Part One: Jim Bowie: The Worst Texan

Robert is joined by Billy Wayne Davis to discuss Jim Bowie, the biggest piece of crap in the Old West.

FOOTNOTES:

1. What became of Jim Bowie's famous knife?
2. Hero Tales of the American Soldier
3. Three Roads to the Alamo
4. The Mysterious Illness of Jim Bowie: How Did He Contribute to His Own Decline?
5. James Bowie, Big Dealer
6. Selling the Sandbar: Marketing the Bowie Knife
7. No Wounds In His Back
8. Jim Bowie Before the “Gaudy Legend”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M podcasts. This is Robert Evans and that was the
introduction from Behind the Bastards, which is a podcast, which
is why I said the word podcasts. Today with me
in the room that is a digital room and not
a physical room because of the plague. Is Mr Billy
Wayne Davis. Everybody, Hey, Billy, how are you doing? How's

(00:23):
your quarantine going? It's doing pretty good exercising. Yeah. When
I saw you last over Skype, you look like normal Billy,
and then suddenly this week you have a mustache and
a headband. It's coming together. It's been an interesting quarantine
week for you. I'm embracing it. You've got a cookery now,

(00:44):
which is a special type of curb Nepalese blade very nice.
I want to the Gerber to see if I liked it,
and then now I'm gonna get into Apoll and get
one proper. Yeah, I have a Nepalese blade smith that
I can point you towards. This is a podcast about
the worst pill in all of history. And Billy, you
and I have developed a couple of different niches for ourselves.
We're we're we have a lot of niches. One of

(01:06):
those niches is medical scammers. And this is not a
medical scammer episode because our other niche is weirdos from
the South. Today, we're going to talk about one of
the South's great, all time famous weirdo bastards, Billy Wayne Davis.
What do you know about Jim Booie? I know the name,

(01:26):
Do you know what I mean? Like growing up in
the South, You're just like, yeah, you hear it. I
don't know what he There's like, I don't know exactly
what you did. You've probably heard of I'm gonna guess
everybody listening to this has at least heard of a
bowie knife, which is a great kind of knife, one
of my favorite knives. It's basically a small sword that
is a dagger because we call it one instead of

(01:48):
a small sword. UM, with a specific kind of curved
in point to the top of the blade. And it's
it's great for it was initially It's great for hunting
and skinning animals, and it's also great for waving around
drunkenly at a house party if you're me and nineteen
years old. Um. The one thing I am about him
is the the giant mutton had the horrifying facial hair.

(02:13):
He had gigantic mutton chops and he died at the Alumo.
Now I was I was a Texas boy. So in
in Texas school, you have a special class called Texas History,
and every Texas kid learns a lot about Jim Booie
and it's all wrong because they only teaches about Jim
Booie at Texas School. I know who Jim Bowie. Yes, yeah,

(02:35):
yes I do. I just came back. It froze and
everything came back, and then you said the Alumo and
I was like immediately on his motherfucker's Yes. Yeah, So
Jim Booie is a giant piece of ship because this
is my show. But he's also like a frontier legend,
like he's one of those he's like David Crockett Um
or like wild Bill Hickock, like he's one of those
like wild West legends. So this is gonna be a

(02:57):
hoot of a tale. Um And yeah, let's just get
into it. So h James Bowie Um was born on
March tenth, uh in Logan County, Kentucky, in seventeen nineties six,
probably because again in Kentucky in seventeen ninety six, nobody
was super good at like birth certificates and the like. Um,

(03:20):
but that's that's a good guess as to when he
was born three or four days ago. Yeah, yeah, he
came into the world sometime round round about. Then it
was the year when we had that big flood on
the river. Yeah, that's kind of how people talked about
ship like that back then. So yeah, his brother gives

(03:40):
March ten six is as James Bowie's birthdays. Older brother
John gives that as the birthdate. And uh, John is
kind of the source of a lot of our information
on Jim Bowie's early life. But John and every other
member of the Bowie family are liars and unreliable narrators.
So it's really we really take this all with a

(04:00):
grain of salt. I know people like that and they
tell you that liars do it. Hey, now I'm gonna
tell you the story. But keep in mind, I make
a lot of stuff up. Keep in mind, what would
the moonshine? I can't keep much much together about my
own back story. Yeah, the Booe families a bit like that,
and they have financial motives for telling a bunch of
saying a bunch of fun ship about Jim Bullie. But

(04:22):
I don't think they have much in the way of
financial motives about lying about his birthdates. That's probably more
or less accurate, at least as well as they could
remember it. So uh Jim was the ninth of ten
children born to Resin, which I think was just sort
of so basically our easy I n is how his
dad's first name was spelled, and it was supposed to
be Reason, but they weren't great at spelling in Kentucky

(04:44):
back in the seventeen hundreds, so they wrote it out
as Resin Um. So he was this Yeah, you know what,
not bad for modern Kentucky spelling they're doing right, You
get the gist of it. So, yeah, he was the
son of Resin Boo and uh An Elvy Booi and
his parents came to the United States as part of
a massive Scottish migration across Appalachia and into the Old

(05:07):
South Old South. The Booey family were basically the archetypal
early White Americans pioneers down to the core of their marrow.
Resin had a habit of moving on to wild land
in the frontier, developing it by building homes and orchards
and stuff, and then when other people would come in
and move in around him. He would get angry because
he didn't like being around other people. He wanted to

(05:28):
be out in the middle of nowhere, and so he
moved somewhere else and start building a homestead again until
civilization or whatever caught up with him. This was kind
of like how Jim Bowie's dad liked to live first
house slipper. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of what he's doing.
He's like gentrifying. Yeah, he's like he's basically gentrifying, like
the woods. Yeah yeah, but then he hates it and

(05:50):
he's got it. Like, yeah, you could call them early hipsters.
But instead of like you know, enjoying artists lofts and
uh artisanal coffee houses, he liked fighting bears with machetes. Um,
every time I see alize of place, these people shut up.
That's kind of resins attitude. So the point of making

(06:13):
is he he wasn't just going about this like make
a home and a living for himself and his family,
like he needed to be at the bleeding edge of
the frontier. And so Jim Booie's early life as a
child consisted of many moves. You know, they'd spend a
couple of years somewhere, and then his father would grow
frustrated by the fact that there were human beings within
a half mile of them, and so they'd move somewhere else. Liked.

(06:34):
I realized, like these people, there's a there's a level
of even though all these people are spoilers, slave owners
and colonizers and monsters, there's a level of respect you
have to have to anyone who is like, there's people
within a mile of me, I'm gonna go move out
to the middle of nowhere with an hatchet and build
another home, like like they're they're tough, is Yeah. I

(06:56):
just keep thinking, I'm like, I'm not as stubborn as
I thought. There there's there's a TikTok r. That's that's
that's like where the wife comes in, it's like, honey,
we have to move. The neighbor said, hi, and that's
these people. Yeah, yeah, that's resin Booie friends, Billy, what
were you saying? I'm gonna call you booeye a couple

(07:17):
of times and as I'm certain I like it, I
don't remember, Oh good, fantastic. Well, uh yeah. So now
the Booie family, when Jim was young, tended to live
all the spots they pick. We're along the Mississippi River,
and they basically moved down the Mississippi as like people
filled up the area above them. UM and moving dot

(07:38):
day for the Booey family meant they would build by
hand a flat bottom boat, toss all of their ship
onto it, and then sail down the Mississippi to find
a new place to live. So that's what. That's what
like the U haul of the day is, Yeah, you
just wake up here. Ship Dad's boat. Dad's making a boat.
God damn it. Yeah. Now Will Jim Bowie's first memories

