�
When in doubt, go to the encyclopedia. This is what theEncyclopedia Americana(1928) sets forth: “Colonel James Bowie is said to have had his sword broken down to within about twenty inches of the hilt in a fight with some Mexicans, but he found that he did such good execution with his broken blade that he equipped all his followers with a similar weapon�—the Bowie knife.
But let us not be too rash in drawing conclusions. Arkansas is yet to be heard from, and Arkansas has better right to speak on the subject than any encyclopedia. The Bowie knife used to be commonly known as the “Arkansas toothpick,� and Arkansas is sometimes referred to as “the Toothpick State.� Arkansians certainly knew their toothpicks. The very spring that Bowie died in the Alamo, Arkansas became a state, and fittingly enough history records that the members of the first Legislature used, after adjournment in the cool of the evening, to taketheir knives and pistols and repair to a grove hard by, there to practice throwing and shooting at the trees.
Some members of the Legislature were in fine practice. The Speaker of the House was John Wilson, sometimes known as “Horse Ears� from the fact that when he was excited—whether by love, humor, or anger—his ears worked up and down like those of an aroused horse. One of his political enemies in the House was Major J. J. Anthony. When a bill relating to bounties on wolf scalps came up Anthony arose and, in the course of his remarks, made a cutting allusion to Speaker Wilson.
With ears working and quivering “in a horrific manner,� Wilson leaped from his chair, drew a Bowie knife, and started toward his antagonist. Anthony was waiting for “Horse Ears� with his own knife drawn. A legislator thrust a chair between them. Each seized a rung in his left hand and went to slashing with his right. Anthony cut one of Wilson’s hands severely and in the scuffle lost his knife. Wilson, thereupon, made short work of his enemy. In court Wilson was triumphantly cleared of the charge of murder, and at a meeting of the Legislature a fewyears later drew his Bowie knife on another member. Those were the days when the Bowie knife governed in Arkansas.
So it is not without reason and just basis for pride that Arkansas insists on having originated the Bowie knife. It has already been said that John J. Bowie established a plantation in that state. A former Arkansas judge, William F. Pope, maintains that Rezin P. Bowie once came to Washington, Arkansas, and engaged an expert smith named Black to make a hunting knife after a pattern that he, Bowie, had whittled out of the top of a cigar box. “He told the smith he wanted a knife that would disjoint the bones of a bear or deer without gapping or turning the edge of the blade. Black undertook the job and turned out the implement afterward known as the Bowie knife. The hilt was elaborately ornamented with silver designs. Black’s charge for the work was $10, but Bowie was so pleased with it that he gave the maker $10 more.
“I do not hesitate to make the statement,� concludes Judge Pope, “that nogenuineBowie knives have ever been made outside the State of Arkansas.... Many imitations have been attempted, but they are not Bowie knives.�
Despite such strong assertions, it would appear that Judge Pope based his judgment on a false premise. The classic Arkansas story comes from Dan W. Jones, governor of Arkansas from 1897 to 1901. According to Governor Jones, the James Black, who alone made the only “genuine� Bowie knife, also designed it. Black was born in New Jersey and, after having served as apprentice to a Philadelphia silver-plate manufacturer, came South in 1818, settling that year at Washington, Hempstead County, Arkansas.
Here he found employment with Shaw, the village blacksmith. Shaw was an important man with high ambitions for his daughters. Consequently, when Anne fell in love with the young smith, only a hired hand, Shaw objected. The young people married nevertheless, and James Black set up a smithy of his own.
He specialized in making knives, and very soon they had won a reputation. Governor Jones’s story continues:
“About 1831 James Bowie came to Washington and gave Black an order for a knife, furnishing a pattern and desiring it to be made within the next sixty or ninety days, at the end of which time he would call for it. Black made the knifeaccording to Bowie’s pattern. He knew Bowie well and had a high regard for him as a man of good taste as well as of unflinching courage. He had never made a knife that suited his own taste in point of shape, and he concluded that this would be a good opportunity to make one. Consequently, after completing the knife ordered by Bowie, he made another. When Bowie returned he showed both the knives to him, giving him his choice at the same price. Bowie promptly selected Black’s pattern.
“Shortly after this Bowie became involved in a difficulty with three desperadoes, who assaulted him with knives. He killed them all with the knife Black had made. After this, whenever anyone ordered a knife from Black he ordered it made ‘like Bowie’s’ which finally was shortened into ‘Make me a Bowie knife.’ Thus this famous weapon acquired its name.
“Other men made knives in those days, and they are still being made, but no one has ever made ‘the Bowie knife’ except James Black. Its chiefest value was in its temper. Black undoubtedly possessed the Damascus secret. It came to him mysteriously and it died with him in the same way. He often told men that no one hadtaught him the secret and that it was impossible for him to tell how he acquired it.�
The death of the secret is a part of the story. About 1838 Black’s wife died. Not long thereafter Black himself was confined to his bed by a fever. While he was down, his father-in-law, who had all along been jealous of Black’s growing reputation, met up with him and beat him over the head with a stick. Probably he would have killed him had not Black’s dog seized Shaw by the throat. As it was, inflammation set up in Black’s eyes and he was threatened with blindness. As soon as he had strength enough to travel he set out for expert treatment. A quack doctor in Cincinnati made him stone-blind.
