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According to an unpublished letter, written in 1890 by John S. Moore, grandnephew of James Bowie, and preserved among the historical archives of The University of Texas, the original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 himself up 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 large couteau 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.