(08:02):
probably would have been in the Twapay Township in what
is now Missouri uh and what was then still under
French control and part of their new Madrid district now.
The name Twapati came from the original inhabitants of the land,
the Apple Creek band of the Shawnee tribe. They'd been
forced out by white men via unspeakable violence and disease,
and young Jim would go on to spend much of

(08:24):
his childhood playing in camps that they had abandoned all
throughout the forests and swamps around Twapty Township. UM. Now.
His earliest memories from age four to six would have
been pretty relaxed. Bowie family children weren't expected to work
much at that age, and Jim would have spent much
of his time relatively unsupervised in the middle of the woods. Um.
The Booey men were in general uh given to spending

(08:48):
a lot of time alone in the middle of nowhere.
Jim's formal education would have been basically non existent. His
mother Elvi, taught her children the alphabet, but that was
about all she knew, so that was about all they learned. Um.
After two years in Twopity, it got too developed for
resident and the family moved now. During this time, much
of the southeast was still run and owned by France,
and the French government saw Americans as an ally in

(09:11):
their endless, bloody war against English people, which is the
only war that really matters in my opinion. That's that's yeah. Now,
they were happy to allow Americans to settle in the
Louisiana territory, and they offered generous terms on land grants
for them to do so. The Bowie family kept moving south,
and by eighteen twelve they'd staked out a claim on
buyou vermillion in the Atta Kappas parish just south of

(09:33):
opelousas Uh. They got into the timber cutting business, and
by now Jim was coming up into a young adult,
so he was able to help the family business, as
did all of his many brothers. The Bowie boys were close,
and for most of his life, Jim Bowie's primary business
partners would be his kin. He was raised with a
love of exploration and constant motion, as well as an
abiding appreciation for owning enslaved human beings. His grandfather had

(09:57):
owned people, as had his father. The Bowies weren't but
they did not and did not have large fields full
of enslaved people, but they kept small families of field
hands enslave to help them with their work. And I'm
gonna read a quote now from the book Three Roads
to the Alamo that describes sort of how slavery was
practiced within the Bowie family. It's gonna sound like it's
making a different point than it is at first, but

(10:18):
just just listen to the whole quote. Typically, for land
owned by small farmer slaveholders, Bowie plantations enjoyed benign, even
familial relations between blacks and whites. They certainly wore for
where for Uncle Reza, who never married, but who fathered
a son named James by a slave mistress around sometime
around seventeen ninety, and thereafter openly acknowledged him, gave him
his freedom and the family name, and brought him to

(10:40):
Louisiana with the rest of the clan. The Black James
Bowie remained in cattle cata Hula while the rest moved south.
For years to come, he steadily did land and loan
business with both John Senior and Junior, even buying and
selling slaves himself, and achieved some minor position in the
community near Sicily Island, wherever Bowie blood flowed, clanned loyalty followed.
In later years, the family were remembered well stories of

(11:00):
resins Young Uh, stories of resins Young James's closeness to
an old slave woman named Mandy, of the little kindnesses
he did for her, and of the advice she passed
on to the boy. There was never any question that
the Buoye slaves were property, though, and with the exception
of a few favorites like old Mandy, they were usually
sold with the land whenever a buoy moved on. So
you've got a really complicated relationship with slaves here. To

(11:22):
the point where some of the Boweymen have children, um
with with their slaves, and those children are seen as
Buoy's and are generally live lives as freed people. Um.
And you have like certain older slaves that are beloved
and considered almost a part of the family, but also
almost um includes a lot of wiggle room. And as
much as the Buoys pretended to have familiar relations with

(11:45):
their slaves, they sold them, um whenever they would move,
because these people were in the end property to them.
And this is kind of like, this is a pretty
normal sort of master slave relationship to exist in the
era at the time with among people who are moving
a lot like we don't we mainly talk about sort
of the old plantation system, but that hadn't really gotten
going in a big way at this point. Um. And yeah,

(12:07):
that's kind of how the Booey family dealt with slavery. Um.
It's it's yeah, I don't know, it's weird, it sucks,
but yeah, it was bad. It's just it's very clear
they've viewed them as livestock. They've used that's it's it's
it's more messed up than even just that though, because

(12:27):
you know, the buoys were a close knit family. You
had a lot of different uncles and brothers all living
together with their families, and when one of them would
make another human being with a slave, that that person
was considered to be a buoy and a member of
the family. Um, but that person's black cousins and and
and you know, half brothers and stuff would be sold

(12:49):
off as property. So it's this it's really kind of
weird to wrap your head around. I don't even know.
I can't even really get into the head of the
people who would comfortably do that, who could like recognize that, like, well,
this one's got my blood, so he's family, and we're
gonna treat him like family. But these other people who
have are related to him, but not to me. I'm

(13:10):
just gonna sell like a dishwasher. It's really strange. It's
such a weird flip of the coin in their head
where they've made this is the line for us. It's bizarre. Yeah,
it's hard for me to get my head around in anyway.
And I should note here that because I my longtime
co worker uh is Sore and Bowie, I'm going to

(13:33):
regularly pronounce the Bowie name in a number of different ways,
and it's going to frustrate people and they can just
they can just deal with it. Yeah, deal with it people. Yeah,
it's just gonna happen. Sorry. Yeah, So the Bowie family
patriarch had to kill other human beings at least once
while the Bowie boys were children. When the family moved

(13:54):
to Louisiana, they found squatters on their land. A disagreement
in suit, and Resin killed one of the squatters. He
was jail. Yeah, yeah, and this was not uncommon because, like,
land ownership was kind of a murky idea back then,
you know. Yeah, so was the idea of squatting too,
where you're just say in court you're not you're yeah,

(14:16):
you're not gonna see me in court. I'm just gonna
shoot ye right now. Yeah. So Residin killed one of
these squatters and like it went to trial and he
got jailed in the wake of the fight while they
were waiting for a trial, and his wife actually got
a bunch of guns together and one of her slaves
and busted him out of jail. So this would have
been a pretty early memory of Jim's Booie is his

(14:36):
like mom and one of their slaves busting their dad
out of jail for murdering a guy. Um, yeah, so
that's cool. That's that's that that puts an imprint on
your foundation as a person. I think, yeah, that the
law is something that you can manipulate via having enough guns.
I think would have been yeah. Yeah. So Jim's their

(15:00):
brother also named Resin, left home to go have dangerous
adventures when he was about nineteen, and this was desperately
hard for young Jim because he was very close to
his brother. A few years later, when the War of
eighteen twelve came to Louisiana, Jim was finally old enough
to follow Resin when he enlisted. Uh James, another one
of the Bowie brothers, described Resin Jr. As a perfect
rowdy and Jim hisself was noted to be even wilder

(15:23):
and even less thoughtful than his older brother. They were
both very excited for their chance to go off and
kill English people. Tragically, they arrived too late. The war
ended without them having to fire a shot. The Bullie
brothers were still in the militia, though, and they remained
in it for a couple of months after the battle,
taking on boring patrol duties and spending their off duty
time in the city of New Orleans. Somebody, we'll hang

(15:46):
out for a couple of moments. Yeah, yeah, that's basically
what happens. But they don't get a chance to shoot anybody,
and they muster out with about twenty one dollars each
for their troubles. So yeah, that's that's kind of Jim's
a man now, like he he doesn't get his chance
to murder anybody, but he's got twenty one dollars in
his pocket. He's like seventeen years old. That's as much

