Bowie Knife Discussion by Michael Payne

Excellent discussion of different contenders for the title of "real" Bowie knife by Bowie knife historian Michael Payne, available on YouTube here.

Bowie Knife Possibly Owned by Rezin Bowie

In this Jan. 9, 2018 photo, Shelly Crittendon, artifacts and exhibits manger, holds up a 17-inch Bowie knife recently donated to the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame Museum, Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2018, in Waco, Texas. The knife's scabbard gives a tantalizing sign of its true significance. Engraved in a flowery script are the words: "R.P. Bowie to Capt. Wm. Y. Lacey." That would appear to be Rezin Pleasant Bowie, Jim's big brother, who helped popularize the Bowie knife in the 1830s and was known for giving them as gifts. (Rod Aydelotte/Waco Tribune-Herald via AP)

 Museum adds rare Bowie knife

January 18, 2018 at 5:00 a.m. | Updated January 18, 2018 at 3:15 a.m.

by Waco Tribune-Herald

WACO, Texas-As a fearsome weapon, the Bowie knife recently donated to the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum speaks for itself.

The Waco Tribune-Herald reports it is 17 inches long, with a bison horn hilt and a sturdy high carbon steel blade featuring the "Texas clip" characteristic of knives made famous by James Bowie, the Alamo hero.

But a closer look at the silverwork on the knife's scabbard gives a tantalizing sign of its true significance. Engraved in a flowery script are the words: "R.P. Bowie to Capt. Wm. Y. Lacey."

That would appear to be Rezin Pleasant Bowie, Jim's big brother, who helped popularize the Bowie knife in the 1830s and was known for giving them as gifts. William Lacey, or Lacy, is obscure today but accompanied Jim Bowie in his rambles around Texas and later served as a Texas revolutionary soldier, a Texas Ranger and mayor of Palestine.

The knife and a folder full of research on it arrived at the museum in December in a FedEx box from Rudolph W. Gleichman, a Pennsylvania arms collector. Ranger museum officials want to continue researching its authenticity but say it is potentially a marquee artifact for their collection. It will likely go on display this spring.

"It was a nice Christmas gift for Waco," museum director Byron Johnson said. "It would be very significant given his association with his brother and the fact that it's inscribed to someone who was a Texas Ranger. That makes it very worthwhile for us. I would say it will be one of the treasures we have in the museum."

Johnson said the authenticity of the knife may never be proven, but so far he sees no reason to doubt it.

Gleichman, a former insurance underwriter who served as president of the Maryland Arms Collectors Association, spent about $400 for the knife in 1982.

"I bought the thing in the parking lot of a gun show from a picker," Gleichman said. "I saw it for what I thought it was, an important item. I spent a year researching it. . It turned out the gentleman who owned the knife was an intimate friend of the Bowie family. Everything seemed to fall into place."

Gleichman collected opinions of silversmiths and knife experts and published descriptions of the knife in arms collecting publications. Around 1988, he also showed it to Gaines DeGraffenreid, founding director of Waco's Ranger museum, who was impressed and hinted that the museum would like to acquire it. Now 91, Gleichman decided he was ready to part with his treasures.

"I don't need money per se," he said. "I just thought it would be wonderful since the gentleman who owned it was an important person who had a relationship with the Bowie family, it would be nice to give it to the museum that authenticates and collects these things. It's a treasure for anyone's collection."

Johnson said the knife's story may end up like a lot of forensics investigations, based on circumstantial evidence.

He said the artifact has all the marks of a Bowie knife manufactured in the 1830s, when the knife became popular across the frontier. He said the knife is undated but may precede Jim Bowie's death at the Alamo in 1836.

Johnson said it would not be unusual to find a forged inscription on a Bowie knife, but it seems unlikely that a forger would have chosen William Lacy as the recipient.

"There's only about half a dozen historians who have heard of William Lacy," he said.

William Lacy, a Kentucky native, moved to San Augustine, Texas, with his father in 1830, according to the 1881 Encyclopedia of the New West.

He was about 18 in 1834, when he headed out to the Tarrant County area with Jim Bowie to prospect for gold.

