Jim Bowie: Knife-Wielding Son of Kentucky

by

Sitting up in his sick bed, he could hear the chaos in the courtyard outside—the roar of cannon, the crack of musket fire, the screams in Spanish and English of wounded and dying men. He knew it was only a matter of minutes before they smashed in the door to his chamber, but with a single-shot pistol in each hand and his fabled knife in his lap, he was as ready as fevered resolve and desperation could make him. 

Suddenly, the heavy door gave way with a crash as a horde of wild-eyed Mexican soldiers poured in. He fired the pistols, felling a man with each shot. Scooping up his terrible blade, he slashed and thrust, inflicting mortal damage until the soldiers’ bayonets ended the one-sided contest. Jim Bowie, Southern entrepreneur, Texas pioneer and fabled knife-fighter, was dead.

At least, so goes the legend. In fact, there is no definitive account of Bowie’s final moments, any more than there is of his fellow Alamo defender, David Crockett. Mexican soldiers unaware that Bowie was dying or perhaps already dead of disease reported scornfully that the famous “Santiago” Bowie perished helpless in his cot, cowering under a blanket. 

The fog that surrounds Bowie’s death is consistent with the fantastic stories that followed him throughout his life, ultimately making him a folkloric figure of mythic proportions. However, a study of the documented history of Bowie’s life reveals a man whose character was somewhat less than peerless. 

According to the Texas State Historical Association, the flesh-and-blood James Bowie “was born near Terrapin Creek [now Spring Creek] where it crosses Bowie’s Mill Road [Turnertown Road], nine miles northwest of Franklin, Logan County [now Simpson County], Kentucky, probably on April 10, 1796.” He was one of four brothers, sons of a farmer, millwright, whiskey distiller and dedicated wanderer named Rezin. 

Prior to James’ birth, Rezin had moved the family from Tennessee, where he had operated a gristmill. The Kentucky frontier offered boundless opportunity, and the Bowies prospered. Rezin acquired a small herd of cattle, built another mill, increased his slave holdings, and acquired hundreds of acres of land. Always seeing greater possibilities around the next bend in the road, however, he soon took his brood to Missouri, and from there, to Spanish-owned Louisiana Territory, where he again did well. 

Rezin’s third son, James, embraced the rustic life, and hunted and fished the bayous from early youth. (According to Bowie family lore, he roped and wrestled alligators for fun, and trapped bears for profit.) Physically, James was impressive. His brother John described him as “a stout, rather raw-boned man, of six feet [in] height, weigh[ing] 180 pounds,” with sandy hair, deep-set gray eyes and a fair complexion. “Taken altogether,” wrote John, “he was a manly, fine-looking person, and by many of the fair ones he was called handsome.” 

Despite what John describes as an “open, frank disposition,” James had a dark side. He could not tolerate what he perceived as an insult. “[T]he displays of his anger,” wrote John, “were terrible, and frequently terminated in some tragical scene.” A friend recalled, “When unexcited there was a calm seriousness … which gave assurance of great will power, unbending firmness of purpose, and unflinching courage. When fired by anger his face bore the semblance of an enraged tiger.” In the words of one biographer: “What observers took for fearlessness was as much an entire forgetfulness of his own safety in the grips of his fury … Instilling fear in others was something James Bowie did with ease.” 

While in his teens, James worked in his father’s logging business and invested in land. But by 1814, the War of 1812 was still raging and had finally come to Louisiana. James and older brother Rezin enlisted in a Louisiana regiment and marched to New Orleans. Although they saw no fighting, it was James’ first exposure to a cosmopolitan center, and its elegance—along with the saloons and gambling dens—made a lasting impression. 

When the war ended, James, Rezin and John entered into a business arrangement with the notorious pirate and smuggler, Jean Lafitte, in an enterprise that was both sordid and illegal. They became slave traders. For James, whose long-term ambition was to become a major landowner, it was a fast track to making enough money to realize his goal. 

Theirs was a two-part enterprise. Lafitte would attack slave ships on the seas and commandeer their human cargo, which he would then sell to the Bowie brothers at a dollar per pound, to be ferried up the river from Vermilion Bay and sold on the auction blocks of St. Landry Parish. Since the law would have considered their enterprise illegal importation, the Bowie brothers devised a scheme to keep themselves above the law, while earning tremendous returns. Rather than risk arrest and confiscation of their “property,” they would turn the slaves over to the local authorities as illegal imports and collect sizable rewards. With the reward money in their purse, they would then buy back the slaves at auction and re-sell them at a significant profit. 

In a relatively short time, slave trading earned the Bowies some $65,000—the equivalent of more than $1.25 million in today’s currency. They soon quit the slaving business, built a sugar plantation, and, with James in the lead, set about establishing themselves as real estate moguls. Unfortunately, they did so almost exclusively through swindling and land fraud. 