(16:09):
of an adulthood as you, um, you get at that
that period in time and his high school graduation and
in New Orleans. That's a good place to be seventeen
with the pocket full of money. That is a good
place to be then and now, well no, not now
because of the coronavirus, but then yeah, yeah. Uh so

(16:29):
Jim was frustrated at the fact that his war experience
hadn't ended with him getting to shoot anybody. Um, but
he also, you know, it was exciting still. You know,
he got to do some patrols and stuff as part
of the militia. He got to get wasted in New
Orleans and his taste of being out in the world
made it impossible for him to return home. Um so
he took to the same basic tactic as the men

(16:51):
his father had murdered a couple of years back, and
started squatting on a patch of land above Bayou Booth
in Opalosis h James Bowie, Jim's older there, and I'm sorry.
The Booey names are all very complicated because there's multiple
James and multiple Resins and John's. It's very frustrated. We
forgot what we name the other one. We named him
the same one. The feeling you get from the Bowie

(17:14):
brothers names is that they were expecting. The parents were
expecting most of them to die, and then they didn't
because the Bowies tended to be pretty tough, and so
you wind up with a bunch of kids. We have
the same fucking name name James. Yeah. We didn't expect
as many of them would make it eight teen, as
did I'm gonna make a boat. There's people over here,

(17:35):
yeah yeah, so. Uh. James Bowie, another one of Jim's
another one of Jim Bowie's older brothers, would later describe
eighteen year old Jim Bowie this way. Quote he was Yeah, sorry,
John Bowie, Jim's older Ye, Jesus, I'm sorry. The booing
names are so fucking competent. How many siblings does he

(17:55):
have to? They all have weird he has Tim has Tim?
Are they all? Jim just sucks? Jim? John Right, there's
a couple. There's a resident in there, Yeah, resident Jr.
It's very frustrating. But Jim Bowie's older brother would later
describe Jim at eighteen this way quote. He was young, proud, poor,
and ambitious, without any rich family connections or influential fringe

(18:17):
to aid him in the battle of life. After reaching
the age of maturity. He was a stout, rather raw
boned man of six ft height, with a hundred and
eighty pounds, and about as well made as any man
I ever saw. His hair was light colored, not quite red.
His eyes were gray, rather deep set in his head,
very keen and penetrating in their glance. His complexion was fair,
his cheekbones rather high. Taken together, he was a manly,

(18:37):
fine looking person, and by many of the fair ones
he was called handsome. The fair ones or women he
was possessed of, and his brother a little bit Yeah,
you know, you get the idea that maybe some boowie
brothers got up to some some things. They were in
French country. It wasn't weird good looking brother. I got

(19:00):
some sexy brothers, and I know from sexy brothers. He
was possessed of an open, frank disposition, with a rather
good temper unless aroused by some insult, when the displays
of his anger were terrible and frequently terminated in some
tragical scene. So he was a friendly guy unless he
got angry, in which case he got really violent. That
he had a pretty fair temper unless he made him mad.

(19:21):
That's what he just said. That's literally what he's saying. Oh,
I forgot. You just learned the alphabet I forgot. Yeah,
that's your only education. Uh. He was never known to
abuse a conquered enemy, or to impose upon the weak
and defenseless. A man of very strong social feelings. He
loved his friends with all the ardor of youth, and
hated his enemies and their friends with all the rancor

(19:42):
of the Indian. He was social and playing with all men,
fond of music and the amusements of the day. It
would take a glass in a merry mood to drive
dol caraway, but seldom allowed it to steal away his
brains or transform him into a beast. This is what
his brother claims, and a lot of it's lies because
he was a famous drunk um. But yeah, that's that's
that's how his his older brother described him at eighteen UM. Now,

(20:06):
by any accounts, Jim Booie was a pretty good frontiersman. Um.
He squatted on land, chopped and sold cypress wood, which
he saw down in the planks, and then floated down
by the river into town. He also hunted a great
deal uh and his brother John wrote that he developed
a particularly painful way of hunting bears uh quote. In
the summer season, when the bears were constantly ravaging little

(20:26):
patches of green corn of the early settlers, he adopted
the following novel plan to entrap them. After finding a
place where they usually enter the field, he would find
like a stump, a tree stump that was kind of
hollow on the inside, and he'd filled the inside of
the stump with spikes that were facing inward, and then
he'd pour honey into the stump, and so the bear
would stick it snout in the stumps. The stump to

(20:47):
get honey, and then as it pulled its head out,
the spikes would gouge into its face, and so its
head would be trapped inside the log like with with
iron spikes gouged into its mouth. And then while the
bear was like in horrible agony trying to free itself
and blinded because it's head stuck in a stump, he
would just shoot it in the head. I mean, I

(21:09):
feel like he went a step Barbara for that, but
you know, it's different times, I guess. So, yeah, that's
the kind of hunter Jim is. He's a he's a
a cunning man and good at surviving, but also clearly
uh not against horrific cruelty. Um even like I mean,
even amongst sort of the ways you hear about people trapping,

(21:31):
that's pretty rough. Uh yeah. So uh. He was very
successful at living on the frontier um, and he made
enough money that after two years living this way, he'd
saved up three hundred dollars to use as a down
payment on the land he'd been squatting on um and
he had enough left over from that nest dagg after
he bought the land to buy some human beings, a

(21:52):
family of four that he purchased on credit from his father.
Over the next couple of years, Jim Bowie used their
unpaid labor and very questionable credit math to work out
a series of loans and deferred payments for three more
parcels of land. Now, these were days in which no
one had much hard currency, and most deals relied heavily
on the amount of personal trust the loanie was able

(22:12):
to gain from whoever issued the loan. Um it like.
It wasn't like today where you actually had to have
the money one way or the other, you know, if
you got like a bank to front it to you like.
A lot of loans were based on like you're a
trustworthy guy um and And Jim Bowie was good initially
at least at convincing people that he was worth taking
a risk on. Before long, Using only the his own

(22:34):
elbow greased and the uncompensated labor of four enslaved people,
Jim was able to turn these four plots of land
into a productive and valuable piece of property. He would
eventually sell it for significantly more than he paid for it.
What Jim succeeded with was essentially the goal of the
smartest pioneers. They were land speculators looking to turn labor
into real estate value and eventually get to the point

(22:54):
where they could profit from investments without spending three years
clearing timber. In the time when he wasn't working, Jim
Bowie was sociable, as Three Roads to the Alamo notes,
Society was important to James Bowie. He loved company, and
his open, frank manner and even temper attracted others to him.
He was also ambitious, and he knew and he knew
it to be in his interest to cultivate friendships with
what John Bowie called the better class of people. And

(23:17):
they're on rare occasion, when there were too many glasses
in the merriment turned to harsh words, his other side
might emerge. He would not abide an insult. When enraged,
James Bowie became entirely single minded in his determination to
vent his anger on a foe. What observers took for
fearlessness was as much an entire forgetfulness of his own
safety in the grips of his fury. He soon acquired
a reputation as a man to both respect and fear.

(23:41):
That's an elegent way to put that. Like, Once he
got drunk and kissed him off. He would fight you
till he couldn't fight you anymore. Yeah, it's this thing
where like this is like this constant state of realization
as you like go over the stories of like frontier
legends and wild West heroes and off that, like, oh,

(24:01):
if these people were around in twenty you would call
them violent drunks who commit murder when they get wasted.
Like like in there, there's like he was a good
friend and a dangerous enemy, which just means that like
when he got drunk and he thought you had muttered
something about him, he would just start shooting, Like yeah,
and that person a good friend and a dangerous enemy.

