Stories of Christmas and the Bowie knife
Date: 2022-10-27T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Christmas; Texas -- History; Bowie knife

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Title: Stories of Christmas and the Bowie knife

Author: J. Frank Dobie

Illustrator: Warren Hunter

Release date: October 27, 2022 [eBook #69245]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Steck Company, 1953

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69245

Credits: Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STORIES OF CHRISTMAS AND THE BOWIE KNIFE ***

Stories of Christmas
and the Bowie Knife

Stories of
Christmas
and the
Bowie Knife

BY J. Frank Dobie

ILLUSTRATED BY Warren Hunter

The Steck Company Austin, Texas

Copyright 1953 by
The Steck Company, Publishers
Austin, Texas

All Rights Reserved

Printed and Bound in the U.S.A.

Preface

In wanting to bring you a distinctively different Christmas greeting for 1953—as well as one that is typically Texan—The Steck Company turned quite naturally to Texas’ most distinguished folklorist, J. Frank Dobie. His writings of the past quarter century have turned the attention of people in many lands to the rich folklore of the Southwest. Dobie’s recollections of three boyhood Christmases begin this volume. As an added fillip, his colorful story of the Bowie knife is included.

Warren Hunter, one of Texas’ outstanding artists, has provided striking illustrations that catch the spirit of the stories and recall days quite remote from the modern scene, yet separated from us by only a few decades.

Thus, with a glance backward, The Steck Company brings you warm greetings for the 1953 season. In the words of Dobie, “Generous feelings and cheering words are never trite. Merry Christmas!”

Christmas and Remembrance

1

It is a benediction of nature that generally we remember more vividly and oftener what has given us happiness rather than what has given us pain. Christmas in particular is the time for recollecting, and now I am recollecting Christmases even more remote in character from modern Christmases than they are in time.

We lived on a ranch twenty-seven horse miles from our “shopping center.” That was Beeville, Texas, which later became the family home. Three or four times a year a wagon went to town and hauled out supplies, but the biggest haul was just before Christmas.

As I look back, those days seem to have been days of great plenitude—not because of anything like family prosperity, for we lived meagerly, but because of the necessity of local stockpiling. Sugar came in barrels, molasses in kegs or big jugs, flour in barrels or in tiers of 48-pound sacks, beans and coffee in bushel sacks (the coffee to be roasted and ground), lard in 50-pound cans, tomatoes, salmon, and other canned goods in cases. Then at Christmas time there was a large wooden bucket of mixed candy—enough for us six children, for our visiting cousins, and for the children of several Mexican families living on the ranch, most of them farmers. Each of these families received also a new blanket and a sack of fruit.

We had home-made candy not infrequently, but Christmas was the only time of year when it snowed candy. There were no chocolates, as I recollect—just a mixture of lemon drops and an assortment of variously shaped hunks of sugar, both hard and gummy, variously colored, alloyed, and flavored, with peppermint being dominant.

Christmas was also distinguished by apples, oranges, raisins (on stems), almonds, walnuts, pecans, and a coconut or two. We ate some of the coconut as broken out of the shells, but its main function was to be grated and mixed with sliced oranges and sugar into ambrosia—as inevitable for Christmas dinner as turkey is for Thanksgiving. Nobody then dreamed of having fruit every morning for breakfast. Oranges, apples, raisins, and nuts were put into stockings and hung on Christmas trees. They were a rare treat.

These fruits and nuts left a stronger impression on my mind than all other gifts associated with childhood Christmases except books, firecrackers, Roman candles—and my first new saddle. There were tin bugles, toy trains, and dolls for the girls, but we—the boys, at least—had so much fun making our own toys that no bought toy has left any impression on my memory. Christmas was the time for new pocket knives, and very useful they were. My father taught us to whittle water-wheels, which could be run only when an occasional rain made Long Hollow run. The axle for the wheel might be a piece of wood or a section of dried cornstalk, less durable but much more easily fitted with paddles than hard wood. The toy bugles would not split the air as brightly as cane whistles whittled out of an old fishing pole.

