Why bowie knives for fighting?

[Thomas Linton]

See: "serious" kitchen knives. The "classic" form came later.

 

[Freman Bloodglaive]

I do like the large, clip pointed "Bowie" knife though.

 

[Raymond1000]

I looked, and it doesn't seem to be here anymore. A.G. never agreed that the knife was meant as an all purpose knife, at least in the beginning. I'm sure when A.G. sees this, he'll straighten things out. What A.G. , and many others hold though, is the belief that the Edwin Forrest knife is the closest to what is the original Bowie pattern -

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That knife does seem to have the best reportable trackable lineage of the early Bowie, from Bowie to Edwin Forrest to much later, Bill Williamson. It also jives well with knives that Rezin Bowie (the real Bowie behind the design) was known to commission as gifts, e.g. , the Searles knife, and similar -

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Schively made for Rezin -

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Those three examples correspond to Resin’s description of his knife.

The first Bowie knife was made by myself in the parish of Avoyelles, in this state (Louisiana), as a hunting knife, for which purpose, exclusively, it was used for many years. The length of the blade was nine and one-quarters inches, its width one and one-half inches, single edged and not curved. Rezin P. Bowie, Planters Advocate: August 24, 1838.

That’s as close to a source document as we can get.

 

[tltt]

A interesting note on that bit from The Planter's Advocate of 1838, it's noted as the first instance of it being referred to as a hunting knife, and it also comes after quite a bit of anti- Bowie knife sentiment in various magazines and newspapers and after a few duels fought by other members of the Bowie family, including one a few months before with the knives.

 

[marcinek]

Historically, Bowie knives were always Fighters. They were never meant as camp knives. Historical, at least in the west, most woods work fell to axes, and such, and yes, while there were things like HB Camp knives, Dags, etc.... They were marketed even back then, as separate types of knives. Michael Price and Will and Finck made what they termed brush knives, they are shaped and edged differently than Bowie knives.

Nailed it. :thumbup:

 

[marcinek]

A interesting note on that bit from The Planter's Advocate of 1838, it's noted as the first instance of it being referred to as a hunting knife, and it also comes after quite a bit of anti- Bowie knife sentiment in various magazines and newspapers and after a few duels fought by other members of the Bowie family, including one a few months before with the knives.

Nailed it again! :thumbup: Early Bowies were called hunting knives. But just to put a better "spin" on them. They were weapons and the people who owned/carried them and called them "hunting" knives knew they were weapons.

And I agree with your call on the Forrest knife. Its the sandbar knife.

 

[Raymond1000]

Nailed it again! :thumbup: Early Bowies were called hunting knives. But just to put a better "spin" on them. They were weapons and the people who owned/carried them and called them "hunting" knives knew they were weapons.

And I agree with your call on the Forrest knife. Its the sandbar knife.

Rezin Bowie as a spin doctor? The Bowie knife became notorious, so Rezin lied that his weapon was a tool? He would do this…why? One local article isn’t going to affect the Bowie Knife’s national reputation.

We know the Bowie boys were skilled frontiersmen. Rezin and Jim preferred frontier life to civilization. I can’t think of any reason Rezin wouldn’t have carried a big knife as a tool. One that came in handy as a weapon. I used a trail knife for woods bumming for years. I never needed it as a weapon. But I know what a versatile tool it is. I’m sure Rezin knew as well.

If there is any evidence to prove the man was lying, I’d like to study it. Lacking that…Assertion is not argument.

 

[marcinek]

Rezin Bowie as a spin doctor? The Bowie knife became notorious, so Rezin lied that his weapon was a tool? He would do this…why? One local article isn’t going to affect the Bowie Knife’s national reputation.

We know the Bowie boys were skilled frontiersmen. Rezin and Jim preferred frontier life to civilization. I can’t think of any reason Rezin wouldn’t have carried a big knife as a tool. One that came in handy as a weapon. I used a trail knife for woods bumming for years. I never needed it as a weapon. But I know what a versatile tool it is. I’m sure Rezin knew as well.

If there is any evidence to prove the man was lying, I’d like to study it. Lacking that…Assertion is not argument.

You are missing the point about "hunting knife" and the point made in tltt's posts. The Bowie knife weapons that people carried after the sandbar fight made them popular were called hunting knives because of those people did not want to be seen as ruffians carrying weapons.