By this time Bowie and his knife were already a legend thanks to the notorious "Sandbar Fight" on Sept. 19, 1827, across the Mississippi River from Natchez, Mississippi. Bowie, who was a second to one party in a duel, ended up being attacked himself by the other party. Using a large hunting knife, he reputedly killed one opponent, badly wounded another and was hospitalized for a shot to the lung.

Bowie family lore holds that R.P. Bowie had invented the knife several years earlier on their plantation in Louisiana after Jim's encounter with a rogue bull. The handle guard was intended to keep the blade from slipping and injuring the hand.

The knife became popular throughout the country immediately after the Sandbar fight, and R.P. Bowie had blades forged in Louisiana and Pennsylvania. Four other knives that R.P. Bowie inscribed as gifts to friends are known to exist.

Jim Bowie moved into Texas in 1830 to snap up land grants from the Mexican government and hunt for gold.

During the Texas Revolution in 1835-36, he won lasting fame as a military leader, dying in the siege of the Alamo in San Antonio.

Lacy briefly served as a captain in the revolution, then went on to organize Texas Ranger militias in East Texas in 1837. He surveyed parts of East Texas and went on to become a prosperous landowner and mayor in Palestine after the Civil War. He died in 1892.

In later life he remembered Jim Bowie as a gentleman "with no trace whatever of the border ruffian that these same wild tales have handed down to us."

Nothing is known of what happened to the knife before or after Lacy's death, if in fact it belonged to him.

Gleichman said that mystery has always been an intriguing part of owning the knife. "I've looked at it a million times and said, 'If you could just tell me your background history, what you've been through,'" he said. "That's one of the things that just grabs you."

"The Cult of the Jambiya: Dagger Wearing in Yemen"

I came across this article by Shuyler V. R. Cammann in my files. Not a bowie knife article, but knife related. Click on page images to get a more readable size.

 

Chauncey Thomas on the Bowie Knife

 I recently came across an article in my files titled "The .45," by Chauncey Thomas, who wrote frequently for Outdoor Life magazine. This particular article was published in the September 15, 1922, issue of Arms and the Man. Though writing mostly about the Colt Single-Action Army revolver, Thomas makes some observations about the Bowie knife, and even if many of them are flat-out untrue, I found his thoughts on how the bowie would be used in a fight to be of interest. 

The bowie knife was just one kind of a knife, just one shape and size. It had the clip point commonly seen today in hunting knives, but the curve on the top of the blade was sharpened to an edge, thus mak­ing it double edged part way back from the point. The blade was 9 inches long, the handle 6 inches, total length was thus 15 inches. The bowie varied in only one item—weight. It was never less than two pounds, and often even three pounds in weight. The grip had a swell—usually of buckhorn or wood or horn—on the lefthand side of the handle as one looked down on the back of the knife. 

The knife was al­ways used with the longer edge, toward the user, thus this swell in the grip fitted into the hollow of the right hand. The hilt was always very heavy, at least 3 inches or more from point to point, and always pointed top and bottom. The butt or end of the handle was also of heavy metal, and the three iron points thus projected from the outlines of the hand, so that the handle or the hilt could be used somewhat like a pair of brass knucks. Thus with a bowie knife the hand-to-hand fighter could strike downward with the end of the handle on the top or against the side of a foe's head, and as the edge was always held inward and the knife used with a long side sweep, the knifer could thus stick it into his foe's right side, or into his back, if in a clinch, or if a bit farther away, then could dis­embowel him with one sweep. If he missed his stroke, he could backblow with the end of the handle, as just mentioned, on his foe's skull. Or a back stroke of the shorter incurved edge on the top of the blade could be raked like a claw across the, foe's belly, face or throat. The genuine bowie combined the fine points of the dagger and the razor. 

It is said to have been invented by a negro slave of Col. Bowie, who saw it accidentally, and at once, appreciating its fine points, had a better one made, with which, traditions say, he promptly disemboweled a man with one stroke. The legend goes on to say that that one stroke made such a terrible wound that the knife became immediately popular, and thence its fame spread. The .45 put the bowie out of business. 

