James Bowie and the Bowie Knife
Through long 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 knife was 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 battleground of 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.