The knife Jim Bowie usaed on the sandbar was not a hunting knife. It was a weapon. The knives Rezin had made were not hunting knives. They were weapons. The knives that became wildly popular based on the fame/myth of the sandbar fight were not hunting knives. They were weapons.

Towards the end of the 1800s/early 1900s the Bowie hunting knife came into existence along with the growing popularity of outdoor recreation. They were kinda like the earlier Bowies, redesigned for the middle class casual recreational outdoorsmen. One could argue they were not hunting knives either.

As tltt pointed out earlier, Michael Price and Will and Finck were making knives used by serious recreational outdoorsmen, and later Marble did so. But all of these were nothing like the turn of the century Bowie hunting knives or the actual early-mid 1800's Bowie knives.

 

[marcinek]

If one is going to argue that the Bowie's knives were hunting knives, then one should be able to show similar looking hunting knives of the period.

There are similar looking Mediterranean daggers of the period. Not hunting knives. There are similar looking chef/butcher knives of the period. Not hunting knives.

There the knives the plainsmen used around when the sandbar fight went down. Like Green Rivers. Don't look like Bowie's knives.

 

[Shotgun]

If one is going to argue that the Bowie's knives were hunting knives, then one should be able to show similar looking hunting knives of the period.

There are similar looking Mediterranean daggers of the period. Not hunting knives. There are similar looking chef/butcher knives of the period. Not hunting knives.

There the knives the plainsmen used around when the sandbar fight went down. Like Green Rivers. Don't look like Bowie's knives.

I don't have a dog in this fight as I don't actually care that much. But to play devils advocate, weren't the green river knives being sold and carried just american style butcher knives? If so, then it stands to reason that the german style butcher knife(which is basically what the knives in tltt's pics are and a similar pattern still being sold by F. Dick) was also popluar?

IMO, the bowie knife is the fighting knife design in the world of large camp and butcher knives. I see it as an evolution of those pre-existing patterns for the purpose of fighting first but again I can't see them NOT being used for random chores. I think the reason for all the confusion is simply that Jim Bowie was a famous person who carried a big knife. After that all big knives were just generically called Bowie knives because it was an easy descriptor of large knives seen outside of the kitchen.

 

[Blackie Scantling]

Frontier life was a survival existence, what we imagine today as an endless SHTF scenario. People owned and carried only what they could carry on foot or horseback. Rather than a collection of job specific knives for defense, fighting, scalping. skinning, hunting and cutting things up in camp one knife was carried, and the smarter the owner was the larger the knife was.

For many, knives were the primary weapons as were axes, hence the once exclusively Scots-Irish saying "He has an ax to grind with someone". That meant an ax was going to be sharpened to do double duty as a battle ax. Same held true for large knives. I bet the large Hickory style butcher knife has dressed more game, butchered more livestock and killed more people than a Fairbairn Sykes or clip point Bowie combined. Not being able to afford a handmade Bowie knife was no excuse to leave the cabin unarmed and thats why a butcher style camp knife was commonly carried in many belts.

 

[Raymond1000]

You are missing the point about "hunting knife" and the point made in tltt's posts. The Bowie knife weapons that people carried after the sandbar fight made them popular were called hunting knives because of those people did not want to be seen as ruffians carrying weapons.

The knife Jim Bowie usaed on the sandbar was not a hunting knife. It was a weapon. The knives Rezin had made were not hunting knives. They were weapons. The knives that became wildly popular based on the fame/myth of the sandbar fight were not hunting knives. They were weapons.

Towards the end of the 1800s/early 1900s the Bowie hunting knife came into existence along with the growing popularity of outdoor recreation. They were kinda like the earlier Bowies, redesigned for the middle class casual recreational outdoorsmen. One could argue they were not hunting knives either.

As tltt pointed out earlier, Michael Price and Will and Finck were making knives used by serious recreational outdoorsmen, and later Marble did so. But all of these were nothing like the turn of the century Bowie hunting knives or the actual early-mid 1800's Bowie knives.

tltt’s argument seems to be that the enormously popular Bowie Knife was so unpopular that people who carried it pretended it was something else. “My Kalashnikov? That’s my hunting rifle. All those Kalashnikovs in use by the world’s revolutionaries? Hunting rifles. Never were anything but hunting rifles.” That does sound silly. Most of us on this forum know the AK47 was an assault rifle from conception onwards.