The bowie was used mostly in the South, later in Texas, the Southwest, and somewhat in the Rockies and on the Plains in the good old days before the cowboy, but it flourished most on the old Mississippi river steamboats, particularly among the gam­blers. In the confined spaces of a paddler's cabin there was no room for the long cap and ball revolver; besides the weather was too hot and the climate too damp to make a revolver a thing of comfort or reliance. It would not always go off, and it was too easy to grab in a closed-in free-for-all over marked cards. Hence the river gam­bler's favorites, the tiny little muzzle-load­ing single-shot derringers, weighing but a few ounces and about .50 caliber, loaded even to the muzzle of its 2-inch or even shorter barrel, with a lead slung driven in tight with a hammer, and the more reliable and far deadlier bowie knife. 

Outdoor, in the rain and saddle, the cap and ball guns were none too reliable, and slow to reload. So of the more or less free fighters on both sides, usually with mixed uniforms, in the Civil War on the Western edge of civilization, especially in Kansas and Missouri, carried no rifles or sabers at all. They depended entirely on their revolvers, and often carried from four up to a dozen of them, swung from the belt and from saddle horn. These revolvers could be reloaded, too, almost as rapidly as we can reload today on horseback by simply changing a fired for a loaded cyl­inder, and often a supply of these extra cylinders, all loaded, were carried handy. And with them always a bowie knife, that because of its point could pierce like a dagger, because of its long, thin edge could slice like a razor, and because of its length and weight would chop like a hatchet. When the guns were wet or empty it was his last load and hope.

 

Then came the cartridge revolver, and it put the cap and ball on the nail just as quickly and forever as the cartridge  rifles hung the muzzle-loading rifles on the pegs. The .45 also made the bowie not only needless, but nearly worthless, so that pleasant instrument of quick extermination also vanished from Western clothes, so much so that today the bowie knife is almost unknown, except to a few old timers who, like myself, have seen long ago, before the rails and the cowboys came, the wild buf­falo and the free feather heads. 

Kentuckians And Their Knives

During his visit to Kentucky in the 1830s, Sir Charles Augustus Murray, a Scotsman, was dismayed at seeing the residents there carrying knives. In Travels in North America During the Years 1834, 1835, & 1836 (1841), he expressed concerns similar to what we still hear from the British today regarding knives, which are illegal to carry in those isles.

The character of the Kentuckians has greater merits, and greater faults; their moral features are more broadly and distinctly marked. Descended, as I before said, from the western hunters, and some of them from the more wealthy planters of Virginia and North Carolina, they are brave, generous, proud, frank, and hospitable, but apt at the same time to be rough, overbearing, and quarrelsome. They are extremely vain of their State, and inclined to play the braggart, as well in her praises as their own; the former fault, I, for one, can freely forgive them, as the want of local or home attachment is one of the least agreeable features of American character. They are, moreover, pretty strongly imbued (probably through their Virginian descent) with a taste for gambling, horse-racing, &c., which is perhaps strengthened by their frequent intercourse on their northern and western frontier with the numerous gamblers, or "sportsmen," who come up the river in spring and summer to avoid the heat and malaria of New Orleans and the adjacent country.

In addition to the above traits of character, there is one of which I cannot speak otherwise than with unqualified reprobation — I mean the cowardly and almost universal practice of carrying a dirk-knife. This instrument, which, like the Italian stiletto, is only fit for the hand of an assassin, is displayed upon every occasion. It has ordinarily a blade about six or eight inches long, sharp on both sides towards the point, and comes out of the handle by a spring, which also prevents its closing on the hand of the owner. I have seen several well-dressed Kentuckians, who would probably think themselves much injured if they were not considered gentlemen of the first grade, picking their teeth with these elegant pocket-companions, in public; and I have repeatedly seen them while engaged in conversation employ their hands in opening and shutting this dirk-spring, as a London dandy on the stage raps his boots and shakes his watch-seals, or sometimes in real life, for want of manual employment, draws his glove on and off, or smooths down the felt of his hat.

Now, I would ask any candid Kentuckian, from what "chivalrous" precedent (which epithet they are very fond of applying to themselves), or from what principle, just, noble, or Christian, is this habit derivable? Man is sufficiently irascible, and when angry, prone enough to inflict injury on his fellow-creature, without deliberately furnishing himself with a weapon calculated to occasion death, or permanent mutilation, upon the occasion of the slightest dispute or ebullition of temper. I believe it is Virgil who, in describing a savage popular tumult, says, "Furor arma ministrat" ["Their rage supplies them with weapons"], and surely experience attests its truth; but this people determine, that the voice of reason or reflection shall not have one moment to whisper a suggestion, but that their passions (naturally hot and ungovernable) shall never want a sudden and deadly minister. It might be supposed, that the coarse and brutal method of fighting, still frequently adopted in this State under the name of "rough and tumble," is sufficiently savage to satisfy the parties concerned. In this, as is well known, they tear one another's hair, bite off noses and ears, gouge out eyes, and, in short, endeavour to destroy or mutilate each other; but this is not considered sufficient, and Birmingham and Pittsburgh are obliged to complete by the dirk-knife the equipment of the "chivalric Kentuckian." ....

They may formerly have had an excuse for constantly carrying a weapon, when their houses and families were hourly liable to be surprised by the war-whoop of the Indian: but against whom is the dirk-knife now sharpened? against brothers, cousins, and neighbours!

Travelers on a Mississippi Steamboat

An  Englishman traveling through the American South in the mid-19th century gave an account of his conversation with a few travelers on a Mississippi riverboat in Odd Neighbors (1865):

"You seem to know New Orleans well, gentlemen," said I, after listening to two or three  anecdotes, the scene of which was invariably laid in the metropolis of the Western Delta.

"No place like it!" cried one of the younger men, with a sort of enthusiasm; "it's right down, thorough going, and slick through, the cream of all creation. Life goes faster there than in other places."

"So I have heard," said I, with a smile, but rather diffidently; "life, I understand, goes a good deal more abruptly than is pleasant. In duels I mean," added I, seeing that I was not understood.

"Sir," said another of the party, "you have been misinformed. Not that I insinuate that our free citizens will tamely brook affront. No, sir! But there is great exaggeration prevalent on the score of duels and fatal affrays, pretended to be of continual occurrence down South. We have chivalry, sir, we have fire, but we air not the monsters we air depicted."

I told him I had always understood that the state of Mississippi in especial was renowned for its lawless condition, and for the slight value set on human life by its inhabitants. The four gentlemen shook their heads with one accord.

"These air slanders," said one of the seniors of the party, whose name I understood to be Alphonso P. C. Jones—"these air slanders, I give you my sacred word of honour. We live, it is true, in a land where the blushing bloom of Eden has not yet wholly faded away; in a land where the luxuriant beauty of airth sometimes attracts the spoiler and the rowdy, and occasional difficulties will happen. But peace is our idol, and the olive- branch ---"

Here some confusion was caused to the orator by the trifling circumstance of his bowie-knife tumbling from its concealment somewhere in the roll-collar of his waistcoat, and coming with a bang on the mahogany table. He turned very red, and was shuffling the unwelcome implement away, when I stretched out my hand, saying, "Would you allow me to look at it ? I have often wished to inspect a bowie-knife."

Mr. Alphonso P. C. Jones solemnly handed over the weapon in its shagreen sheath, and I looked with great interest at the sharp and heavy blade, the strong cross-bar to increase the purchase in close conflict, and the silver mountings of haft and scabbard. Meanwhile, Mr. Jones muttered something about the necessity of self-preservation, and the number of Irish and Germans about.

"You must often have found this sort of thing useful in your mode of life," said I, poising the heavy dagger as I gave it back.

"What way of life? What might you mean?"

Such were the questions rather fiercely propounded, and every brow was overcast.

Bowie Knives and Pistols in Congress

A report on ante-bellum violence in the nation's capital appeared in The New Monthly Magazine, published in London in 1856. Again, the English are appalled with what goes on in their former colonies.

There are not infrequently scenes on the floor of the House which 
threaten to end in personal violence. On a Saturday afternoon when I 
was present, members were questioning the candidates for Speaker as to 
their sentiments on various points in relation to slavery, and a Mr.
 Kennett "begged to add to the questions that had been put two others: 
Did they believe in a future state? and, if they did, did they think that 
state would be a free state or a slave state?"

A southern gentleman
named Barksdale thought these questions were meant to ridicule his own, 
so he jumped out of his seat, rolled up his coat-sleeves, and advanced 
towards Kennett, declaring that he "repelled the insult with scorn, and 
derision, and contempt," and much besides. He appeared as though he 
must annihilate at least half a dozen men before he could be pacified, but 
at last his friends succeeded in convincing him that he was mistaken. 


Kennett told him he was not to be frightened by him or anybody else,
 nor did he appear to be. Some Congressmen are known to carry pistols and bowie-knives about with them. The latter is a formidable weapon, 
the blade about a foot long, slightly curved at the point. It is kept in a
case, and sometimes worn thrust down the back inside the coat, with the 
handle at the nape of the neck; so that the wearer can put his hand 
behind his head and draw it out in an instant.

I saw an advertisement 
offering a reward for the recovery of a silver-hilted bowie-knife lost in 
the Capitol. In the session before last, the present clerk to the House, General Collum, who was then a representative, during debate was involved 
in a personal dispute with another speaker, when a pistol was 
drawn forth by one of the parties, and only the prompt interference of 
friends prevented bloodshed. I am sorry to say that out of doors, too, 
physical force arguments for subjects of opinion are often resorted to. One day, while at Washington, my English sense of legislative and 
literary propriety of behaviour was shocked by a public fight on the
Avenue between a Congressman from Virginia and the editor of the Evening Star. The man of the quill got worsted, and had his finger 
bitten by the honourable member.

A few days before I left the city, in the last week of the contest for the Speakership, Horace Greeley, the 
notable proprietor and editor of the New York Tribune, was grossly assaulted 
in front of the Capitol, after the adjournment of the House, by 
Mr. Rust, member of Congress from Arkansas. Mr. Greeley, being an
 ex-M.C., is entitled to a seat on the floor of the House, and he had been 
in the city, since the assembling of Congress, corresponding for his paper. 
A paragraph of comment in the Tribune on a speech of Mr. Rust's was 
the only provocation this enlightened representative of the people of Arkansas had to knock Mr. Greeley down with a loaded cane, repeating 
his blows, and inflicting serious injuries on the unfortunate and almost 
unresisting editor. Horace Greeley is a mild, amiable-looking old gentleman, 
and, merely from his appearance, you might guess he was of the 
peace sentiments of the Quakers. He declined to prosecute his brutal assailant, though some weeks after, at the instance of a gentleman of 
New York, who came forward of his own accord, Rust was arrested and 
held to bail to answer for the assault at the Criminal Court. When I 
heard of the assault, I thought that Rust must be blackballed everywhere, 
and that if he ventured into the House next day the affair would at least become the topic of indignant comment. "No, indeed," said 
a friend, "his party will think him a fine fellow for it: there will be 
plenty of men giving Greeley a cow-hiding now they see he's so tame." 


And truly I was mistaken. Nothing disgusted me so much with political
cant about liberty on the American side the Atlantic as this occurrence, 
and the matter-of-course sort of way in which it was looked upon, — 
not by all, but at the least by a political party which in England 
would have hasted to purge itself of the disgrace of connexion with such 
ruffianism. John Bull before Jonathan still, for fair play and freedom of 
opinion.

The following is a newspaper account of this transaction: "Yesterday afternoon, 
about four o'clock, soon after the adjournment of Congress, the Hon. Win. 
Smith, M.C. from Virginia, met Mr. Wallach, the editor of the Star, on the
Avenue, near the corner of Eleventh Street, and accosting him, pronounced a 
statement in the Star of the day previous, in relation to himself, to be false. Mr. 
Wallach replied, that if Mr. Smith made that assertion, he pronounced his assertion false; whereupon Mr. Smith struck Mr. Wallach, and both combatants 
grappled each other, and contended manfully for the mastery. At length, they 
fell to the ground with a mighty shock; and by the force of the fall, as we are 
informed, Mr. Wallach's bowie-knife fell out of its hiding-place, and was thrown 
to some distance. When the parties fell, Mr. Wallach was uppermost, but Mr. Smith turned him, and maintained the upper hand until separated. After a 
minute or two of severe thumping and scratching, the belligerents were separated; 
Mr. Smith with his face badly bruised and marred, and Mr. Wallach with one of 
his fingers 'catawampously chawed up.' We have not heard that either of the 
parties concerned in this fight have been arrested.