We may have had colored balloons at some Christmas, but I recollect only the ones made from bladders. Hog-killing time is cold weather. The chief prize for us from every hog and every calf, cow, or steer butchered was the bladder. A human mouth was the only air-pump for blowing up this home-contrived balloon. Held, air-expanded, near a fire, it would keep on expanding until the material was very thin and dry. Then came the climax—an explosion. Nobody wanted to part with his bladder-balloon, but that grand explosion could not be resisted.

I never heard of Fourth of July fireworks until I was nearly grown. Firecrackers and Roman candles were as much a part of Christmas as ambrosia. The firecrackers could be set off by day, but the Roman candles were for darkness, when everybody watched the pyrotechnics. They vanished all too quickly, like most other beautiful things—but not from the great reality called memory.

There were toy pistols and airguns, but a new pair of rubbers for a nigger-shooter gave just as much satisfaction. At one time we got more satisfaction from lead bullets gouged out of live oak trees than from any other form of shooting. Our house was on the edge of a grove of scores of live oak trees, some of them very large and old. When Uncle Ed Dubose, my mother’s half brother, came in the fall to hunt and again at Christmas time with all the family, he freely spent ammunition perfecting his marksmanship. His targets were tree trunks. He was an indefatigable treasure-hunter also, but he never found a bonanza comparable to that he left us children in the form of lead.

From it, from solder melted off tin cans, and from now and then a haul of babbitt found in wornout windmills, we minted dollars. We melted our metal in a large iron spoon over an outdoor fire and poured the liquid into a round wooden bluing box, wherein it quickly cooled and solidified. (Bluing for laundry in those days came in powdered form, for dissolving in water—in wooden boxes, with tops that screwed on, about the diameter of a dollar.) This free coinage was limited only by the supply of crude metal. The more canned goods we consumed and the more old bullets we could find, the higher the rate of coinage. The two principal uses the dollars had were for pitching—into holes in the ground—and for buying cattle, horses, sheep, and goats from each other.

Each of us had a play ranch enclosed by miniature fences—twine (our barbed wire) strung on sticks stuck into the ground like posts. Our cattle were tips of horns that had been sawed off cattle at the chute in the big picket cowpens about a hundred yards from the house. Our horses were spools from which my mother and neighbors had used the thread in endless sewing; our goats were empty snail shells; our sheep were oak galls. Sheep and goats were very plentiful and, therefore, had a low value; cattle and horses were harder to come by.

With running irons made of baling wire and heated red hot in a fire, we branded the cattle, sheep, and horses, but could not brand the snail-shell goats. We made long trains of flat rectangular sardine cans, coupled together by pieces of wire, to haul the stock from ranch to ranch. Our dog, Old Joe—named after Beautiful Joe, the wonderful hero of a favorite book—made a very unsatisfactory engine to pull the freight train. We hitched green lizards, snared with the hair of horsetail, to a single sardine can or to a cardboard matchbox that served as a wagon. Lizards never make tractable teams.

This ranching, with all of its ramifications, was not primarily Christmas play. It went on more in the summer than in the winter, but no Christmas toys could compete with it. Certain Christmas books added to prolonged play.

We children always knew positively that there would be books on the Christmas tree or in our stockings. We always wanted particular titles, and we had the before-Christmas pleasure of speculating on what known and unknown books Santa Claus might bring. I don’t remember what Christmas it was that Ivanhoe came to make knights of us boys. Old Stray, an irritatingly gentle horse that could hardly be forced out of a walk, enriched the flowering of our knighthood. Swiss Family Robinson made us into cave-dwellers. We dug our own cave into the bank of Long Hollow, some distance below the house.