In the case of the Bowie, things are less clear. You can define the Bowie as a pure fighting knife. You can claim that everyone who said the Bowie was a hunting knife is lying. You can assert that anything that looks like a bowie is a fighter by definition. You can exclude, by definition, any wilderness tool. You can thereby conclude that all Bowies are fighters. It's an exercise in logic that proves nothing.

Correct me if I am wrong, but this seems to be the syllogism.

If: Anything that looks like a fighter is a Bowie.
And: Anything that looks like a trail knife is not a bowie.
Then: Nothing that doesn’t look like a fighter can be a Bowie.

QED? I think not. There’s nothing wrong with the syllogism. The problem is the logical fallacy. The particular fallacy is petitio principia, or begging the question. IE, “Assuming in your argument what you propose to prove.”

If tltt’s argument is to be accepted, then I can “prove” that we have no clue what the original Bowies looked like. The best evidence that the Forest knife, the Searls knife, and the Schievely knife are early Bowies is the word of Rezin Bowie. But we have just excluded that evidence. After all, Rezin’s word is no good. He lied about his weapon being a hunting knife. Why should we believe him about anything else? It doesn’t matter what spin-doctor Rezin said. I needn’t believe his physical description. I am free to assert that the only real Bowie is, “As long as a sword, as sharp as a razor, as wide as paddle, as heavy as a hatchet.”

Just to be clear, I don’t throw out Rezin’s words. That magical sword-razor-paddle-hatchet definition is nonsense. When you start making up your own evidence, you can “prove” anything. At least to your own satisfaction.

I’m willing to be convinced if you show some evidence. Were there twelve step meetings where Bowie addicts learned to pretend their weapons were tools? Show me records of quarters rented for the meetings. Show me descriptions of the meetings. Show me the Big Book of Bowie Bashing. Show me some reason to think that everyone, from coast to coast, who carried a Bowie lied about the knife’s use. Sounds unlikely to me, but show me evidence. Show me something other than, “It’s so because I say it.”

Assertion is not argument. Assertion is not evidence.

 

[Doug C]

It's a shame Bill Bagwell isn't a posting forum member here.
Bet there would be a definitive answer to the question.

DC

 

[Wanimator]

The bowie was *is everything from a poor man's blade to the equivelant of a Katana. Also they can de limb nearly as easily as a sword, make stabs so nasty that on sight can make a doctor walk away and be hidden under a jacket. And for that, I truly admire bowie knives.

 

[Blackie Scantling]

I think this is being overanalyzed, categorized. A Bowie on the frontier was just as important survival tool as a firearm and the means to make fire, whether used for fighting or whittling a toothpick, something you didn't do with a broadsword.

Bowies have been around since before the sandbar fight because like a Great White Shark, it has evolved into a near perfectly efficient all around cutting, killing, survival instrument.
One example, before the innovation of the automobile a young Texas Ranger named Frank Hamer rode into a small town and having just finished his lunch of sardines and crackers stood out in front of the store whittling a toothpick with his Bowie. A group of town tuffs saw the stranger and approached, all the while commenting on who would get his boots, belt, hat etc. Hamer just kept whittling and studying them while working up spit. When the bravest one got within arms length Hamer spit in his face. The guy wisely backed away. Hamer said if he would have taken one step closer he would have made two of him.
From whittling a toothpick one second to cutting a badguy in half the next, what else do you need?

 

[bronyblacksmith]

one thing about the bowie being a "hunting knife" is that it may have been used to finish off wounded animals. I know that the German's did this with swords but I have no Idea if that was the case with the bowie, I think that it was a weapon with more utility than a dagger.
edit: I use a 11* inch bowie as a tool.

 

[marcinek]

Assertion is not argument. Assertion is not evidence.

One could just as easily use your points to refute your claims also. I'm not seeing any historical evidence of your claims. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

I'll just leave with some quotes from a pretty solid source, Bernard Levine, from Levine's Guide it Knives and Their Values, Expanded 3rd Edition:

Although shape, size, and decoration varied widely in the first two decades of the bowie knife era, all bowie knives had this in common: they were designed primarily as weapons. The coffin-shaped hilt on many early bowie knives might well have been symbolic. A sense of propriety prompted most people then (including Rezin Bowie) to call bowie knives "hunting knives," but first and foremost they were in fact weapons.

The American hunting knife was a new home-grown type of knife created expressly for the new breed of leisure time-middle class hunters. It was a cross between the bowie knife, which is primarily a weapon, and the butcher knife used for skinning and cutting up game by frontiersmen, farmers, and Indians.