(24:25):
That shouldn't be the same person. Yeah, Yeah, he shouldn't
be your good friend and then in the same day
also be your worst enemy. That's not that's not a
good dude. Yeah, he got piste usually easily, especially when
drinking um, which is it was more of a romantic
thing back then that I think we tend to consider it.

(24:47):
It's just it's fun. Yeah. We we didn't have terms
like violent alcoholic back then. Instead, you were, uh, you
were just known as being rambunctious and a man to respect.
Didn't fear like that's what you called the guy who
was really good with a gun and got drunken angry
too often. There's that guy that's gonna feel us. He's

(25:08):
so funny. He's so funny. I really respect his ability
to murder people when he's wasted. I like that we
don't know what he's gonna do. Ever, that's my favorite
part about him. I like how unpredictable he is with
that six gun he always carries. Yeah, and also how
how talented he is at using it. That part mixed

(25:30):
in with the unpredictable is awesome. It's so good. You
know what else, he's so good. I was gonna say,
you know what, also is unpredictable with a handgun? Sure,
let's go with that. The sponsors of this podcast. You
can never predict what they'll do with their guns. That's
how we've had all of our sponsors, is their unpredictability

(25:53):
with a firearm. We just throw one at them. See
what happened. You can never predict it. Here's product. Al Right,
we are back and we're talking about Jim Booie. So
back during his brief time in the militia, Jim had
been in near contact with a guy named Dr. James Long,

(26:16):
a surgeon who had served in the Battle of New
Orleans and was pretty well known by the excitable and
heavily armed men of Louisiana. In the summer of eighteen nineteen,
Long began making plans to invade Texas. Uh. Now, then,
as in today, Texas was a violent and lawless wasteland.
Mexico was ostensibly in charge, but they weren't great at

(26:36):
being in charge, and the United States had only recently
yielded her claim over Texas in the Adams OWNUS Treaty.
A lot of her being honest, Mexico was stealing in charges. Yeah,
large swaths of texts. Yeah, but they're not there again.
They're still not good at it. No one's really ever
been good at being in charge of Texas, which is
part of Yeah, it's a lot of Texas is charm

(26:58):
and a lot of what makes Texas is such a
bad place to be. Um. So you think one person
is gonna tell all these dickads what to do? Okay, No, No,
they don't even listen to each other. They're now you
gonna listen to you? Ye Oh that everyone voted? Okay, okay, yeah, Yeah,
it's just like people talk about Austin being the capital
of Texas. The capital of Texas has always been whatever

(27:21):
the most men with guns in a given part of
Texas want the law to be. It's just how it works. Yeah,
um so yeah, yeah. A lot of southern white dudes
weren't happy that the US had kind of backed off
on attempting to take over Texas, and mainly this was
because they wanted to take over a bunch of Texas

(27:41):
for themselves because other parts of the Southeast were kind
of filling up. Um So, this doctor James Long, started
putting together a crude militia of what you would either
call freedom fighters or violent extremists, depending on you know
their complexion and your complexion and how you feel about
complexions in general. Uh, and are about seventy five of
these guys, and their plan was to launch an expedition

(28:03):
through the territory and claim it for the United States.
They marched through Louisiana on their way over, and Jim
Bowie could not resist the urge to get into a
series of gunfights and maybe also get rich, so he
signed up along the way. But wait, white, we're going where?
Sure you need a violent guy. I'm a violent guy.

(28:25):
I'm really bummed that I didn't get into more gunfights
when the war happened. I would love a chance to
do that again. I never shot over that one before.
Yeah yeah. So by the time Long reached Nakodoches, one
of every one of the three or four towns in
Texas that every Texan elementary student learns how to spell. Um,
it was late June, and Long and his men declared
a new government and started proclaiming laws. Now, it was

(28:48):
a general rule when white folks with guns in the
middle of nowhere started announcing laws in this period of times,
one of two things would happen. One would be a
violent ship show, and two would be the United States
of America. Unfortunately, that had already happened, and so this
turned into a violent ship show. Um yeah. So Long
knew that his three hundred men or so wouldn't be

(29:09):
much of a match for the entire Mexican army, so
he attempted to draw more filibusters down by offering them
land at a dollar an acre, which was a pretty
good price. Uh. And so for a couple of months
he succeeded in drawing in a few hundred guys who
wanted very cheap land. Um And Jim Bowie was immediately
one of the most popular of these filibusters, mainly because

(29:29):
he was really good at getting into gunfights, which happened
pretty regularly during this period of time. Um And and
the various fights that Jim got into around now would
have been his first taste of Mortal Kombat. But it
was pretty obvious that Long was outmanned and outclassed by
the Spanish authorities, and by October of night of eighteen nineteen,
they'd driven him and his men out of Nakodoches. Within

(29:51):
a month or so, the expedition was a shambles, and
Jim Bowie fled back to Louisiana because he didn't really
want to get his ass kicked. So we got into
a couple of gunfights. He gets to have an adventure,
but it doesn't really work out in the long run.
I got fled out of magadish this one time. Yeah,
it's a write of passage for every Texas Texans. So
Jim Bowie was a trailblazer in that hammered and they're like,

(30:12):
you need to leave down. I was like that, now
this would not be the last time that James Bowie
would try and fail to conquer Texas um. And thankfully
there were no consequences at this point for invading another
nation's sovereign territory and trying to take over a part
of it. Like he and and the other Filibusters just
kind of went back to Louisiana and everything was fine

(30:32):
like that. I mean, it's it's kind of like the Bundy's. Yeah, yeah,
it is a little bit like that, yeah, with with
more gunfire than I heard, Yeah, with the Bundy's. So
or Jim would return home and kind of got together
with his brothers, John and Resin, and they all kind
of agreed that, uh, they were ready to make a whole,
big fucking pile of money. Um. And in those days,

(30:55):
as now, the best way to make a whole, big
fucking pile of money was to sell illegal and desirable products. UM. Now,
today that means cocaine. In nearly eighteen hundreds, it meant
enslaved human beings. Slavery was obviously a big business and
a big part of the economy of the South, but
by eighteen nineteen, most American slaves had been born in

(31:15):
or around the United States. Because The federal government had
banned Americans from buying African slaves about a decade earlier,
in eighteen o eight. Now, some of this had been
due to moral pressure to in the Atlantic slave trade. Um,
but it only happened because America's political leaders assumed that
existing slaves would breed enough to you know, settled demand.
But the massive growth of the plantation system in the

(31:37):
South in this period surprised people, and before long the
demand for slaves in the Old South far outstripped the supply.
This was obviously christ what that surprises, you know, But
just to hear it, yeah, I mean, there's no way
it's weird, because like these are these are human beings

(31:58):
and we should always talk about this as the hime
that it was. But also I think if you talk
about it, I think it actually it actually gets across
how horrible it was when we do use terms like
supply and demand and product, because that's how these people
viewed them. Um. Jim Booie was looking at like the
fact that, oh, you know, slaves aren't having enough babies

(32:18):
to meet for the demands, so someone needs to bring
in more people to enslave. Um. He was looking at
it the same way that like today we're like, oh,
there's not enough toilet paper. We need to manufacture more
toilet paper. That's how they thought about human beings who
were enslaved at this point in time. And that's the
more he thought about it, like, hey, there's not enough
prisoners in my prison too for the stockholders to make money. Yeah. Yeah,

(32:44):
he would have owned a private prison or at least
invested in one if he lived in the modern day,
but he didn't, and so he got up to what
I can only call like a slave trading con um. So, yeah,
this is a complicated business. So I I I have
to explain some peculiar and some peculiarities of Louisiana law. First, so,

(33:04):
slaves smuggling was a big business um and because the
state was fundamentally racist, it had no desire to Like,
the state didn't want people smuggling slaves, right, it had to.
It had to try to stop that. It had to erase,
arrest slave smugglers, and it had to confiscate the smuggled slaves.
But those smuggled slaves were still property. So when illicit

(33:24):
slave traders were caught bringing African slaves illegally into the
United States. Those slaves were not freed, and they sure
as ship weren't returned home. Instead, they were auctioned off
by the government for profit. This meant captured smuggled slaves
were super profitable for the government because if they you
captured a bunch of slaves, you just made a shipload
of money as the government. So the government had a

(33:47):
real interest and actually people telling them where contraband enslaved
human beings were, so they would pay a bounty on
people who could turn in contract like who could point out, like, hey,
there's a bunch of contraband slaves here. Such helpful citizens
received a percentage of the sale price of the slaves
as a reward. Are you seeing how this could be

(34:08):
the system could be gamed yet? I yeah? Yeah, So
all this brings me to the story of Jean Lafitte,
a French pirate who spent half of his year robbing
and raping and stealing whole ships full of booty on
the Spanish main and half of his year hanging out
in a fortified compound called Snake Island near Galveston, which
is objectively cool. It is cool to be a pirate with. Yeah,

(34:31):
there's like a couple of things that you shouldn't have done,
but everything else sounds awesome. Yeah, Snake pirate with living
on Snake Island, that's cool as hell. Like, I mean,
it's awful that he's trading and enslaved human beings, but
Snake Island, you know, yeah, yeah, so uh yeah. He
would sell stolen goods from his base in Snake Island,
and throughout eighteen eighteen eighteen nineteen, Lafitte and his pirates

(34:53):
were particularly successful in stealing shiploads of enslaved people bound
for South America, and Lafitte's barracks on Snake Island soon
held more than six hundred of these people. Now, can
I just make a terrible just like one of his
other projects, like scratching his head on the I like
this place used to be a lot more fun. Um

(35:17):
it sounds like all he cares about his money. Now,
this is yeah, not what I had in mind when
I signed up. It used to just be about the
pillaging exactly. So. Around this same time, Jim Bowie had
developed a bit of a reputation in this area um
as a a rough customer and and an exciting guy.

(35:40):
He was a land speculator, but He also made cash
as a roper and a tamer of wild horses and
as an alligator writer, which what do you Understandly everyone
around this time was a rough character, so everyone else
to be like that guy's fucking. The average person in

(36:04):
like the southeast Southwest in this period of time who
could make it to twenty would have just wiped the
floor with any given m M A fighter today, largely
because they would have immediately pulled a knife. Yeah, well,
he said, I thought this is a fight. I just
stabbed him. That's how we fight. He did. He didn't

(36:24):
stab me back. I don't understand it. He was dumb.
So Jim Billie was like really popular among like the
whole area around Snake Island because he was just this
this tough dude who would write alligators and ship who
tried to evade Texas. He was a cool seen as
kind of a cool guy. So James, you know, his

(36:45):
popularity eventually brings him into conversation with Jean Lafitte, and
the two became instant friends because they were both dangerous sociopaths,
And eventually the pirate let Jim in on a little secret.
He had a shipload of slaves but a lot of
them were sick um and so he just couldn't sell
them um. And he wasn't allowed to legally sell any
of them in the United States because they were all

(37:06):
from Africa. Now, at this point in time, a healthy
slave went for about a dollar a pound, which is
how Jean Lafitte sold human beings. But again the sick
ones were unsellable. So Booie came to visit the fit
on Snake Island and took a look at his inventory,
and he returned from the trip, got together with these brothers,
and together they launched a plan. So gen bow John Bowie,

(37:26):
who was part of this plan, would later write, quote,
we first purchased forty negroes from Lafitte at the rate
of one dollar per pound, or an average of a
hundred and forty dollars for each negro. We bought them
into the limits of the United States, delivered them to
a custom house officer, and became the informers ourselves. The
law gave the informer half the value of the negroes
which were put up and sold by the United States Marshal,
and we became the purchasers of the negroes, took half

(37:49):
as our award for informing and obtained the marshal sale
for forty negroes, which entitled us to sell them within
the United States. We continued to follow this business until
we made sixty five thousand dollars. So you see what
the scam is here, Billy. They're buying slaves that are
illegal to bring into the United States um from their
pirate fringe, John Lafitte. And then they turned the slaves

(38:10):
into the government and say we caught these illegal slaves
being smuggled in and the reward the government gave them
was half the value of the slaves. And then the
government would auction off the slaves and they would buy
the slaves at auction and basically get subsidized for the
price of the slaves because they'd get, you know, half
of the value of them um as a reward. And

(38:32):
then once they bought the slaves at auction, they would
be legal slaves in the United States and they could
go on and sell them to other people. And it
also worked because Lafitte a lot of his slaves were
elderly and old and sick um and so nobody was
going to buy them from the pirate, but they would
buy the slaves, turn them into the United States and
get half of the value because they were valued by weight.

(38:54):
They'd still get money for these slaves that were actually
valueless slaves, and then the government would just be stuck
with them. So like, yeah, it was that. This was
like the slavery con that that Jim Bowie made his
fortune in. Wow. Yeah, it's it's like Robin drug dealers,
but worse because there's not because you're still a terrible person. Yeah,

(39:19):
it's it's I don't even really have a word for it,
but like, slavery is one of the worst things a
human being can do, but in this time, it was illegal,
and so they found out found a way to take
this horrible legal thing and also break the law while
doing it. Like it's yeah, we're doing slavery, but shady.
Yeah what is that? How did you do that? It's

(39:42):
a gift? Now, Billy? You know who won't illegally commit
tax fraud by sneakily importing slaves in and then turning
them into the customs officers in in order to take
advantage in a loophole in the law. You know who
won't do that? Billy? I don't want to guess the
ducks and services that support this podcast. So we're back. Um. So,

(40:08):
the Bowie Boys spent months engaging in this business of
buying slaves from a pirate, taking them into the United States,
smuggling them in, and then turning them into the government.
And true to form, Jim Bowie had the most personally
violent task of the whole enterprise. And I'm gonna quote
now from William C. Davis's book Three Roads to the Alamo.
Quote James himself did the most dangerous work of conveying

(40:29):
the contrabands through the swamps and bayous, bringing them in
lots of forty at a time as many as one
or two men could handle. Although the blacks were chained,
Bowie found little need for fetters. The frightened Africans knew
nothing of the country and had nowhere to go. While
they were told enough of alligators, snakes, and hostile natives
to know to know that safety, if not happiness, lay
with the Bowie's. On one trip, a few slaves may

(40:50):
have escaped, not to be found again. But for the
rest James Bowie felt secure that they would not run.
He even told the feet on one of his visits
to Campeache that he rarely lost a slave because he
was our and he knew they feared him, and stilling
fear in others was something James Bowie did with ease.
It sounds like, not with ease, like with pride. He's right, yeah, yeah,

(41:11):
He's like, no, I have this gift, then I'll kill you. Yeah.
I'm really good at scaring chained up people with a
gun as I lead them through unfamiliar territory because they
look at me and without question, they know that I
will murder that. Yeah. I don't give a ship. It
means nothing to me. It's like, yeah, people, people tell