Black returned to Arkansas to find his little property gone and himself an object of charity. A Doctor Jones, father of the future Governor Jones, gave him a home. When Doctor Jones died, the blind man went to live with the son.
“Time and again,� recalls Governor Jones, “when I was a boy he said to me that, notwithstanding his great misfortune, God had blessed him in a rare manner by giving him such a good home and that he would repay it all by disclosingto me his secret of tempering steel when I should arrive at maturity.
“On the first day of May, 1870, his seventieth birthday, he said to me that he was getting old and could not in the ordinary course of nature expect to live a great while longer; and that, if I would get pen, ink and paper, he would communicate it to me and I could write it down.
“I brought the writing material and told him I was ready. He said, ‘In the first place’—and then stopped suddenly and commenced rubbing his brow with the fingers of his right hand. He continued this for some minutes, and then said, ‘Go away and come back again in an hour.’
“I went out of the room, but remained where I could see him, and not for one moment did he take his fingers from his brow or change his position. At the expiration of the hour I went into the room and spoke to him. Without changing his position or movement, he said, ‘Go out again and come back in another hour.’
“Upon my speaking to him at the expiration of the second hour he again said, ‘Go out once more and come back in another hour.’ Again I went out and watched. The old man sat there, his frame sunken, immobile, his only movementthe constant rubbing of his brow with the fingers of his right hand.
“When I came in and spoke to him at the expiration of the third hour he burst into a flood of tears and said:
“‘My God, my God, it has all gone from me! All these years I have accepted the kindness of these good people in the belief that I could repay it all with this legacy, and now when I attempt to do it I cannot. Daniel, there were ten or twelve processes. When I told you to get pen, ink and paper they were all fresh in my mind, but they are all gone now. My God, my God, I have put it off too long!’
“I looked at him in awe and wonder. The skin from his forehead had been completely rubbed away by his fingers. His sightless eyes were filled with tears and his white face was the very picture of grief and despair.
“For a little more than two years longer he lived on, but he was ever after an imbecile. He lies buried in the old graveyard at Washington, and with him lies buried the wonderful secret of the genuine Bowie knife steel.�
Texas, too, has asserted her claim to being the place where Bowie originated the knife. Thereare other stories—many of them. However they may contradict each other, the preponderance of evidence goes to show that the knife used by Jim Bowie in the “Sandbar Duel� of 1827 set the fashion for Bowie knives. It was duplicated in many places—by solitary smiths over a vast pioneer country, by a factory in Sheffield, England. It was improved upon and elaborated upon, and until the six-shooter supplanted it, it was the chief weapon employed to settle personal difficulties over a vast territory of the South and West where pioneer conditions prevailed.
The exact proportions of the original Bowie knife probably never will be known, though the blade was undoubtedly about ten inches long. TheidealBowie knife was forged from the best steel procurable. It was differentiated from other knives by having more curve to the blade near the point, by having a heavier handle—often of horn—and by having handle, blade, and guards all so well balanced that the knife could be cast a maximum distance with the most deadly effect.
How many men Bowie killed with the blade that saved his life on the Mississippi sandbar we do not know. Rezin P. Bowie flatly affirmed that the knife never was used more than the once forother than hunting purposes. Maybe Bowie used at other times an improved model, though, as we shall see, he was passionately devoted to “Old Bowie.� Estimates of the number of men he stabbed—exclusive of his work in the Alamo—vary from sixteen to nineteen. It is significant that Rezin was careful to make a distinction between a “difficulty� and a “duel�; consequently his flat assertion that neither he nor James “ever had aduelwith any person whatsoever� is to be taken technically.
The technically trained Judge Pope, already quoted, overruled, we might say, Rezin’s definition—or assertion. “Several months ago,� he records, “I met a descendant of the Bowies who informed me that his great-uncle James once fought a desperate duel with a Mexican with knives, the combatants, face to face and within mutual striking distance, sitting on a log to which the stout leather breeches each wore were securely nailed.�
Bowie was as gallant as he was gory. One time, so another yarn goes, he met in Natchez-Under-the-Hill a young man named Lattimore, whom he recognized as the son of a much esteemed friend. Young Lattimore had sold a largeamount of cotton and in a faro game was being cheated by “Bloody Sturdivant,� a notorious gambler.
“Young man,� said Bowie, “you don’t know me, but your father does. Here, let me take your hand.�
In a short time Bowie exposed the cheat. Then he won back the money Lattimore had lost and gave it to him with the advice to gamble no more. “Bloody Sturdivant,� meantime, ignorant of who his opponent was, had become so incensed that he challenged Bowie to a duel, proposing that they lash their left hands together and fight with knives. Bowie accepted, at the first stroke disabled the right arm of his antagonist, and then forbore to take his life.
