Do People Use Bowies For Anything?

I do...See them poles ? they have to be notched for 10mm steel cable that holds the canopy..also those kiwifruit vines need pruning when they get in the way....FES

 
There are two museum knifes associated with Davey Crocket.

One is his personal knife; a 5” dagger with double quillons . He sharpened one edge for rough work stuff and one edge for fine work.

The other is a Bowie knife he used on his last bear hunt before lighting out for Texas. The Bowie is a long knife with a drop point blade.
 
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall reading that back in the day, people used what (knives) they could find. Often these were the relativley mass-produced knives from Sheffileld originally designed for use in the butcher shop/kitchen. That makes some sense.

Jordan
 
There is no definitive Bowie knife, meaning a knife just like the one Jim Bowie used at the Sandbar fight. What we do have are a wide range of medium to large fixed bladed knives used in North America during the early 19th century. These ranged from useless junk intended for greenhorns to practical and traditional knives that had been in use for hundreds of years. There were various butcher knives and splitters, as well as dirks, sax, bolos, gaucho knives and the like which could easily pass for what we now call "bowie knives." We should remember that this is also a period marked by the fall of the sword, so in civilized society knives and canes came into use in place of the sword.

n2s
 
After the Sandbar Brawl everyone wanted a knife like Bowie's.
Not that they knew what it was.
When has that ever stopped a knife knut?
:D

The Bowie name has been hung on many different styles of knives.
Add to that, what we call a butcher knife today, could be a totally different sort of knife back then.

A copy and paste of my own post in general from the beginning of the month

The only eye witness description of the knife used in the sandbar brawl was
"Big Butcher Knife"
That's it.
Everything else is supposition.

The Alamo fell march 6, 1836. The first mention I find of a Bowie Knive is 1840. It seems that the name Bowie knife came into use after the Alamo, before that they were simply called butcher knives.
This little piece of informatioin comes from my last 960 pages of reading about the Alamo, searching for the history of Bowie knives.

-Ed Fowler
Click to expand...

Some say it was the Forrest knife, some the Searles knife, some the Black knife, but there is no real concrete answer only assumptions and conclusions.

And therein lies the rub.
We just don't know.

More reading:
http://knifetalkonline.com/smf/index.php?board=13.0 (the source of the quote above)

http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/s...l-Bowie-Knife-Where-Is-It/page2?s=&perpage=20

http://www.historicarkansas.org/jamesblackrevisited/

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F20E17FF3D5415738DDDAC0A94DB405B8485F0D3

I can't find my link to the Lucy or Lucille Bowie letter... It may be in Ed Fowler's Knife Talk... more good reading, more loose ends.

Enjoy :)
 
It’s no surprise that Civil War infantrymen threw their Bowies away.

They were in the Army. The rifle mounted bayonet is a better close quarters weapons than any short sword.

Trail knife functions were irrelevant because they were in the Army. Soldiers don’t need the same tools small hunting parties use.

Sherman’s infantrymen cut excess inches from their blankets to lighten their march.

Smart soldiers abandoned their pig stickers.
 
The only time I ever saw a Bowie knife other than in a collection was on a biker in California. It was a beautiful thing, brass fittings with a stag handle. Guess he meant it to be scary, or something. Come to think of it, he looked more like a lawyer in leather than a real biker.
 
My grandmother had her grandfather's Bowie knife that he carried during the Civil War. He was from Louisiana, which is where all my folks still live. We tried to find it years ago but couldn't. I saw the knife several times when I was a kid. It was BIG! It had a D guard on a pecan wood handle. Seems like the blade was a drop point. You could tell it was handmade. My grandmother told me that his brother had made it, as he was a blacksmith. She also said her grandpaw used the knife around his farm all the time. Sorta like a machete, to clear weeds, brush and that sort of thing. I don't know if she had given the knife away or it was stolen.
I do have his bayonet. I don't know how to post pictures from this phone but I could send them if anyone would like to see them.
 
This is my first post here, Hello everyone.
I decided to reply to this thread, because I have always loved the Bowie style knife, and I have used and carried one quite a bit. Some Bowie knives are certainly more practical then others, but my favorite one has an eight inch blade, and a sandbar stag handle, full tang. I love it. I carry it bowhunting for clearing shooting lanes, building blinds, and as a last resort self defense, and also use it for kitchen work, as it's a great chopper. And I know some will laugh at me, but IMHO it's the best knife I ever used for skinning and butchering squirrels because it has a very sharp slim point that gets under hide in case I need to finish getting a leg past the hide, and it also serves as a fine cleaver for chopping off the head and feet. It's so much faster then using a small knife and trying to find the joints and force the small knife through to cut off the head or feet. With the big knife you have so much more leverage and one chop is all it takes anyway. I probably use it more then any other hunting knife I own, and I have custom Doziers, and all sorts of off the shelf hunters, both fixed and folders.

Although, I generally use my custom Dozier with a 3.5 inch blade for skinning deer, I don't need a chopper for deer, as I don't cut the bones anyway, because I bone out all of the meat on a deer.

I guess my first big Bowie was one of those big Western 12 inch Bowie's and I still have it. It's even better for building deer blinds or clearing shooting lanes, and before the days of CCW, I never felt unarmed while bowhunting as long as I had that big Bowie along, even in bear country. I know many so called woodsmen laugh at anyone that shows up with a knife with a blade longer then 5 inches, but I don't care, I still like a big blade in addition to a smaller knife, usually.
 
I have a couple of Westerns that are also great dust collectors. But I would never part with them.

