Chapter 4
“A Warm Friend of Colonel James Bowie”
TO ROSE AND MANY AMERICANS, Jim Bowie was the rod by which American manhood was measured.
A fighter who “never lost a fight or started one,” James Bowie killed more than fifteen men in “non-military encounters” – usually employing his “Bowie,” a knife (virtually a small sword) which combined superb steel with a curved two-edged point for stabbing and slashing.
Rose first heard tell of Bowie a decade after the Frenchman crossed the Atlantic and arrived in the New World. Actually, what he heard – from one end of Louisiana to the other – was the story of Bowie and the famous “Sandbar duel,” fought on a small island opposite Natchez, Mississippi.
The prologue to the celebrated altercation began a year earlier in 1826 when Bowie demanded an apology from his archenemy, Major Norris Wright. The cause was slanderous remarks made by Wright after having lost an election to a Bowie ally. In a rather dramatic response, Wright shot Bowie in the chest. Bowie remained on his feet, leaped on Wright and after beating him with his fists, reached for his clamp knife, pounding him with his other hand, while trying to open the knife with his teeth. But before the knife would open, Wright’s friends grabbed Bowie’s arm and the knife dropped. Weaponless, Bowie sunk his teeth into Wright’s hand, losing a tooth as he was pried away.
Bowie vowed thereafter to wear a scabbard to hold a special hunting knife “as long as I live.” The knife was designed, constructed and modified by his brother, Rezin. It was twelve inches long and almost two inches wide. Some described it as a “large butcher knife.” The blade was ground sharp along the bottom edge with a “signature” concave indentation on the top edge, well-honed so that a back stroke could inflict a fatal wound. A cross piece separated the handle from the blade.
The first “Bowie knife” was used against Major Norris Wright in 1827.
A year after their initial encounter, Bowie was a mere observer to a pistol duel on a sandbar. When the duel ended with each combatant missing the other, an ally of Wright suddenly fired his pistol at Bowie but missed, then Wright fired at Bowie, who fired back. Bowie had not yet reloaded his single-shot pistol* as Wright drew a second pistol and again aimed at him. “Shoot and be damned!” Bowie yelled at his adversary. For the second time in two encounters, Wright shot Bowie in the chest, this time the ball passing through one of his lungs, staggering him. An ally of Wright shot Bowie in the thigh bringing him down.
Wright then charged with a sword cane, piercing Bowie’s left hand, another sword blow bent the blade as it hit Bowie’s breastbone, forcing him flat on his back on the ground.
Incredibly, Bowie raised himself to a sitting position and in one lunge grabbed Wright by the collar and pulled him downwards. As his startled enemy tried to pull back and straighten himself he inadvertently raised Bowie to a near standing position. Bowie whispered in his foe’s ear: “Now, Major, you die,” as he drove his knife through Wright’s chest, and “twisted it to cut his heart strings.” Wright died instantly but landed on Bowie pinning him to the ground.
Immediately one of Wright’s friends began stabbing Bowie while another man shot Bowie in the arm; Bowie pushed off Wright’s corpse and knifed the second man in his side. Finally, Bowie’s people were able to stop the shockingly unfair brawl.
All in all Bowie suffered a bullet through his lung, arm and thigh, and seven major stab wounds to his body. Bowie was removed “as it was supposed, in a dying condition,” but, after two months recuperation, he survived to fight again.
The national press took note that an enraged Bowie, oblivious to fear or self-protection, stood his ground and fought alone against the odds. A Grand Jury refused to indict him for the slaying.
“Is that true?” an incredulous Rose asked. Yes, replied the speaker, so proud that one would have thought it was his exploits he was relating . . . and there is more. “Now, I will tell you about ‘The Siege at San Seba’.”
Bowie, with a party of 16, searching for silver mines north of San Antonio, was attacked by more than 120 Indians. After eight with tomahawks were shot down, Bowie saw an Indian leader “with buffalo horns and other finery about his head” on horseback within range. His pistol empty, Bowie called to a friend: “Shoot him!” – and the friend did; when the braves tried to rescue their chief, they too were shot. A new Chief appeared and this time Bowie, having reloaded, shot him. Again the braves riding to carry their Chief away were also shot. Next the Indians set fire to the prairie, trying to burn out the white men and eliminate their cover.
With one of Bowie’s men dead, three seriously wounded, all the rest wounded in some manner, those able to stand formed a circle around the critically wounded in readiness to fire one single volley when attacked, then they would fight with their knives. Thus passed the first 10 hours. By nightfall, there were the sounds of mournful wailing of warriors as they sang over their dead.
In the morning, Bowie erected a slim pole and flew a small flag “to intimidate [the Indians] and show there were still men ready for a fight” – that is, all of the six “able to use their arms!”
With forty dead and thirty wounded, the Indians departed.
A few weeks later Bowie and his party arrived home. Though reports had reached Bowie’s family and friends that he and his men were dead, the frontiersman had defeated odds of almost 8 to 1. Bowie became known as a legendary leader of men; no odds were too great for him to overcome.
JAMES BOWIE was born in 1796 in Kentucky – four years after it became the 15th state of the United States of America. It was a time when you could be born on U.S. soil, ride a few miles to be a Spanish subject, take a boat a few more miles and be subject to French rule – and without a further move, later be living on U.S. soil again. (Some could be subject successively to three different sovereigns without ever moving from their land.)
The very year Bowie was born, Spain invited Americans to cross the Mississippi, and accept liberal grants of land without taxes. It was an offer the Bowie family could not refuse. In 1800, they set off for the Missouri Territory and swore allegiance to the Spanish government.
