Read Ebook: Stories of Christmas and the Bowie knife by Dobie J Frank James Frank Hunter Warren Illustrator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They wouldn't do any better for a stranger than for their master," Mr. Cude answered.

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

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

"Oh, yes, and they knew him. They liked him."

Then for a little while there was silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Through long centuries of warring, certain weapons of the Old World, like King Arthur's "Excalibur" and Siegmund's great sword "Gram," became the subjects of legends and of songs that have made them immortal. Their solitary counterpart in the New World, before six-shooter and law-abiding habits supplanted its use, was the Bowie knife. The knife's origin is wrapped in fable as fantastic as that recounting how the dwarf smiths forged for the old Norse gods; its use is memorialized in a cycle of dark and bloody legends yet told all over the Southwest. And certainly the Bowie knife was once as important to the frontiersman as a steady eye.

It was the rule to "use a knife and save powder and lead." The Bowie knife was the best possible knife to use, and knife throwing and thrusting were arts to be excelled in, as well as shooting and wrestling. Indeed, many frontiersmen regarded any other weapon than the knife, for work in close quarters, as "fit only for the weakly." Bowie himself, it is claimed, could juggle a number of knives in the air at the same time and at twenty paces send one through a small target of thick wood.

For dozens of purposes the Bowie knife was "as handy as a shirt pocket." Its hard bone or horn handle was often used as a kind of pestle to grind coffee beans. The blade, sometimes as heavy as a Mexican machete, served to hack limbs from trees and to cut underbrush, as well as to dress and skin game. Tradition has it that in the battle of San Jacinto the Texans killed more Mexicans with the Bowie knife than with bullets. An Englishman named Hooten, who visited Texas a few years after the battle and straightway wrote a book, said: "I have myself seen skulls of Mexicans brought in from the battleground of San Jacinto that were cleft nearly through the thickest part of the bone behind, evidently at one blow, and with sufficient force to throw out extensive cracks, like those of starred glass."

Of all the characters connected with pioneer history in the Southwest, James Bowie comes nearer being unadulterated legend than any other. He did nothing really great or constructive; yet his name has probably been more widely popularized than that of the truly great and constructive founder of the Texas Republic, Stephen F. Austin. He affected little, if at all, the destiny of a nation, and merely a scrap of his paper survives; yet the stories that sprang up about him are second in number only to those about the voluble and spectacular Sam Houston. He is remembered popularly for three things: first, his brave death in the Alamo, fighting for Texas independence; second, his supposed connection with a lost Spanish mine on the San Saba River, which came to bear Bowie's name, and which today, after thousands of men over a period close to a hundred years have vainly sought to find it, is yet the object of ardent search; third, the knife which bears his name--and which, to many people, symbolizes his character.

All three of these claims to remembrance are wrapped in legend. The traditional tales, some of them truly extraordinary, centering around the Lost Bowie Mine, would, if compiled, fill a volume. History is clear as to Bowie's part in the Alamo, but the best stories about him there do not get into documented histories. Nor do the tales of how he succored abused slaves, took the part of bullied preachers, and rescued wronged women. But our subject is the Bowie knife.

The known facts about James Bowie's early life are that he was born in Tennessee in 1795, two years later than his distinguished brother Rezin P. Bowie, and that in 1802 he came with his parents and their numerous progeny to Louisiana. The name Bowie at that time was already more than a century old in Maryland and had been known for two generations in Virginia and South Carolina, the several branches of the family having shot out from a stout clan of Scottish Highlanders. The male members of it--hard riding, hard-headed, well propertied, decently educated, contentious in politics, and ready to die in adherence to the code of the Cavaliers--generally deserved the epithet given to them, "the fighting Bowies."

The pair that reared James were equal to holding their own in a wilderness where turbulent men were made more turbulent by the confusion of land claims following the Louisiana Purchase. On one occasion Rezin Bowie, Sr., father of James, in defending his land against a gang of squatters, killed one of them. He was arrested, charged with manslaughter, and put in jail to await trial. Mrs. Bowie, accompanied by a slave, rode on horseback to the jail, demanded entrance, and entered. In a few minutes she and her husband reappeared, each armed with a brace of pistols. While the jailer retreated, they mounted the horses in waiting and rode away. It is not recorded that Rezin Bowie, Sr., was again molested. Years later when this wife and mother was told how her son had been killed by Mexicans in the Alamo, she calmly remarked, "I'll wager no wounds were found in his back."

In time, James Bowie and his brother Rezin came to own and operate a great sugar plantation on Bayou Lafourche, called Arcadia. Meantime, John J., a third brother, had moved to Arkansas and established a large plantation.