W46-8 -8 is for the 8 inch blade


Top is a Western Bowie
 
I can't speak to the history of the Bowie pattern, but some of the posted information is fascinating. So thanks for that guys! I do have a largish bowie, about a 10" blade. I use it for limbing trees(small stuff up to about 3 inches in diameter) and the like all the time. Heavy blade makes it a great chopper and keeping it sharp helps with finesse. I wouldn't carry it on my belt, but I like it for working wood and it makes a decent food knife as well. I've used it to carve the thanksgiving turkey more than once.

Jon
 
jackknife said:
I think that the time window of the real utility of the Bowie was pretty small. In the late 1830's to the late 1840's, it was a viable choice for a defense weapon, but the Revolver changed that by the 1850's. Popularity of the Bowie among the Union troops in the civil war, (also known by many as the war of northern aggression) was very low. Even among the southern troops who often were ill equipped, the Bowie fell out of favor by mid war. Many were just discarded as being too heavy and not really needed. The many civil war museums around here in Maryland and Virginia, gives a good glimpse into what the soldiers actually carried.

Post civil war era, with the advent of metallic cartridge firearms, and more compact handguns, the Bowie fell further out of favor by most. It became more of a male jewelry and display item, hence the many old bowies that are found in very good to almost unused condition. Most of the frontiersmen and later buffalo hunters used what amounted to large butcher knives that were far better cutters.

I once saw in a book the casualty figures for the soldiers in the civil war. Even though the firearms of the day were slow muzzle loaders, the figures for other than gunshot wounds were astoundingly low. Even bayonet wounds were not common. It would appear that very few union or southern troops relied on a bowie as a weapon. Steven Dick wrote a good article for the Ken Warner Knives Annual, about knives of the fur trade. In it he listed the knives and manufacturers of the items used. Almost none were bowies. I believe he stated it to the effect that the bowie was popular among water front thugs and saloon folk, but past the Mississippi was a working mans relm, and the plain butcher knife was the knife of choice among both trappers and homesteaders.

The Bowie's biggest fan has been Hollywood movie makers.

Carl.
Click to expand...

They may have been muzzle loaders but they weren’t muskets. The Minié ball allowed volley fired rifles. That meant effective fighting at greater distances. It meant an early version of trench warfare. It changed the way cavalry was used.

I haven’t researched it but I bet bayonet and sword wounds were a lot more common during the Napoleonic wars.
 
Lastmohecken said:
This is my first post here, Hello everyone.
I decided to reply to this thread, because I have always loved the Bowie style knife, and I have used and carried one quite a bit. Some Bowie knives are certainly more practical then others, but my favorite one has an eight inch blade, and a sandbar stag handle, full tang. I love it. I carry it bowhunting for clearing shooting lanes, building blinds, and as a last resort self defense, and also use it for kitchen work, as it's a great chopper. And I know some will laugh at me, but IMHO it's the best knife I ever used for skinning and butchering squirrels because it has a very sharp slim point that gets under hide in case I need to finish getting a leg past the hide, and it also serves as a fine cleaver for chopping off the head and feet. It's so much faster then using a small knife and trying to find the joints and force the small knife through to cut off the head or feet. With the big knife you have so much more leverage and one chop is all it takes anyway. I probably use it more then any other hunting knife I own, and I have custom Doziers, and all sorts of off the shelf hunters, both fixed and folders.

Although, I generally use my custom Dozier with a 3.5 inch blade for skinning deer, I don't need a chopper for deer, as I don't cut the bones anyway, because I bone out all of the meat on a deer.

I guess my first big Bowie was one of those big Western 12 inch Bowie's and I still have it. It's even better for building deer blinds or clearing shooting lanes, and before the days of CCW, I never felt unarmed while bowhunting as long as I had that big Bowie along, even in bear country. I know many so called woodsmen laugh at anyone that shows up with a knife with a blade longer then 5 inches, but I don't care, I still like a big blade in addition to a smaller knife, usually.
Click to expand...

Welcome, Lastmohecken. Enjoy yourself here.

My favorite eight inch Bowie is the Randall Model 1. It's a great chopper for its weight.
 
I think that many who start considering a "big knife" for the first time after they have usually had folders of some sort, usually want a Bowie styled blade. I did. It characterizes what a big knife IS for many. But I sort of got past that point too and I have no intention of selling or getting rid of the big ones. So nothing wrong with getting a big bowie styled blade because they are simply "cool".
 
Strictly from the collectors standpoint (which is NOT me), an "Authentic" Bowie will come from the 15 or so years prior to the invention of the revolver, was of a certain size (large), and here's the use point, designed to serve and be used as a sidearm. Back in the days when two shots meant two pistols, if you've got 3 enemies you need that sidearm.
 
Raymond1000 said:
...

I haven’t researched it but I bet bayonet and sword wounds were a lot more common during the Napoleonic wars.
Click to expand...

Consider that these statistics are based on the wounds treated at aid stations and that when you get up close and personal with an enemy who is willing to kill you, you are unlikely to let them go until you are certain that they can no longer strike back at you. So the reason for the low incidents of blade wounds is that the victims died on the battlefield.

n2s
 
22-rimfire said:
I think that many who start considering a "big knife" for the first time after they have usually had folders of some sort, usually want a Bowie styled blade. I did. It characterizes what a big knife IS for many. But I sort of got past that point too and I have no intention of selling or getting rid of the big ones. So nothing wrong with getting a big bowie styled blade because they are simply "cool".
Click to expand...

I think I can agree with this. For myself, the first fixed blade I bought was a KABAR, and while I bought it for the history behind it as such an iconic knife of the Marines, I think the KABAR pretty clearly shows it's Bowie ancestry to one degree or another.

As to the OP, I don't have a Bowie, but if I did and didn't live in an apartment I'd get some use out of it. If I lived where I had easy access to a wooded area I'd have some fun with it, taking it to wood from time to time. Not necessarily out of practicality but for fun because it's a Bowie:) I grow tired of apartment/city living. But that's another topic.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top