I wasn’t yet reading when for Christmas I received an illustrated book, with a linen cover, about an owl that hooted. On demand my father read it aloud over and over. We could hear owls hooting in the live oaks many nights of the year, and my father could talk owl talk. Every time he read the book he had to tell us what the owl says, in words long drawn out from deep down: “I cook for myself. Who cooks for you-all?” There are very few conversationalists to whom I had rather listen than to a hoot owl, and often to this day his lonely and beautiful who-ing takes me back to a Christmas of childhood, to a child’s book, and to my father’s voice.

There were no commercial Santa Clauses in the country, so far as I know. The only Santa Claus for us was my father. At an early age I learned his identity, but that knowledge had no effect on the great illusion, any more than knowing that a grown woman could not literally live in a shoe had on the Mother Goose fact that there was an old woman who lived in a shoe—and she had so many children she didn’t know what to do.

My father cut the Christmas tree out in the pasture—a comely live oak or maybe a “knock-away” (anacahuita)—and brought it in secretly. After it was hung with gifts and lighted with little colored candles and we had all gathered to behold it, Santa Claus would bound in, all in white and red, as cheery in his ruddy complexion, reindeer country manners, other-world talk, and contagious spirits as the Saint Nicholas of “The Night before Christmas.” In disguised voice he called out the names on the packages and added joy to the gift in the way he presented it. Then he would disappear, and presently Papa would come in and claim his own presents with as much eagerness as we had received ours.

“The gift without the giver is bare.” Gifts can be manufactured, some beautiful, many useful, but giving-out feelings can’t be—though they can be cultivated. The love and cheer associated with Christmas will always be the best thing about it. How often just a good word that conveys the word-giver’s generosity of spirit enriches people! I remember the “Merry Christmas, sir!” of a gray-haired woman scrubbing stone steps at a college in Cambridge, England, during the war; and recollection of her sturdy, cheerful, kind nature brightens my world. I can hear my mother’s “Christmas Gift” or “Merry Christmas” as I write these words. Whoever heard her greeting received a gift, for she meant every syllable of it, felt every tone in it.

Sunrise, starlight, silence of dusk are never trite. Generous feelings and cheering words are never trite. Merry Christmas!

2

In memory as well as in actuality, Christmas is the time for coming home. Many a father lives for these homecomings of a scattered brood, but it is the mothers who make them. Fay Yauger’s “I Remember” suggests something of almost universal contrast:

My father rode a horse
And carried a gun;
He swapped for a living
And fought for his fun—
I remember his spurs
Agleam in the sun.

My father was always
Going somewhere—
To rodeo, market,
Or cattleman’s fair—
I remember my mother,
Her hand in the air.

My own mother has been dead five Christmases now. She was eighty-seven years old when she died and had been a widow for twenty-eight of those years. Maybe every mother is a matriarch; matriarchy was very strongly pronounced in mine. She invariably wanted her children and then grandchildren and great-grandchildren home at Christmas, and they generally got there. If I live to be a hundred, at every Christmas I’ll be remembering the brightness of her face, the eagerness of her greeting, the love in all her conduct—including cooking.

There was a kind of homecoming in our family—the returning of a presence without the immediate returning of the person—that seems to me to belong to Christmas, though it did not actually occur at that season. Not long after the United States entered the First World War, my mother and father had three sons and a daughter in the service. The baby of the family, Martha, was still in school and so was Henry, the youngest son, eighteen years old. My mother was thinking how she would have him for a time at least, as a stay while she cared for a sick husband and her own aged mother.

During World War I, millions of youths who joined the army volunteered. One day Henry came to my mother and said, “Mama, I wish you wouldn’t feel as you do about my enlisting. I want to go. I feel like a slacker staying at home.”

“Son,” she replied—and it was never her nature to take all day to make up her mind—“if you feel that way, go ahead and enlist. I’d rather you’d go and never come back than stay home feeling like a slacker.” Nor would it ever have occurred to her to try to pull wires to get him into a soft place.