Duels of this character between men lashed together were not exactly everyday affairs, but the fact that they occurred at all bespeaks the spirit of the times—and the popularity of the Bowie knife. In the region of Texas below San Antonio they were called “Helena duels� from the fact that the town of Helena fostered them rather frequently. Sometimes they were known as “Mexican fights.�
More dramatic, perhaps, and certainly as chillingto the imagination, was another form of duel that Bowie is said to have inaugurated. He was challenged, so the story goes, and had the privilege of arranging the combat. He stipulated that the fight should take place at night in a dark room into which the combatants, stripped to the waist, barefooted—so that sound would not reveal movement—and armed with Bowie knives, were to be locked.
In the dead of the night they were accompanied to the appointed room in a deserted house. They entered. The door was locked. The seconds outside listened for long minutes without hearing a sound. Then they heard a scuffle, accompanied by a click of steel, a moan, and a voice crying, “Come in.� By the light of a lantern Bowie was seen standing in a pool of blood, the other man dead.
Bowie must have lain awake nights thinking up novel ways in which to exercise his knife. It is humiliating to record that in all likelihood he did not think up what might be denominated “the grave duel�—the most exquisite form that hand-to-hand combat with knives could assume.
While the noted Clay Allison “of the Washita,� one of the swiftest, boldest, most bizarre andhumorous gunfighters of the Southwest, was in Texas along in the early 1870’s he became embroiled, so old-timers tell, with a neighboring ranchman. The two men agreed to fight it out, and the coolness and originality that Clay Allison displayed in planning the details of the fight would have delighted Jim Bowie.
“It was agreed,� Maurice G. Fulton relates the story, “that a grave should be prepared of the usual length and width, but to the exceptional depth of seven or eight feet. The two men were to strip themselves to the waist and then seat themselves inside the grave at the two ends, each grasping in his right hand a Bowie knife. At a given signal they were to rise and start fighting. This they were to keep up until one or the other was dead. A final stipulation required the survivor then and there to cover the dead one with the earth removed in digging the grave.�
Clay Allison, of the Washita, threw in the dirt.
Bowie still had his knife at the Alamo—at least a Bowie knife. Dallas T. Herndon, Arkansas historian, says that he died in the Alamo “with the knife made by James Black clasped in his hand.� Others have said that around Bowie’s cot—for he was ill—was a heap of Mexicanswhose ribs had been tickled by the knife. Among the relics in the Alamo itself at present is a not very formidable specimen of cutlery that some man by the name of Bowie donated a few years ago as the original Bowie knife. The Witte Museum, in San Antonio, has another knife that is supposed to have been owned by Bowie and presented by him to a friend. (Bowie seems to have been fond of making presents of the knife, very much as an author presents his own books.) One tradition is that Bowie gave the original knife to the great actor, Forrest. No doubt Bowie admired actors. Another report has it that one of the Louisiana descendants of Rezin P. Bowie lost the original knife in a boggy river some forty years ago.
James Bowie died before the knife that bears his name was supplanted by the six-shooter. It is generally said that Captain Jack Hays, of the Texas Rangers, at the battle of the Pedernales with Comanche Indians, about 1842, first fully demonstrated the superiority of the Colt’s revolver over all other weapons in close combat. It was about this time that Robert M. Williamson, a lawyer and one of the most singular characters among the highly individualized men ofAustin’s colonies, made a gesture that signified the waning dominance of the Bowie knife.
The President of the Republic of Texas commissioned Judge Williamson to go to a certain county and there hold a term of court. No court had been held in the county for years; the citizens were principally engaged in feuds and wanted no legal meddling. Just before court was to be convened, a mass meeting of the feudists adopted a resolution declaring that no court should be held. When Williamson took his seat on the bench, a lawyer who had been deputized to set forth the resolution arose and read it aloud. The courtroom was crowded with armed men. After the lawyer had concluded and taken his seat, the judge asked him if he could cite any statute to warrant the adjournment of court for any such reasons as he had set forth.
Coolly enough, the lawyer again rose, pulled out his long Bowie knife, laid it on the table, and said: “This is the statute that governs in such cases.�
At this the fiery Williamson leaped from his chair, drew one of the new Colt’s revolvers, pointed it at the lawyer, and roared: “And this is the constitution that overrides the statute.Open court, Mr. Sheriff, and call the witnesses in the first case.�
Whether they be literally true or largely the product of imagination—and many of them must be fabrications—the tales that have come down regarding the origin of the Bowie knife and of its use by Bowie and other frontiersmen reflect, in a phrase from Henry Adams, “what society liked to see enacted on its theater of life.� Indeed, they reflect not only what society “liked to see enacted� but what was enacted. As truly as documented history they reveal a time and a people.