Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Bowie Knife

The Bolo versions are pretty cool. Last one I saw at the big Tulsa Gun Show was not cheap.

M1849 Ames Riflemans knife

M1904 Hospital Bolo

That’s cool Bob ! Never seen one.

I used to have a Patton Sword that they cut down to make a soldiers knife in WW-1 with the original grip still attached. Gave it to my nephew that you’ve met that does re-enactments at Camp Mabry

I have three of these. Rigid Alamo Bowie. Damn things are 17 inch with a 10 1/2 inch blade. The spine of the blade is 3/8 inch thick and weighs prolly close to for pounds. Real practical... An everyday carry knife right. I have both a gun and knife problem.

No one ever said Jim Bowie made men equal, Colonel Colt did.

As best I can gather affordable, reliable revolvers first achieve general distribution here in Texas with the arrival in numbers of the ‘51 Navy in the mid 1850’s.

The end of the “tyranny of the Bowie knife”?

Birdwatcher,

You mentioned the name Smithwick, that reminded me of an old town out on 1431, between CedarPark and Marble Falls. Nothing really there anymore.

You have a good memory.

Later on during his near thirty year career in Texas, Noah Smithwick was one of the first settlers of that section of the Colorado River. Throughout his life he was an industrious individual and built a mill at that location.

Shortly thereafter, being a confirmed Union man. he left Texas for California at the outbreak of the Civil War.

Many years later, when he was approaching 90 and going blind, his daughter had him relate the events of his life to keep him occupied.

A guy who’s extraordinary life reads like a Texian miniseries. Best of all his whole memoirs are available online. See....

The Evolution of a State, or Recollections of Old Texas Days

He is so matter-of-fact it bears careful reading or you might miss it. Like the time around 1840 the Comanches stole his horse, so he reads their tracks, checks the priming on his rifle and sets out on foot to recover it ”because there were only two of them”.

Viking,

As an aside, I have taken the same route a Smithwick in my recent western migration. I have moved from his old stomping grounds on the Wilbarger trace NW of Bastrop on the Joseph Rogers grant, out onto a portion of the old Fowler grant on the Burnet/Blanco co line. Im a bit southeast of his old Burnet county digs SE of the conflux of Double Horn creek (close to his mill location) on the Colorado.

Yep. Colt revolvers replaced the Bowie knife as the best, serious, regularly carried, personal sidearm in the US, but the 1849 Pocket Revolver was actually a hair earlier than the 1851 navy, and was always a bigger seller. The Navy was close in popularity, though.

The Dragoons were never popular personal civilian arms.

Tks for the info.

Ranger Captain John Salmon Ford in his memoirs “RIP Ford’s Texas” states that, early 1850’s, his Ranging Company” was reduced to using old single-shot horse pistols due to a lack of “serviceable revolvers”. Didn’t matter that much anyway as most of his Comanche fighting was done with rifles.

1857, Frederick Law Olmstead (the guy who went on to design Central Park in NYC) left us an invaluable snapshot of Texas in his “A Journey Through Texas”. By then guys all over Texas were packing Colt revolvers.

I've got one of these but don't have the sheath. I really should search for one.

What lots don’t of folks don’t realize in these days of relative stopping power et al, is being gutshot with anything was pretty much a death sentence back then. .31 or .36 cal. round ball or conical, no matter. You gonna ride off and die a miserable death, somewhere.

George Childress, in a fit of drunken depression disembowled himself with a Bowie

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Childress

Another hero of the Tx. Revolution, Dr. Branch T. Archer ( Archer City Tx named for him), tried to shove his guts back in and sew him up best he could. But to no avail.

A little info on the alleged knife maker James Black.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Black_(blacksmith)

This is a little speculation but he was known as an enterprising self promoting type. I suspect that having famous people like Crockett and Bowie in town was too much temptation for him to resist and he couldn’t help but make a special knife for the famous knife fighter. It probably wasn’t the first “Bowie” knife but it likely contained some “improvements” or special touches and might very well have been the knife Bowie carried at the Alamo a few months later.

That’s a great book. I actually read it twice.

So James Black left home at age 8, that’s pretty hardcore.

Several great passages in the book, my own favorite is when he reflects upon the action where they tracked and surprised a Comanche war party and rescued the young Hibbons boy (1837 ??)

I was riding a fleet horse, which, becoming excited, carried me right in among the fleeing savages, one of whom jumped behind a tree and fired on me with a musket, fortunately missing his aim. Unable to control my horse, I jumped off him and gave chase to my assailant on foot, knowing his gun was empty. I fired on him and had the satisfaction of seeing him fall. My blood was up and, leaving him for dead, I ran on, loading my rifle as I ran, hoping to bring down another..... The brave whom I shot, lay flat on the ground and loaded his gun, which he discharged at Captain Tumlinson, narrowly missing him and killing his horse; when Conrad Rohrer ran up and, snatching the gun from the Indian’s hands, dealt him a blow on the head with it, crushing his skull....

The boys held an inquest on the dead Indian and, deciding that the gunshot wound would have proved fatal, awarded me the scalp. I modestly waved my claim in favor of Rohrer, but he, generous soul, declared that, according to all rules of the chase, the man who brought down the game was entitled to the pelt, and himself scalped the savage, tying the loathsome trophy to my saddle, where I permitted it to remain, thinking it might afford the poor woman, whose family its owner had helped to murder, some satisfaction to see that gory evidence that one of the wretches had paid the penalty of his crime.

That was the only Indian I ever knew that I shot down, and, after a long experience with them and their success at getting away wounded, I am not at all sure that that fellow would not have survived my shot, so I can’t say positively that I ever did kill a man, not even an Indian.

Cool stuff 😎

Pretty sure Captain Tumlinson is one of my ancestors. there were several in the Rangers.

I've looked for some books I had that had quotations
from period newspaper accounts of where Rezin Bowie
had written to state that he had "the " Bowie knife made
by Jessie Clift as a knife for James after an attempt
on his life and as a hunting knife, and other eyewitness
accounts of the knife being a large butcher knife.
One letter from Rezin to a newspaper said that the
the knives we think of as Bowie knives were brought
about by other knife makers and not by himself.
That's why I've always thought of the personal
knife of Bowie as the E Forrest knife
I'm thinking Rezin also designed what we call a
Searles Bowie knife