Henry joined the Marines and within a few weeks was across the Atlantic. He was the only one of us four brothers who got a shot at the Kaiser’s young Hitlers, but when he was fighting in the Argonne, he wasn’t calling himself lucky, I guess. In October, 1918, Mama had a letter from him and knew he was somewhere on the front.

November 11 and the Armistice came. I had been in France myself a few weeks at that time. I can still hear and see the French peasants around the artillery camp where I was stationed, going about all day saying to each other and to any American soldier they met, “Fini le guerre, fini le guerre—The war is finished, the war is finished.” Some had tears in their eyes. They were in a kind of daze. They were in a transport as if peace on earth and good will to all men had suddenly arrived to end all wars. They were kind and simple people, like the masses of people of all nations, whether red, white, black, yellow, or brown.

The Armistice had been declared and battling had ceased. November passed, and no word from Henry. Had he survived? One by one the days of December passed and Christmas came, little sister Martha the only child at home, and no word of assurance from Henry and no dreaded word from the War Department either. One by one the long nights of January and the days made longer by waiting for a letter that did not come, passed.

Nearly every family in Beeville had a boy in the service. A few were not coming back. Some had come. The others had been heard from. Everybody knew that Henry’s whereabouts were unknown. The post office had been so besieged over the telephone, every day and Sunday too, with inquiries as to whether a letter had come from this boy or that, the inquirers too eager to wait for the mail, that the postmaster ordered the phone taken out. He was a good friend of my family.

One day in February, 1919, my mother answered the ring of the telephone in her house. A post-office clerk was calling. The postmaster, he explained, had sent him across the street to telephone from a store. The postmaster wanted my mother and father to know that a letter had just arrived—from Henry. Yes, from Henry, postmarked U. S. Army of Occupation, in Germany.

With Mama and Papa in the house at this hour were an infant grandson, lying in a baby buggy, and his mother, Elizabeth, my brother Lee’s wife, Lee being in the Air Corps.

“I can go faster than anybody else,” Elizabeth cried.

The post office was about four blocks away. As she tore out, Mama and Papa followed as rapidly as they could, pushing the baby buggy. There was no pavement to roll it over. The streets were sandy and gullied, but the baby buggy was more than halfway to the post office when Elizabeth met it coming back. She was running, hand stretched out holding a letter that had already been torn from the envelope.

There in the middle of the street the little group read it through—a father enfeebled beyond his years by a disease that was soon to carry him off, a young kinswoman of eager sympathy, and a mother, still wonderfully vigorous, who had said, “Go, son. I’d rather you’d go and never come back than stay home feeling like a slacker.” I asked her years later for her definition of bravery. “A brave person,” she came back, with steel-spring energy, “is a person who is scared to death and goes ahead anyway.”

I don’t remember now why no letter had come from Henry. Anyway, a letter now brought him home in safety and changed the world for a few people who had been waiting in utter anxiety.

3

This story, which is a true one, goes back to the days of oxen—a time and a tempo in which people

could stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep and cows.

Many a man and boy, and many a woman and girl too, had a strong affection for oxen reliabilities bearing such names as Old North and Crump, Tom and Jerry, Bigfoot Wallace and Jim Bowie, Bully and Blackie.

Take Old Samson and the rollicky crew that drove the freight train he helped pull. It was carrying supplies west from Jefferson on the Louisiana line. The wagon to which Samson was yoked happened to be loaded with bacon and barrelled whiskey. One day he went lame. The next morning a bullwhacker suggested that he be shod with bacon rind. Accordingly the rinds were cut off two sides of salt pork and put on Samson for shoes. While he was being held, the ingenious whacker suggested Samson would feel more at ease in the strange footgear if he had a dram. A quart bottle was filled out of a barrel and poured down Samson’s throat. “Well, sir, that old ox licked out his tongue and smacked his lips and went against the yoke. For a while, with his new bacon-rind slippers and morning dram, he was as frisky as a young colt. He tried to pull the whole load by himself.”