However, almost as the Bowies were arriving, Spain lost the entire Louisiana Territory to France. Believing they could do better under French rule, a few years later, the Bowies took a flatboat down the Mississippi to start a new life in French Louisiana (which soon became part of the United States).
The Louisiana Purchase created great excitement to the land hungry Americans – only to become a great disappointment when Spain repudiated the claim that the Territory extended to the Rio Grande, meaning including Texas. The U.S. government was passive, caught in political machinations.
In anger, American rebels in 1812, including Bowie’s father, marched to Nacogdoches, Texas, near the Louisiana border – then to the frontier at San Antonio de Bexar, along the Rio Grande, nearest to the interior of Mexico, to fight the Spanish for Texas. Soon they gave up and returned to Louisiana . . . for the time being.
The attempted (half-hearted) conquest of Texas coincided with the War of 1812, fought between the United States and Great Britain (at the same time that Rose was retreating from Moscow). When the war came to the lower Mississippi Valley, James Bowie and brother Rezin enlisted in a Louisiana Regiment to counter a British attack on New Orleans.
Young James taken altogether was “a manly, fine-looking person and by many of the fair ones he was called handsome,” said his brother John. He was “a stout, rather raw-boned man, of six foot height, weighed 180 pounds,” and had a fair complexion with sandy hair, not quite red and high cheek-bones. Bowie caught and rode wild horses, trapped bears and actually rode alligators. He was wild with occasional bursts of a “terrible anger.”
But all that energy went untapped in the War of 1812, which ended weeks before Bowie and his brother arrived. In January 1815, Gen. Andrew Jackson won a decisive victory at New Orleans over the attacking British forces. The war over, the Bowie brothers mustered out.
But a new battle – or rather the old battle over Texas and the Louisiana Purchase – re-emerged. In 1819, the United States formally gave up its claims to Texas in return for Spain’s Florida territory. (This was the “secret negotiations” that prompted the U.S. to allow Rose and the French exiles to be ousted by the Spanish in 1818 from Le Champ d’Asile.)
This political compromise did not sit well with the same frontiersmen (now seven years older), who were itching to cross the Sabine River and seek their fortune in the fertile new territory. In 1819, a band of American rebels attacked an outpost in Texas.
Among them was 23-year-old Jim Bowie who marched with a company of 75 volunteers from Louisiana; in time they were 300 and they crossed the Louisiana border and invaded Nacogdoches (as his father had done seven year earlier). Independence from Spain was briefly declared but soon Spanish soldiers retook the town and pushed the revolutionaries back across the border.
After the defeat, Bowie returned home and immersed himself in his family’s plantations in Louisiana and Arkansas where cotton and sugar cane were harvested – even more effectively after the Bowies set up the first steam-powered sugar mill in Louisiana. But Bowie had other ambitions.
THERE WERE MANY SIDES to this adventurer. The duelist’s readiness for battle co-existed with a readiness to make his fortune, and without too many scruples. Back home in Louisiana during hard times, while a hurricane swept though the area impoverishing many and a financial depression seized all of western Louisiana, Bowie began smuggling slaves and selling questionable deeds of land.
The Bowie family were slave owners, who, like most Southerners, accepted slavery as a way of life. So did the U.S. government, which abolished only the African slave trade – not slavery. No longer could new slaves lawfully enter the United States. To discourage smugglers, government officials encouraged law-abiding citizens to turn in “illegal” slaves and rewarded them by paying them one half of whatever price was obtained at slave auction. (The forbidden slaves would remain slaves in the U.S.) The Bowie brothers saw an opportunity here. First, they purchased their “illegal” slaves at bargain rates from pirate Jean Laffite, who captured slave ships on the seas and then sold the booty in Galveston. Next, the Bowies surrendered the slaves to U.S. officials and then re-purchased the very same slaves at auction, at a cost cut in half by their bounty. And now they could sell the slaves legally anywhere . . . at a premium price – and at a great profit.
Using similar wiles, Bowie moved onto grant deeds. When Louisiana in 1812 became the 18th state in the union, the Louisiana government recognized as lawful all valid existing land claims from Spanish grants. Bowie obtained dubious Spanish land grants, and then, as with the slaves, sold “legal” title to Louisiana land, again at a premium price.
Though a crafty businessman, Bowie would not abide injustice . . . by his standards. At home in taverns, he was adroit at “gambling, tippling and wenching.” But twice he risked his life for strangers, once for a young man, another time for newly weds, to restore them to their savings, lost in crooked card games.
Despite his slave manipulations, he beat a slave owner caught whipping a slave, then “purchased the slave at double his value” and set him free.
And the duelist kept his legend alive: “A gleam in his eye, the clenching of his jaw, and the pursing of his thin lips, gave certain signals that Bowie was on the boil” – even to avenge the death of his dog.
Neither man nor beast was safe from his wrath. In the backwaters of the Mississippi, after his pet hound was devoured by an old bull alligator, Bowie jumped atop the monstrous reptile and survived many dives into deep water until able to slay the beast by plunging his blade into a vulnerable spot in its belly.
One had to be on his toes, at all times, to be certain which “Jim Bowie” one was dealing with. The man was a mass of contradictions.
THE GREATEST HONOR in the life of Moses Rose would be later hearing himself referred to as a “warm friend of Colonel James Bowie.” Rose knew most of the stories about the duels and of the good deeds of this unique man; he knew nothing of the shady financial ventures, as now in 1836 he stared at Bowie on his cot on the other side of the Travis Line. As Rose was peering across the Line at his friend, he caught the eye of Davy Crockett who was tending to Bowie. The renowned frontiersman warned him, “You may as well conclude to die with us, old man, for escape is impossible.”