Louisiana—including what had become Arkansas—had been a Spanish territory, and the king of Spain had proffered parcels of land as a means of encouraging Spanish settlement beginning in the early 1700s. President Thomas Jefferson honored these land grants when he purchased the territory from Spain in 1803. However, it soon became evident that several grantees had never occupied their land, while others had been the recipients of “floating grants,” allowing them to select the land they wanted at some future date. Such conditions all but invited those who were inclined to perpetrate land fraud; such men were the brothers Bowie. 

At this time, Louisiana real estate was ripe for the picking. Writes historian William C. Davis, “The business of Louisiana in 1820 was the acquisition of wealth. Men lived on the expectation of fortune, hoping each new day for the bonanza that awaited in the trading houses of New Orleans or out in the vast soil.” 

James Bowie was not unique in seeking a fast track to financial success. Swindlers abounded in this time and place, and having once been the victim of a land fraud scheme himself, he was aware of both the methods and the possibilities. Bowie not only forged land grant documents; he then created deeds of sale, indicating that he had purchased the land described in the spurious grants. Since the documents required the signatures of witnesses, Bowie forged these as well, using the names of respected citizens who were far enough away to render their awareness of his activities unlikely. The plan was to immediately sell the feloniously acquired land to unsuspecting buyers. “The audacity of Bowie’s scheme,” writes Davis, “was stunning.”

Inevitably, his plot was uncovered when a registrar noticed that the handwriting on all the grants and related papers was identical. Feeling the need for an immediate change of venue, Bowie moved from the backwater Avoyelles to the more upscale Alexandria, where he continued to register bogus claims. His name was fast becoming synonymous with fraud throughout the region. 

Bowie refused to let this stop him, as he set about seeking loans and letters of credit based on his bogus real estate claims. At 30, he also began involving himself in local politics. In backing a friend and fellow army veteran named Samuel Wells, he ran afoul of Maj. Norris Wright, Wells’ strong political opponent. Wright, a local sheriff and notorious duelist, publicly maligned Bowie’s reputation, an insult the volatile Bowie could not stand. Armed with nothing but a pocketknife, he confronted Wright, who promptly drew a pistol and shot Bowie in the side. The bullet was deflected by pocket coins, causing only a bruise and a broken rib. Bowie kept his feet and proceeded to pummel Wright, whose friends intervened in time to save the major’s life. Bowie’s own friends belatedly arrived and carried the injured man to his room. The two would soon meet again on the field of honor, and what followed would elevate Bowie’s status from slave runner and local land swindler to nationally known knife-fighting superstar. 

The year 1827 can be considered the time in which the legend took root. Inevitably, any discussion of Bowie comes around to the famous knife that bore—and still bears—his name. Folklore tells us that he designed the weapon himself, with a massive blade, clipped and sharpened along the front of the top edge. Satisfied with the lethal design, Bowie then commissioned the highly skilled Arkansas blacksmith James Black to fabricate the knife. Black, the story goes, had earlier found a piece of a meteor, which he forged into the blade of this remarkable fighting engine.Handled in ivory and mounted in silver, the one-of-a-kind superweapon became the deadly, inseparable companion of its designer.

The reality is much less dramatic. Fearing for his injured brother’s future safety, Rezin gave James a knife for his protection: “Colonel James Bowie had been shot by an individual with whom he was at variance,” Rezin later wrote, “and as I presumed a second attempt would be made … to take his life, I gave him the knife to use as occasion might require, as a defensive weapon.”

In an era of single-shot firearms, men often relied upon their edged weapons for protection and to resolve matters of honor. The knife that James accepted from his brother and wore for the rest of his life was far from a thing of beauty. It was a simple, homemade affair, as described by Rezin himself in a letter written two years after his celebrated brother’s death:

“The first Bowie knife was made by myself in the parish of Avoyelles, in this state [Louisiana], as a hunting knife, for which purpose, exclusively, it was used for many years … The length of the blade was nine and one-quarters inches, its width one and one-half inches, single edged and not curved.”

More than six decades later, Rezin’s granddaughter—recalling her mother’s version of the actual forging of this first Bowie knife—wrote: “This instrument, which was never intended for ought but a hunting knife, was made of an old file in the plantation blacksmith shop of my grandfather’s Bayou Boeuf plantation, the maker was a hired white man named Jesse Clift, he afterwards went to Texas. My mother, Mrs. Jos. H. Moore then a little girl, went to the shop with her father, heard his directions, and saw Clift make the knife.” No ivory, no silver, no meteorite—just a functional, well-used hunting knife.