Some drivers of oxen were more noted than the most noted oxen. Not long after Texas joined the Confederacy, a youngster named Tim Cude went from Live Oak County to enlist in the Army. Although he was only sixteen years old, his way with oxen was a community wonder—especially the power of his voice over them. It was a voice young and lush, but strong, without the gosling quality. He did not charm the oxen by whispering—horse-charmer style—in their ears.

Brindle and Whitey were his wheelers, Sam Houston and Davy Crockett, the leaders. They were steers of the old-time Texas Longhorn breed, and they could pull a log out of its bark. When Tim commanded them, they would go to their places to be hitched to wagon or plow. Tim was partial to Brindle, and when he put a hand over the ox’s head, the ox would often show his pleasure by licking out his tongue. The four oxen were the last inhabitants of the little Cude ranch that Tim told good-by when he left to fight the Yankees. He was an only child. He did not realize what emptiness he left behind him. He seldom wrote to relieve it.

Months after Appomattox, his mother and father learned that he was still alive at Lee’s surrender. Tim Cude was a mature man now, strong and rangy with a full-grown beard. More months, then a year, then two years, dragged by, and still Tim did not come home, and there was no word from him. At first his father and mother talked with high hopes of his coming. Then, gradually, they came to saying little, even to each other, about his return. They still nursed a hope, but the heavy conviction settled down on them that Tim must be among the many other boys in gray who would never come back home. Their hope grew gray and secret, without confidence. The days went by as slow as laboring oxen walk.

In the late spring of 1867 Mr. Cude put a few beeves in a herd going north. Six months later the owners of the herd returned and paid him the first money he had seen in years. The aging couple needed the money to buy necessities with, but Mr. Cude had a hard time persuading “mama” to go with him down to Powderhorn on the coast for the purchases. “Tim might come while we are gone,” was her only argument. Mr. Cude’s argument that, if he came, he would stay until they got back, had slight weight with her. She wanted to be there. Mr. Cude would not argue, not even to himself, much less to her, that Tim would never come, but he often reasoned gently that it was better for them both to be resigned.

It was in December before Mrs. Cude finally consented to go. They took a load of dry cow-hides with them, and as the oxen pulled them south at the rate of about two miles an hour, they went over their plans again and again for spending the money.

The plans cheered them. They would have plenty of real coffee now, instead of tea from parched acorns and corn, and a new coffee grinder that would do away with the labor of pounding the grains in a sack with a hammer. Their old coffee mill was absolutely worn out. They would get sacks of flour and have real flour bread. “You remember how Tim always likes flour gravy,” Mrs. Cude said. She would have enough calico for three new dresses and a sunbonnet, besides a tablecloth; he would have new boots, new hat and breeches, and percale for sewing into shirts. “I’ll get some blue for Tim,” Mrs. Cude said. There would be a new plow for the cornpatch and lumber for a gallery to the frame house, so hot in the summer.

It took them five or six days to get down to Powderhorn, and then two days to buy everything and load the wagon. On the way back Mrs. Cude kept wishing they’d make better time, but the four old tortoise-stepping oxen never moved a foot faster. “Perhaps Tim came home today,” Mrs. Cude would say at the evening camp. “I dreamed last night that he came just after dark,” she’d say over the morning campfire, always burning long before daybreak. In all the dragging months, months adding themselves into years, no day had dawned, no night had fallen, that she had not made some little extra preparation for her boy’s coming home. In all the period of waiting, this was the first time she had not been there to welcome him. As she approached the waiting place now, the hopes of more than fourteen absent days and of more than fourteen absent nights were all accumulated into one hope. Perhaps Tim had come. Mr. Cude shared the hope, too, but it hurt him to see “mama disappointed,” and he never encouraged day-dreams.