Jim Bowie was a man of surpassing vigor, of headlong energy, and of great ambition to lead. He was six feet tall and all muscle. He roped and rode giant alligators for fun. Generally polite and courteous, in anger he appeared "like an enraged tiger." He was somehow connected with Dr. Long's filibustering schemes against Mexico, and with one or more of his brothers he seems to have carried on an extensive business in slave smuggling. The Bowies are said to have bought blacks from the pirate Lafitte on Galveston Island at a dollar a pound. On one occasion, says the historian Thrall, Jim Bowie, while driving ninety of his purchases through the swamps of Louisiana, lost the entire band. Thereafter he prepared himself against a similar disaster by wearing "three or four knives," so that he could transfix any Negro that tried to run away. Jerking a knife was quicker by far than reloading a horse pistol at the muzzle. "Big Jim," as they called him, showed the "knife men" among Lafitte's crew several things in the art of knife throwing.

And this brings us to our theme--a theme concerning which history must stand abashed before the riot of legend. Who made the first Bowie knife? How did it originate?

According to an unpublished letter, written in 1890 by John S. Moore, grandnephew of James Bowie, and preserved among the historical archives of The University of Texas, the original knife was modeled as a hunting knife by Rezin Bowie, Sr., and wrought by his own blacksmith, Jesse Cliffe. Some time later Jim Bowie had a "difficulty" with one Major Morris Wright, in which a bullet from Wright's pistol was checked by a silver dollar in Bowie's vest pocket. While Wright was in the act of shooting, Bowie "pulled down" on him, but his pistol snapped and the two foes parted, expecting to meet another day. When Jim told his father of this, the old gentleman got out his prized hunting knife and presented it to his son with these laconic words: "This will never snap."

In the "Sandbar Duel" that followed, the knife fully met all expectations. This duel was in reality a free-for-all fight that took place among twelve men who met on a sandbar in the Mississippi River near Natchez, September 19, 1827. In it two men were killed and three badly wounded. Bowie was down, shot in four places and cut in five, when his mortal enemy, Major Wright, rushed upon him, exclaiming, "Damn you, you have killed me." Bowie raised himself up and stabbed Wright to the heart. At once Bowie's knife became famous and copies of it were widely disseminated.

According to notes kept by another scion of the Bowie family, Dr. J. Moore Soniat du Fosset, of New Orleans, now deceased, it was Rezin P. Bowie, the brother of James, who devised the knife. The occasion for it arose thus:

One day while Rezin P. was thrusting his knife into a ferocious bull, the animal lunged in such a way as to draw the blade through the hunter's hand, making a severe wound.

After having his hand dressed, Rezin called the plantation blacksmith, Jesse Cliffe, and told him that he must make a knife that would not slip from a man's grasp. Using a pencil in his left hand, he awkwardly traced on paper a blade some ten inches long and two inches broad at its widest part, the handle to be strong and well protected from the blade by guards. The model having been settled upon, Rezin gave the smith a large file of the best quality of steel and told him to make the knife out of that. With fire and hammer the smith wrought the weapon--just one. It proved to be so serviceable in hunting, and Rezin came to prize it so highly that for a long time he kept it, when he was not wearing it, locked in his desk.

Then one day Jim Bowie told his brother how his life had been jeopardized by the snapping of a pistol while it was pointed at a man firing on him. After hearing the story and learning how the final reckoning between the enemies was yet to be made, Rezin unlocked the desk, took out his prized personal possession, and handed it to his brother with these words: "Here, Jim, take 'Old Bowie.' She never misses fire."

Another story has it that in preparation for the "Sandbar Duel" Jim Bowie himself took a fourteen-inch file to a cutler in New Orleans, known as Pedro. Pedro had learned his trade in Toledo, where the finest swords in all Spain were forged; and all his skill went into the making of a blade which was to be, in Bowie's words, "fit to fight for a man's life with."

But let us not be too rash in drawing conclusions. Arkansas is yet to be heard from, and Arkansas has better right to speak on the subject than any encyclopedia. The Bowie knife used to be commonly known as the "Arkansas toothpick," and Arkansas is sometimes referred to as "the Toothpick State." Arkansians certainly knew their toothpicks. The very spring that Bowie died in the Alamo, Arkansas became a state, and fittingly enough history records that the members of the first Legislature used, after adjournment in the cool of the evening, to take their knives and pistols and repair to a grove hard by, there to practice throwing and shooting at the trees.

Some members of the Legislature were in fine practice. The Speaker of the House was John Wilson, sometimes known as "Horse Ears" from the fact that when he was excited--whether by love, humor, or anger--his ears worked up and down like those of an aroused horse. One of his political enemies in the House was Major J. J. Anthony. When a bill relating to bounties on wolf scalps came up Anthony arose and, in the course of his remarks, made a cutting allusion to Speaker Wilson.