(41:31):
me it's a gift, but I issues who I am now.
James was very much taken with the slave smuggling business.
He saw it as an easy way to make outsized
profits while committing what he considered to be a victimless crime.
The state made money, the pirate made money, and he
made money. No one got harmed, not one human being
got harm. Yeah. Yeah. Now, one thing Jim Bowie was

(41:55):
capable of doing was nursing a deep and abiding love
for knives. Obviously, Bowie is most famous for the enormous
blade that bears his name, which we'll be talking about
in detail here. Yep, the old gym knife. Yep, you
know the old saying, you got a gym on your hip,
never go hiking without a gym. Yeah. So, and I

(42:19):
have to confess here that my bowie knives are my
favorite kind of knife. I love. There's nothing like having
like a fucking pound and a half knife on your
hip and just really fucking up a piece of wood
or a severed skull of a cow. Whatever you gotta
funk up with a knife when you're hiking around in
the middle of nowhere. A bowie knife can do it.
And and I feel it's a shame that these solid

(42:41):
knives have gotten tarnished by the name of this slave
owning monster. And this is the story of why. Because
he did not invent the knife. Yeah, but I feel
like he probably did it justice he did. He did,
And we're going to talk about why his knife got
famous here. So the knife was initially the knife that
he got famous for was initially a gift from his brother.

(43:02):
Probably you'll hear a couple of different stories about how
he got his the first bowie knife from a couple
of different people, and it's not really important to get
into each of the different stories and detail. Um, but
the the details we can synthesize that they kind of
all have in common. Boiled down to Jim Bowie received
a really fucking big knife, either as a gift or
as a purchased he like commissioned himself from a blacksmith,

(43:25):
and it was made by a local Louisiana blacksmith to
be significantly larger and heavier than most hunting knives of
the arrow were. So he just gets an unusually large knife.
Either his brother hasn't made for him, or he pays
a guy to make it, but he winds up with
his huge funk off knife. Um. Now it is a
hobbit sword. Yeah. And his brother John would later claim

(43:49):
that he bought the knife for Jim. And and John
had significant financial motivation to making this claim because the
Bowie family got rich off of the fact that their
name was attached to a famous kind of knife. Um.
And John also had a vested interest in making it
seem as if his brother was like a knife wielding prodigy,
like an artist with a blade. Um, and the reality
is very different from that. Um Now. J Frank Adbe

(44:11):
a historian who studied Bowie and produced a pretty fair
biography of him in nineteen fifty seven noted big Jim
Bowie and conveying smuggled slaves, armed himself with three or
four knives that he could transfix any captive who tried
to break away. Jerking a knife out was easier than
reloading a horse pistol at the muzzle. Both Jim and
Resident could keep several knives moving in the air at
the same time without allowing one to touch the ground.

(44:32):
At twenty paces. Either could send a knife clean through
a small wooden target. So that's probably untrue, but these
are the kind of stories people started to tell about
Jim Bowie that he was like, yeah, like a master
of the blade. And the reason that he got this
reputation for being an artist with a knife is because
of something that happened in eighteen seven, the infamous Sandbar fight.

(44:55):
So it's amazing to me because a lot of people
get stabbed to death and fights even today, and nobody
cares about those fights, and they're kind of written down
as like the result of thugs and criminals, um just
having access to knives. Uh, But when a bunch of
white dudes stab each other to death, this is what happens.

(45:17):
Um well, on a sandbar. Yeah, on a sandbar. So
it's good to know that people have always been doing
nonsense on sandbars in the Gulf of Mexico. Yeah. Yeah,
and this sandbar, we'll talk about the sandbar. So Jim
spent most of the eighteen twenties engaging in a series
of land cons in Arkansas. Um And basically he had

(45:39):
committed dozens of acts of fraud and basically sold people
land and to this day in Arkansas business business. Yeah,
he would sell people land that he didn't have any
right to and then take their money and funk off.
This is not too mad at that he did that
for decade. It's like, is a general rule if you're

(46:01):
wondering what Jim Bowie was doing during a period of
his life where we don't have a lot of detail,
he was scamming people into buying land he didn't known. Um.
So he did this a bunch of Arkansas and it
piste off a lot of people. Um And he also
like the only way he was able to get away
with it is that he relied heavily on banks to
lend him the credit to do land speculation. UM. And
at one point in the late eighteen twenties, he was

(46:23):
infuriated to find that the sheriff of a nearby parish
had basically put in a bad word against him and
stopped the bank from giving him a loan that he
needed to continue his cons um So he got into
an argument with the person who'd put with that sheriff,
and they got into a fight on the street, and
the sheriff, a guy named Norris Wright, shot at Jim
Bowie and only failed to kill him because the bullet

(46:44):
hit a silver dollar in Bowie's pocket. Jim fired back,
but his pistol misfired, and so he charged Norris Right
to try to beat him to death with his bare hands,
but his friends intervened and stopped the whole thing from
ending in murder, and that really pissed Jim off, and
he prom after that point that he would never be
caught without an enormous knife on his body, so that

(47:04):
if that happened again and his gun misfired, he could
just stab a guide to death, and maybe stab his
friends to death for trying to stop him from stabbing
a guided death, because those aren't his friends anymore. Yeah, yeah,
so yeah, it did not take long for Jim Bowie
to find an occasion to use his giant funk Off
knife to stab a man. So the sand Bar Fight

(47:26):
is really romanticized in Texas history, although it didn't happen
in Texas, but it involves Jim Bowie, and so we
all learned about it. And the short of it is
that Bowie wound up on one side of a formal
duel which was held on a sand bar between Louisiana
and Mississippi. Dueling was actually illegal in both states, and
because the sand bar wasn't really in either state, was
a popular place for men to get together with their

(47:47):
friends and try to murder other men. And they later
used that same bluephole for gambling. Yes, yeah, it's the
same basic idea. Now, one of the fun things about
the Sandbar Duel is that no one really has a
good explanation as to why it started. There were two
different camps um one camp was focused around two brothers

(48:10):
named Wells and their friends, including Jim Bowie and the others.
On the other side was a guy named Robert Crane,
a doctor named Thomas Maddox, and Bowie's old enemy Norris. Right. Now,
all of these people had beef with each other for
a bunch of reasons, ranging from business disputes to allegations
of voter fraud, and mainly they just didn't like each other.
William C. Davis writes that quote, chances were that by

(48:31):
late summer of eighteen seven, none of them knew the
true origins of their feud. So it's just a bunch
of men who hate each other. And they agree to
meet up at the sandbar. Will it's okay to try
to murder each other, to try to murder each other. Um,
So they meet up there in the summer of eighteen seven.
Against any of this at this point, No, No, it
sounds like everyone's willing to meet at the sandbar. So, well,

(48:54):
I'm gonna be on the bank and I'm gonna watch.
This is the only victimless crime that we've run into.
So again, two gives a ship and these are all
probably monsters, like these are all slave owners, all pieces.
I don't care. Yeah, So all these guys meet up
at the sandbar and they exchange insults, and they waved
guns at each other in the nearby city of Alexandria

(49:16):
first and like, so they all meet in the city
near the sand bar first, and they like wave guns
and yell at each other, and it's kind of like
a pro wrestling thing, right, Like they all they all
get everyone around them fired up. And so the citizens
in Alexandria like realized, oh, there's a feud got to
be happening. And so like when these guys meet up
at the sands, yeah, that's exactly what this is. This
is a fucking w w E match. And so when

(49:39):
they meet up at the sandbar, like hundreds of people
surround the sandbar to watch this like fight start. It
was very very silly. Um is kind of the the
in summary of what happens. So eventually, on July, like
the two kind of ringleaders of both groups, uh Norris
Right and a guy named Hall, agree to have a
gunfight the sandbar, and two people show up to observe