At last they were only six miles from home. Christmas was only three days away. Then the oxen stalled in a mudhole at the crossing on La Parra Creek. For an hour Mr. Cude struggled and worried with them, trying to make them make the supreme pull. Mrs. Cude threw all her strength on the spoke of one wheel. Finally Mr. Cude began the weary business of unloading some of the freight and carrying it on his back out of the creek.

Then suddenly they were aware of a man, dismounted from the horse beside him, standing on the bank just ahead. Being down in the creek, they could not have seen his approach. His frame, though lank, was well filled out, his face all bearded, his clothes nondescript. In his posture was something of the soldier. Nearly all Southern men had, in those days, been soldiers. For a second he seemed to be holding something back; then he gave a hearty greeting that was cordially responded to.

“Those look like mighty good oxen,” the young man said, coming down, as any stranger in that country at that time would come to help anybody in a tight.

“They are good oxen, but they won’t pull this wagon out now,” Mr. Cude answered. “I guess they’re getting old like us. We been working them since before the war.”

The stranger had moved around so that he was very near the wheel oxen, which he faced, instead of the driver and his wife. His hand was on Brindle’s head, between the long rough horns, and the old ox, whose countenance was the same whether in a bog hole or a patch of spring tallow weed, licked out his tongue.

“I believe I can make these old boys haul the wagon out,” the man said.

“They wouldn’t do any better for a stranger than for their master,” Mr. Cude answered.

“There’s only one person who could get them to pull,” added Mrs. Cude. “That’s our boy who went to the war.”

“Did he know oxen?” the young man asked out of his beard.

“Oh, yes, and they knew him. They liked him.”

Then for a little while there was silence.

As Mr. Cude began drawing up his rawhide whip, again the offerer of help, pleading now, asked for a chance to try his hand.

“Very well,” Mr. Cude agreed slowly, “but every time you try to make ’em pull and they don’t budge the wagon, they’re that much harder to get against the yoke the next time.”

The young man asked the names of the oxen and got them. Then he took the long whip, not to lash the animals—for that was not the whip’s function—but to pop it. He swung it lightly and tested the popper three or four times, as if getting back the feel of something long familiar that had been laid aside. Then he curved the fifteen feet of tapering plaited rawhide through the air—and the ringing crack made the sky brighter. At the same time he began calling to the oxen to come on and pull out. He talked to Brindle and Whitey and Sam Houston and Davy Crockett harder than a Negro crapshooter talking to his bones.

The oxen, without a jerk, lay slowly, steadily, mightily, into the yokes. The wheels began to turn. The whip popped again, like a crack of lightning in the sky, and the strong voice rose, pleading, encouraging, confident, dominating.

The oxen were halfway up the bank now. They pulled on out, but nobody was talking to them any longer. No welcome of feast and fatted calf ever overwhelmed a prodigal son like that, initiated by four faithful old oxen, which Tim Cude received from his mother and father on the banks of an insignificant creek in a wilderness of mesquite. All the gray in the world was suddenly wiped out by sunshine, and all the mockingbirds between the San Antonio River and the Rio Grande seemed to be singing at once.

The oxen, silent and slow, kept on pulling down the road.

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.”

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.

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 told him 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 the Encyclopedia 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 take their 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 few years 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 no genuine Bowie 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 knife according 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 had taught 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 disclosing to 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 movement the 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. There are 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. The ideal Bowie 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 for other 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 a duel with 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 large amount 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 chilling to 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 and humorous 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 Mexicans whose 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 of Austin’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.

Acknowledgments

Most of the third story in “Christmas and Remembrance”—about Tim Cude and the oxen—first appeared in The Longhorns, published by Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1941. The publishers have kindly granted permission to use the story in this volume.

“James Bowie and the Bowie Knife” first appeared in the Southwest Review, Vol. XVI, April, 1931.

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Table of Contents

- Stories of Christmas and the Bowie Knife

- Preface

- Christmas and Remembrance

- 1
- 2
- 3

- James Bowie and the Bowie Knife
- Acknowledgments
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE