A Fifth Of Whiskey & A Bowie Knife

“Bowie Knives the size of claymores…” 

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A fifth of whiskey and a bowie knife
Just enough liquor to cut it up nice.

Monk scouted up the latest episode from Blood Meridian: The Night Does Not End, which focuses on the Bowie Knife — its origins and its appearance among the “weapons of every description” packed by the Glanton Gang.

I tell the story of the second most famous duel in American history, the Sandbar Fight, how Jim Bowie became famous for killing a man in close combat, and how his knife became our first national totem–and the first weapon ever banned in the United States. I connect Bowie’s story — and the story of the blade that bears his name — to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, where the Bowie knife is featured prominently.

Ah, the Bowie Knife. At once the most iconic and the most ill-defined of totemic American weapons. On my coffee table is a copy of my friend Greg Walker’s Battle Blades: A Professional’s Guide to Combat/Fighting Knives. There’s a full chapter dedicated to this “ultimate battle blade.” Greg writes:

If there is a blade form that personifies a specific period of our country’s history, it is the bowie knife. Unique in its conception and clothed in folklore and legend, the bowie has come to represent what is big, bold, and oftentimes beautiful when true battle blades are discussed.

The specific period Greg describes is the 1820s through the 1860s, when the United States was expanding on multiple frontiers, penetrating the Rocky Mountains and on into the Pacific Northwest in pursuit of furs; infiltrating into Texas and the Mexican territory of the Southwest; sailing around the Horn or trekking overland in the avid pursuit of California gold…

The 1849 setting of Blood Meridian is in the heart of this era. It was an era that saw the peak of the development of the single-shot muzzleloading rifle, and the invention of the revolver. These were excellent arms — but limited in firepower. The five- and then six-shot revolver was a major development in that area, but, as Steve Earle sings in The Devil’s Right Hand, the cap-and-ball revolver…

… Shoots as fast as lightning but she loads a mite slow

Loads a mite slow, and soon I found out

It’ll get you into trouble, but it can’t get you out…

What you needed to get out of trouble was a weapon that was always ready. A Bowie Knife.

The Bowie Knife gets its name from a hard-living Louisiana frontiersman named Jim Bowie, who would become one of the immortals when he died at the Alamo in Texas in 1836. He got into many a scrap in his day, the most famous of these being the 1827 Vidalia Sandbar Fight, recounted in detail in the video. The fight was a formal duel that devolved into a vicious brawl, in which Bowie was shot, stabbed and bludgeoned — and still managed to inflict gory, fatal wounds on his enemies — with a big knife invented by his brother Rezin (pronounced Reason).

The Vidalia Sandbar Fight really happened — it’s well-documented in all of its violent details. The rest of the early history of the development of the Bowie Knife is so intertwined with folklore and legend that you can’t separate them, even by slashing at them with, well, a Bowie Knife.

And that’s as it should be — legendary blades from the Ulfberht to Excalibur must come shrouded in the mist of myth and legend.

It seems that Rezin developed the knife that would take his family name after cutting his hand when it slid up the blade. Walker has it happening in an encounter with a feral bull somewhere in the bayous. Works for me. The original Rezin Bowie knife is thought to be configured something like this:

Pretty much a straightforward blade, useful for camp and hunting trail as well as for hand-to-hand combat. Such a blade Jim is said to have borrowed and wielded on the Sandbar. Or, maybe it was just a plain old butcher knife…

In fairly short order, the knife that bore the Bowie name evolved to take on what is today considered the classic configuration, with a wicked, deep clipped point and a S-curved guard.

Just last month, we read about the donation of the Lacy Bowie to the Texas Ranger Museum in Waco, Texas. The blade is supposed to have been presented by Rezin Bowie to William Young Lacy, a Texas Ranger. That’s a good foot of blade, big enough for Glanton’s riders.

By the time of the California Gold Rush — or the Glanton borderland scalp-hunting expeditions — Bowie Knives were being produced on a literally industrial scale, imported from England and Germany. Some of these were pimped-out status symbols for gentlemen, but there were plenty of big-ass, functional Bowie Knives on the frontier.

So many that the term “Bowie Knife” became — and remains —  ubiquitous. Virtually any big knife ends up being called a Bowie. My Becker BK9 is called a Bowie, though it lacks a guard and it’s much better suited to chores than to fighting.

Same with the “Bowie Knife” attributed to John “Liver Eatin’” Johnson.

C’mon, man! That’s just a big ol’ camp knife.

The legend is better. In Vardis Fisher’s Mountain Man, inspired by the Johnson legend, mighty Sam Minard carries two Bowie Knives — one for work and one reserved for darker things.

Walker posits the “classic definition of the true Bowie” as:

A thick-bladed steel knife possessing a cross guard between the blade and handle. With an overall length of no more than 15″, the blade itself measures from between 9-9-1/2″ and is flat along its upper edge with a clip point present along the final 1/3 of teh blade. The primary edge is extremely sharp from the point to nearly the guard. The handle is often formed from exotic hardwoods or stag and is at least 5″ in length.

That’s pretty solid — though the blade length is well short of the mighty Lacy Bowie, and not the “big as claymores” kind o’ blade described (with deliberate hyperbole) among the accoutrements of the Glanton Gang.

Whatever its specs, the Bowie Knife is synonymous with “badass.” When this song played over the opening sequence of the pulp-fest Banshee, I knew I was in for something mad, bad and dangerous… Just like Jim Bowie himself.