(50:02):
the fight. Yeah yeah, yeah, um, But Norris Wright doesn't
show up for the fight. Instead, he gathers a heavily
armed posse and shows up near the site of the
duel and like sends a representative in to say, like,
I'm not ready to fight yet, but we're gonna have
a big fight in September. That's when we're gonna do
it September. It's like a fucking I can't get over

(50:24):
how much like the fucking w W E this is? Um. Yeah,
So everybody kind of waits until the fall and then
the alright, alright, okay, so we all come back in
the fall. Yeah, So the aggrieved parties, I'll gather back
at the sand bar in September nine seven to try

(50:46):
to murder each other for reasons which again are completely unclear.
It's very boredom seems to be the main driver in
all this. Now, officially the duel was between well and
Maddox this time, UM, and everyone else was seconds, including
Jim Booie. But there was so much hatred between all
the different men on both sides that the organizers of

(51:07):
the duel started to worry it might turn into a gigantic,
bloody fight, and to avoid that, they limited each side
to bringing three men onto the sandbar. So Wells and
Maddox face off at ten paces, and because Wells was
nearly blind, they had to be extra close. But it
didn't matter if they were extra close. They're both terrible shots,

(51:28):
and they both miss at fucking ten feet away. Um.
And so the duel ends, and nobody's hurt, and both
men shake hands, and Wells and Maddox are actually like
fine with this, They're like, now we can be friends again.
We tried to shoot each other, nobody died. This is
great and so kind of like at the end of
when a fucking children's best baseball team finishes a game,

(51:49):
like both sides convened together to shake hands, and this
is where things go awry because the other friends who
hadn't shot at each other are still really pissed, and
they start in holding each other, and an argument sparks up.
And if we don't know exactly what happens, there's different stories.
One of them is that uh one of the doctor
Doctor Maddox pulls out his gun and tries to shoot

(52:12):
another guy and accidentally shoots Jim Bowie in the leg
Um three Roads. The Alamo claims that the fight started
with when Jim Bowie and another man named Crane both
drew their guns and everyone else tried to calm them down,
and then Crane shot at Bowie and missed him, and
then Bowie fired back and missed Crane, and then Crane
drew his second pistol and fired again and missed again
but hit one of Bowie's friends in the leg and

(52:33):
severed an artery. And then Crane realized he fucked up,
and he ran like hell away, and so Jim Bowie
drew his second pistol and fired while Crane was running,
and he missed again. Because none of these guys are
good at I have to. I can't. I have to.
I can't over emphasize how bad guns are in this
period of time. Like these men are all firing multiple
shots from tin foot distance and they can't fucking hit.

(52:54):
That's what I'm gonna say. It's like it's I don't
think it's like a marksman problem. It's like a it's
a main manufacturing issue. No, they're metal tubes with explosives
and a ball in them. Like guns are so shitty
at this point in time. And yeah, none of these
people can hit for ship. So Bowie misses with his

(53:15):
second shot, and at this point he makes the wise
decision to stop relying on his guns and go with
an idiot proof killing tool, the gigantic funk Off knife
that he had strapped to his hip. So, roaring like
a madman, he draws the knife and he like charges
into the crowd of his adversaries because the guy who
shot him like ran back to his friends and Bowie
just rushes towards them wielding what is essentially a small sword.

(53:38):
The survivors describe him as seeming like a tiger as
he shouted out, Crane, you have shot at me, and
I will kill you if I can, so proper, pretty proper.
So Crane panics and he only he doesn't have a
loaded gun, but he has an empty gun and it
weighs like ten pounds because guns are big back then.

(54:00):
So he throws it at Bowie's Bowie's charging and he
hits him in the head and like seriously injures him
because it's again a heavy piece of metal that he's
hitting this guy in the face with. This is if
we wrote this kick us out of the network, get
out here. This is famous for being one of the
most badass fights of the Old West. And it reads

(54:22):
like a fucking Binnie Hill skin. So he probably gives
Bowie a concussion from this, Like nobody concussions weren't the
thing back then. But he like he just based on
the reports he would like this fox Bowie up getting
hit in the head with this gun like really hurts. Him. Um. Yeah,
So he falls down to his knees as a result
of getting hit in the face with this gun. And

(54:44):
then Maddox, one of the duellists, the doctor who by
some accounts had accidentally started the fight by accidentally shooting Bowie,
but who knows. Dr Maddox charges Bowie like just to
like fist fight him, and Bowie throws him away like
just because tosses him and so then Crane and their
other friend, Norris Wright, who is the guy who had
had a gunfight with Bowie months ago, charge in to

(55:05):
try to deal with Bowie, and Right draws another pistol
and aims at at Bowie, who yells back at him,
you damned rascal. Don't you shoot. Don't you dare shoot me,
you rascal, You damned rascal. Yeah, he swore. Norris Wright

(55:27):
like stands there with a gun pointed at Bowie and
the two shout at each other for a while until
one of Bowie's friends runs up and hands Jim a gun,
and both men fire at each other at point blank range,
and of course both miss. Again. Yeah, that's so bad
at shooting each other. So Right pulls his second pistol

(55:50):
and Bowie yells at him to shoot and be damned,
and Right shoots again, and of course he misses a
second time. Now at this point, one of the few
not dangerously unhinged men present, a guy named Denny, runs
up in between Bowie and Wright and pleads with Bowie,
this must be stopped, sir, this must be stopped. He's

(56:13):
just like, please, for the love of God, stop fighting.
And he puts a hand on Bowie's chest just as
Right draws a third pistol and fires again and hits.
So he finally did hit somebody. Um So the ball
passes through directly through Denny's hand in it into Jim
Bowie's lung, and with a concussion and a bullet in

(56:35):
their lung, most men probably would have stopped fighting. But
as one of Jim Bowie's friends later noted, if there
ever lived a man who never felt the sensation of fear,
it was James Bowie. It was his habit to settle
all difficulties without regard to time or place, and this
it was the same whether he met one or many enemies.
So Jim Bowie, bullet and his lung and a fucking

(56:55):
concussion charges Norris Right, waving a gigantic knife. He got
about fifteen feet when two of Wright's friends arrived with
fresh guns and opened fire. One bullet hit Jim Bowie
in the thigh and took him down again. Now Right
had been running away from the madman with the sword,
but as soon as Bowie dropped Norris Wright whipped out
a sword cane and charged him again. Now the guy

(57:21):
who shot Bowie in the thigh also pulled out a
sword cane, and the two just start stabbing Jim Bowie
to death a bunch. So the next moment in this
fight is the one that would earn the name Bowie
Knife a proud place in the long history of human
fighting implements. Shot through the lung and the thigh, probably

(57:42):
can coast and repeatedly stabbed with sword canes canes, Bowie
draws his giant knife again and fights off both men's
sword canes, parrying their jabs with his mighty dagger. He
gashed both of them repeatedly on the hands in the arms.
In response, they stab him through the hands and the wrist.
I'm gonna quote now from William C. David, his book
on how the fight ended. Quote Bowie got himself up

(58:03):
to a sitting position. Then in one lunge, he reached
up to grab Norris Right by the collar and his
right tried to straighten himself, he inadvertently helped raise Bowie
to a near standing position. As Bowie later told the
story to Reson in Their Friend, he said in Wright's ear, now, Major,
you die with a single savage thrust. He drove the
knife through Right's chest, boasting afterwards that he twisted it
to cut his heart strings. Ah, well he's not, he's not.