 

[Raymond1000]

One could just as easily use your points to refute your claims also. I'm not seeing any historical evidence of your claims. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

I'll just leave with some quotes from a pretty solid source, Bernard Levine, from Levine's Guide it Knives and Their Values, Expanded 3rd Edition:

No goose I ever met, nor any gander, could run a syllogism worth a damn.

But you’re right, the sauce is good either way.

So…What claims of mine do you have in mind? What am I getting wrong, and how?

I can’t speak to Bernard’s points because I haven’t examined his evidence.

 

[tltt]

My position is this -

1) Bowie knives were foremost weapons, and used as such. Both when various Bowie family used them, and when others used them, and when makers designed them and marketed them.

When you see the Bowie's using them it is as weapons in Affairs of Honor, and various melees. When you read of others using them, it's the same. When makers made them they did so as weapons, never as tools till much later. They had separate lines for edged tools, and general purpose knives.

Look at the actual designs -

http://barkriverknives.com/albums2/1A1/Later_Schivley.sized.jpg .

http://media.liveauctiongroup.net/i/7482/8787694_2.jpg?v=8CC7EC195CC2810 .

http://rusknife.com/uploads/monthly_06_2012/post-103-0-21958800-1339493189.jpg

http://www.timlively.com/images/englishbowies1.jpg .

http://www.timlively.com/images/englishbowies2.jpg .

http://www.timlively.com/images/englishbowies6.jpg .

http://www.svalbardrepublic.org/ebay/mpe0102.jpg .

Also look at the artful etches - They are etched with references to fighting and and various other combative frays. They aren't referencing woodsy or sporting pursuits. They are etched with such things as "self defender" and "protector", etc.... Not "ye olde tree beater" or "fireside whittler". No one cared about them as general purpose knives. They were designed, made, and sold with visions of heroic violence both real and imagined in mind for the most part. Their use as tools was for the most part secondary.

2)

The earliest findable comment by a Bowie that it was a Hunting knife was that letter in the Planter's Advocate in late 1838, a full 11 years after the knife first became in vogue. He had 11 years to comment that it was a hunting knife, but no findable reference is found in that 11 year time, and it isn't like Rezin and family were recluses, they were famous before the Sandbar Duel, and were near Rock Star Status after. Rezin regularly caroused with high powered people from all walks during those years, but never felt the need to harp on about it's pedestrian uses.

One could suppose that there are no early defenses of the knife as a hunting tool because there was a general understanding that they were weapons first, especially in the South, where personal duels were common, and that there hadn't been a need to defend it.

It only comes about after of a number of articles decrying both the family and it's name in the development of the knife. If you read the full text it's not so much about the development of the knife, but as a protection of the family name by an older and more well heeled Rezin. I don't wish to dig up all the articles decrying the Bowies and the knife during those years, but there are quite a few.

The text of the Planter's Advocate letter is here -

http://books.google.com/books?id=wb...Q#v=onepage&q=planters advocate bowie&f=false .

It is a defense of the family really, the defense of the knife is secondary.

 

[marcinek]

So…What claims of mine do you have in mind? What am I getting wrong, and how?

I agree with you on a couple points:

1) Water fowl are terrible with syllogisms. And symbolic logic? Forget it. Worthless.

2) Assertion is not evidence. And as far as what was in the Bowie boys’ heads, there’s not a ton of hard evidence out there other than some writing and some knives known to be associated with them. Best we can do is try to use historical context and try to put together a reasonable scenario.

So here’s my take.

1) Were the Bowie boys having hunting knives made for them? No. They were having weaponized versions of common knives made. In my opinion, a weaponized version of one of the butcher/chefs knives that were among the hunting knives that people who hunted to live used.

2) Were early Bowie knives used for hunting? Maybe, but I personally doubt it. People who hunted at that time did it so they wouldn’t starve. They were not hunting with custom knives in fancy sheathes. They were poor. People who could afford a Bowie didn’t need to hunt, and didn’t hunt. Outdoor recreation wasn’t a thing at the time.

3) Rezin and the other people who called their bowies “hunting knives” weren’t liars...they were attempting to appease the “sheeple” of the day. I know it’s blasphemy to claim that the heroic Bowies would do such a thing, but it certainly appears that is exactly what they did.

4) Were Bowie knives eventually used for hunting? Yes. When outdoor recreation became popular years later around the turn of the century.