It wasn’t long before James would have occasion to use his brother’s gift. His friend, Samuel Wells, got into an altercation with a Dr. Thomas Maddox, which they agreed to resolve in a pistol duel. Since Louisiana forbade dueling, the event was scheduled to take place on a sandbar in the Mississippi River near Vidalia. On the morning of Sept. 19, 1827, the two antagonists paced off the required distance, as their seconds and a sizable group of friends looked on from the sidelines. Longstanding animosities existed between various members of both parties. Chief among them were James Bowie and Maj. Wright, who had been making himself scarce since Bowie’s recovery, but on this day had chosen to accompany his friend Maddox.

At the signal, both parties fired and missed. They fired a second time, with the same result and agreed to resolve their differences over a glass of wine. Others in the party were not so sanguine, however, and a free-for-all broke out. Pistols were drawn and fired on both sides, and one member of Maddox’s party, frustrated at missing Bowie, threw his pistol at Bowie’s head, inflicting a deep gash. 

As Bowie clung to a tree stump, momentarily stunned, Wright approached and shot him through the lung. An enraged Bowie charged his nemesis, whereupon two other Maddox partisans fired at him, shooting him through the thigh and felling him. Wright and an associate descended on Bowie, stabbing at him with their swords, as the recumbent man furiously parried their blows with his knife. One sword thrust pierced Bowie’s left hand, while another glanced off his breastbone and skidded down his ribs. 

Incredibly, the grievously wounded Bowie lunged upward, grabbing Wright’s lapel and hauling himself into a sitting position. Shocked, Wright drew back, pulling Bowie nearly upright. Wielding his knife with fixed purpose, Bowie thrust it deep into Wright’s chest, and, as he later recalled, “twisted it to cut his heart strings.” Wright died instantly, falling onto his mortal enemy and pinning him. Wright’s associate again stabbed at Bowie, who managed to cast off Wright’s body and wound his assailant in the arm. 

The fight, which Rezin later described as a “chance medley,” or rough fight, ended as suddenly as it had begun. It had taken less than two minutes and left two men dead and Bowie severely injured. He had been shot twice—once seriously—stabbed at least seven times, and cut deeply on his head. As Bowie was carried from the field, the physician attending the duel echoed everyone’s opinion that he would not survive. Bowie himself, while conceding that he was “damned badly wounded,” had no intention of dying.

Reports of the affair made national news, and a slowly healing Bowie found himself the focus of widespread admiration. Strangers, assuming a familiarity, referred to him as “Big Jim Bowie.” He had singlehandedly fought four men armed with swords and pistols, killing one and wounding at least one more, using nothing but what eyewitnesses called a “butcher knife.” States biographer Davis, “Impelled by the rage that blinded him to fear or self-protection, he stood his ground and simply kept fighting. That was the sort of thing that turned brutal, pointless brawling into legend.”

 Suddenly, men across the country were requesting their local blacksmiths or cutlery stores to make them a “knife like Bowie’s.” Soon, the steel mills of Sheffield, England, were turning them out in the tens of thousands for export to the United States, and the Bowie knife, in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, quickly became de rigueur on the frontier. Over the years, Bowie, never one to shy from celebrity, had several large, ornate knives forged as gifts to various friends and luminaries. In one brief free-for-all, he had literally hewn a place for himself in the pantheon of American fighting men. 

Ironically, despite Hollywood’s best efforts, and notwithstanding the countless tales of Bowie dispatching opponents in droves, the Vidalia sandbar melee was the only knife fight he was ever in. No documentation whatsoever exists to support the wild tales of mayhem that followed Bowie throughout his life, and Rezin was quite specific on the subject. The sandbar fight, he wrote, “was the only time the knife was used for any purpose other than that for which it was … originally designed … [N]either Col. Bowie nor myself, at any point of our lives, ever had a duel with any person whatsoever.”

Before he was fully healed, Bowie was back in the land fraud business with Rezin and John, this time applying for approval on hundreds of spurious grants in Arkansas. Their plan was a clever one. They flooded the territorial superior court office with hundreds of applications, all written in Spanish. Not speaking the language and overwhelmed by the sheer number, the U.S. attorney simply approved the vast majority of their claims, making the Bowies financially comfortable, at least for the moment.

Now approaching his mid-30s, the ever-ambitious Bowie sought to enhance his station by running for Congress. However, the story of the sandbar fight did not work in his favor with the type of prominent men whose support he required, nor did the swirling rumors of his involvement in land swindles. A political career was not in Bowie’s future. Moreover, given the increasing notoriety his fraudulent claims were now receiving, he determined that it was time for a move. New horizons beckoned, and Big Jim Bowie saw the promise of his future in the raw new frontier to the West: Texas!

Part II of the Bowie saga, which will appear in the November issue, tells the story of James’ brief but eventful sojourn in Texas. It was there that he achieved fame as a soldier and a leader of men and, through his death, a revered place in the so-called “Texas Trinity.”