(58:27):
That's not how that works. But yeah, he guts him
is how most people related. Is he just he pulls
this guy down while being stabbed and just opens his
belly with his gigantic sword knife, and yeah, it kills
the ship out of him. Yeah. So Jim Bowie passes
out immediately after stabbing Norris Right to death, and the

(58:48):
attending physician who observed him after this found a gash
on his forehead, seven stab wounds, and two bullet wounds.
They all kind of assumed he was going to die
of his injuries, but he didn't, and over the next
two months, Jimbowie gradually recovered from his many injuries. Meanwhile,
the story of how he stabbed a dude to death
became national news. So most duels were all like regional stories, um,

(59:13):
and it wasn't a common people to die in them.
But the Sandbar fight became legend for one reason. Jim
Bowie Davis writes that in typical frontier fights quote, the
real fighters risked themselves only when they seem to have
the advantage and happily ran to cover otherwise. But Booie,
impelled by the rage that blinded him to fear or
self protection, stood his ground and simply kept fighting. That

(59:33):
was the sort of thing that turned brutal, pointless brawling
into legend. Yeah he does, because yeah, you're not human anymore. Yeah,
it's totally human to like stand in front of another
guy and you both shoot at each other and one
of you dies, and when he doesn't what Bowie does, Like, Yeah,
he because he's like a fucking superhero, because he does
he survives this, and because he goes so fucking far

(59:56):
beyond what any rational person would do in the era.
So yeah, there's also probably he's not the guy that
like afterwards, while he's like healing, he's also enough the
kind of guy I was, like, I got carried away. No, No,
he was just like, yeah, come at me again. Yeah,
you out. And that's exactly what happens. So newspapers write

(01:00:19):
huge spreads about the Sandbar Fight, and of course they
exaggerate everything that happens in it, and people are in
Americas start talking about Jim Booie, and Booie's canny enough
to lean into the legend. So he spent weeks bedridden
like from gunshot wounds, but he would invite reporters and
to talk to him, and he would tell all of
them the story of the fight. And he would always
have his knife strapped to his chest while he was
in his sick bed so he could show it off

(01:00:40):
to reporters and the steady stream of well wishers who
came by to talk to him. Um. So the bowie
knife becomes incredibly famous as a result of this, and
suddenly like every guy who feels who wants to feel
like a badass, has to have a bowie knife. Um.
And I found a fun right up on sort of

(01:01:00):
the spread of the Booeye knife in the wake of this,
by a site called the History Bandits, and it is
a pretty good job of tracing how Jim and all
of his brothers capitalized on the fame of the family
knife quote. The Bowie family quickly made efforts to actively
link the Bowie name with the famous knife's design and quality.
Bowie's older brother, Resin, who would have allegedly given Jim
his blade before the Sandbar incident, began promoting similar knives,

(01:01:22):
which he advertised more trustworthy in the hands of a
strong man than a pistol, which, given the fact that
everyone missed at the duel, is not necessarily inaccurate at
the time of it. Yeah Yeah. Within months of the incident,
the name of Bowie was forever linked with the large,
hilted knives of the southern back country. As the story
of Jim Bowie's feats with his knife spread, blacksmiths across
the country began to receive requests from customers to make

(01:01:44):
them a knife like Bowie's. As far afield as England,
the Bowie knife became a novelty in knife shops, and
easterners of the United States purchase Booie knives is a
symbol of the frontier. Even backwoodsman who were used to
such knives adopted the new terminology of the eighteen thirties
and requested buoy knives. It's by name, It's Smithy's from St.
Louis to the Mexican border. The Red Rible, The Red

(01:02:05):
River Herald of Necatochez, Louisiana, claimed that, with hyperbole, that
all the steel in the country, it seemed, had immediately
been converted into Booie knives. By eighteen thirty, the Booie
knife became a staple at forgeries across the American continent.
So that's cool. Yeah, it's just it's yeah, it's reassuring

(01:02:27):
that America has always kind of been like this. Yeah,
it's fun. The right up I found on this actually
compares the Booie Brothers in particular to Bear Grills Um,
because Bear Girls has like an incredibly popular series of
knives UM made just based off the fact that he's
good at being in the woods and has been on
camera like using you know, camping knives and stuff. So

(01:02:49):
like the knife companies like Gerber like, hey, what if
we made a knife and stick your name on it,
And sure enough, now they're incredibly pop You can find
them in any outdoorsman story and they're not bad knives. Um.
I don't like the hill very much, but whatever, Uh,
so in the Booie Like, what I find interesting about
this right up is that they kind of say make
the point that, like the Bowie family is the first,

(01:03:10):
the first in that line. Like they do basically what
Bear Gruels has done. They create a brand with their
family name for giant fuck off knives. That's kind of
neat the duck dudes too, Yeah, like Duck dynasty. This
is like the very first time that happened in American history, right,
The Bowie family definitely has some powerful Duck dynasty energy

(01:03:32):
to it. Well, it's the same area, yeah, and it
is the same area. They might in fact be related. Well, yes,
there's not a lot of people down there because they
get killing each other. Yeah. So yeah, Jim Bowie, slave trader,
land con artist, and guy who stabbed a person to

(01:03:53):
death becomes a celebrity mainly for stabbing a person to death.
And uh yeah, we'll talk about what comes next and
how he gets to the Alamo in part two. But
right now, Billy, it's time for you to celebrate your
own knife. What would a Billy knife be, Billy, it
would probably just be like a form of the kukrie.
You would want it to be a cookery kind of

(01:04:14):
like that. I really I'm enjoying the cookery. I like
it a lot. Yeah, cookeries are nice. I enjoy the uh.
I enjoy the the feel of a kukery. If I
was going to have a Robert knife, I would want
it to be I wanted to be a knife that's
too large to be wielded. I would like it to
be like a hunting knife, but one that has to

(01:04:36):
actually be mounted to the bed of a truck. Like
you know how they have technicals in the Middle East
with machine guns in the back. I want that, but
with a knife that you have to like drive at
a target you want to stab it. You just want
a bayonet for a Humby, Yeah, I want a bayonet
for I'm more like a bayonet for an eighteen wheeler.
That's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, that would be. I would
like a Robert knife to be a knife that requires

(01:04:58):
as much steel as a small skyscraper. That would be.
That would be the legacy I'd like to have. If
they ever give us the TV show, we could make
that happen. We could make that happen. All right, Well, um,
if you want me to uh get my own branded knife,

(01:05:18):
uh find bear girls on Twitter and send him pictures,
send him your favorite Simpsons screen grab. Let's make it
confusing for old bear. Um. And if you want to
find us on the internet, you can find us at
Behind the Bastards dot com. Uh, you can find t
shirts on t public. And I have a podcast called
The Women's War that is about Rojava and uh does
include a little bit about knives. So there we go.

(01:05:41):
It's an optimistic podcast. It is optimistic. Also optimistic is
my co host today, Mr Billy Wayne Davis. Billy, you
want to tell the people where they can find you? Yes,
I at Billy Wayne Davis on Twitter and Instagraham. If
I ever start touring again, we're allowed to bet bd
tour dot com. And then I have a podcast about

(01:06:03):
the people that make up cannabis communities and it's called
Grown Local. In season one is based in Eugene, or
speaking of both the marijuana industry and Eugene, Oregon. A
lot of people getting stabbed to death with large knives.
Definitely lots of that, not in your podcast, necessarily, just
in the industry and in Eugene, Oregon. Yeah, and probably

(01:06:26):
not even related, no no, no, I mean yeah, alright,
Episode done