With ears working and quivering "in a horrific manner," Wilson leaped from his chair, drew a Bowie knife, and started toward his antagonist. Anthony was waiting for "Horse Ears" with his own knife drawn. A legislator thrust a chair between them. Each seized a rung in his left hand and went to slashing with his right. Anthony cut one of Wilson's hands severely and in the scuffle lost his knife. Wilson, thereupon, made short work of his enemy. In court Wilson was triumphantly cleared of the charge of murder, and at a meeting of the Legislature a few years later drew his Bowie knife on another member. Those were the days when the Bowie knife governed in Arkansas.

So it is not without reason and just basis for pride that Arkansas insists on having originated the Bowie knife. It has already been said that John J. Bowie established a plantation in that state. A former Arkansas judge, William F. Pope, maintains that Rezin P. Bowie once came to Washington, Arkansas, and engaged an expert smith named Black to make a hunting knife after a pattern that he, Bowie, had whittled out of the top of a cigar box. "He told the smith he wanted a knife that would disjoint the bones of a bear or deer without gapping or turning the edge of the blade. Black undertook the job and turned out the implement afterward known as the Bowie knife. The hilt was elaborately ornamented with silver designs. Black's charge for the work was , but Bowie was so pleased with it that he gave the maker more.

Despite such strong assertions, it would appear that Judge Pope based his judgment on a false premise. The classic Arkansas story comes from Dan W. Jones, governor of Arkansas from 1897 to 1901. According to Governor Jones, the James Black, who alone made the only "genuine" Bowie knife, also designed it. Black was born in New Jersey and, after having served as apprentice to a Philadelphia silver-plate manufacturer, came South in 1818, settling that year at Washington, Hempstead County, Arkansas.

Here he found employment with Shaw, the village blacksmith. Shaw was an important man with high ambitions for his daughters. Consequently, when Anne fell in love with the young smith, only a hired hand, Shaw objected. The young people married nevertheless, and James Black set up a smithy of his own.

He specialized in making knives, and very soon they had won a reputation. Governor Jones's story continues:

"About 1831 James Bowie came to Washington and gave Black an order for a knife, furnishing a pattern and desiring it to be made within the next sixty or ninety days, at the end of which time he would call for it. Black made the knife according to Bowie's pattern. He knew Bowie well and had a high regard for him as a man of good taste as well as of unflinching courage. He had never made a knife that suited his own taste in point of shape, and he concluded that this would be a good opportunity to make one. Consequently, after completing the knife ordered by Bowie, he made another. When Bowie returned he showed both the knives to him, giving him his choice at the same price. Bowie promptly selected Black's pattern.

"Shortly after this Bowie became involved in a difficulty with three desperadoes, who assaulted him with knives. He killed them all with the knife Black had made. After this, whenever anyone ordered a knife from Black he ordered it made 'like Bowie's' which finally was shortened into 'Make me a Bowie knife.' Thus this famous weapon acquired its name.

"Other men made knives in those days, and they are still being made, but no one has ever made 'the Bowie knife' except James Black. Its chiefest value was in its temper. Black undoubtedly possessed the Damascus secret. It came to him mysteriously and it died with him in the same way. He often told men that no one had taught him the secret and that it was impossible for him to tell how he acquired it."

The death of the secret is a part of the story. About 1838 Black's wife died. Not long thereafter Black himself was confined to his bed by a fever. While he was down, his father-in-law, who had all along been jealous of Black's growing reputation, met up with him and beat him over the head with a stick. Probably he would have killed him had not Black's dog seized Shaw by the throat. As it was, inflammation set up in Black's eyes and he was threatened with blindness. As soon as he had strength enough to travel he set out for expert treatment. A quack doctor in Cincinnati made him stone-blind.

Black returned to Arkansas to find his little property gone and himself an object of charity. A Doctor Jones, father of the future Governor Jones, gave him a home. When Doctor Jones died, the blind man went to live with the son.

"Time and again," recalls Governor Jones, "when I was a boy he said to me that, notwithstanding his great misfortune, God had blessed him in a rare manner by giving him such a good home and that he would repay it all by disclosing to me his secret of tempering steel when I should arrive at maturity.

"On the first day of May, 1870, his seventieth birthday, he said to me that he was getting old and could not in the ordinary course of nature expect to live a great while longer; and that, if I would get pen, ink and paper, he would communicate it to me and I could write it down.

"I brought the writing material and told him I was ready. He said, 'In the first place'--and then stopped suddenly and commenced rubbing his brow with the fingers of his right hand. He continued this for some minutes, and then said, 'Go away and come back again in an hour.'

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