Add a Comment

Comment by Bryan OShaughnessy on May 19, 2015 at 22:15

I hope it walks softly...

Comment by Michael Squier on May 19, 2015 at 21:51

Im thinking, "finger guilotine" wow. 

Comment by Tobias Gibson on May 19, 2015 at 21:15

Speaking of knives that defy patterns:

The Taylor Moonshiner

Sure you can call it a lock-back but...

Comment by Tobias Gibson on May 19, 2015 at 11:54

Jeff, I'm sure you are correct.  There were probably  more Spaniards sailors who deserted and chose the life of the Boucan than French sailors, simply because of Spain's conquest of the new world.  And just about every navy used some type of cutlass. 

In any case, the Boucan knife probably owes its legacy to the European Hunting Sword which dates to the 12th century.  These swords were used to dispatch animals after they were ran down and collapsed from exhaustion by a pack of hunting dogs.   (Pretty much the same way the originals Boucans hunted in the Caribbean!)

The hunting swords often featured a hand-guard and a heavy single edged spear point blade somewhere between 15-25 inches long!

And early Hunting swords bear a striking resemblance to the Gladius  which in turn was the Roman version of the Celtic Kladimos.  In short  The Bowie was nothing new.    I think Michael has a valid point.   The Bowie knife was invented by someone who attached Bowie's name to a big bladed knife that had been around for a long, long time!

I actually think the knife that we envision today as a "classic"  Bowie Knife probably came to fruition well after Jim Bowie's death.  (that is, if you think of a knife such as this as Classic Bowie

Comment by jeff on May 19, 2015 at 10:48

tobias.. i also believe the spaniards had a short sword that  resembled a large bowie also. with the cross guards and upswept clip blade.

Comment by Michael Squier on May 19, 2015 at 10:39

I think the true inventor of the Bowie was the newspaper man who called the big knife a Bowie, after that everyone wanted one, but nowbody really knew what it looked like. So really no knife was invented, just a name that covers a generic style of knife. Only much later when it was more refined to the clip point most think of as a bowie did the term realy define a knife pattern. So yea, they didnt invent it, just made a knife and used it.

Comment by Tobias Gibson on May 19, 2015 at 9:20

What drives me nuts is people think large clip pointed blades with cross guards were invented by any of these people.  The pattern predates  both men by at least a couple hundred years and probably even before that.   The knife in America that most likely influenced the the bowie knife was a the Boucan, which was nothing more than a cut down French Cutlass that was used by  French Pig Hunters in the Caribbean.  The pig hunters them selves were deserters from the French navy.  The knife was named after the Boucan, a word which meant smoke, as in smoked meat.  The men were later known as Buccaneers!  As with the Bowie knife, boucan knives really didn't follow a specific pattern.  They were just big knives that could be used to slaughter a pig or kill a man with little or no problem.

Comment by Michael Squier on May 19, 2015 at 8:46

• Max, I dont have any Bowies from 1880 either but I do have some Shefield bowies from 1890's and I still call them bowies too. Pretty sure they called them bowies when the were new too. 

Comment by Michael Squier on May 19, 2015 at 8:43

Hey guys, great conversation and info. Some how Levine and Bowie can always get it going. Ibe always called my Buck 119 a bowie knife so Im on board with the rest of you. Funny that a little Utica Sport Champ knife could start such a good thread. 

Real or npt the picture of James Black is kind of cool.

Comment by Shlomo ben Maved on May 19, 2015 at 4:41

That portrait of Bowie is pure hokum and done decades after his death;

This is the only known portrait done when Bowie was alive C.1820 and before the Sandbar fight (1827) from the Texas Historical Board.

Big problem with the Black (1800-1872) photo--that photo process wasn't invented until 1839 and Black didn't move in with Buzzard until 1842 after receiving facial wounds while recovering from a fever (1835) from William Shaw that nearly completely (and eventually) blinded him.

James Black of Washington, Arkansas, has been a problem for knife collectors from the time that Raymond Thorp wrote the pioneering study Bowie Knife, first published in 1948.  Thorp included the reminiscences of Daniel Webster Jones about Black making a knife for Jim Bowie, then going blind and eventually forgetting his own secret process for tempering steel. Fast on its heels of Bowie Knife came the book (1951), and then the movie, The Iron Mistress (1952), bringing James Black to the masses as a component of the Jim Bowie legend.  In Bowie Knife Black was the inventor of the classic cross-guarded, clipped-pointed bowie, which he made for Jim Bowie.  The Iron Mistress made this role cosmic by having Black forge the blade from a meteorite.   The problem for knife collectors rested in the lack of Black-made knives, or, even, much evidence on Black himself. 

In “The American Arms Collector,” July, 1957, Ben Palmer performed a thoughtful analysis on the Daniel Webster Jones account (1903) of the James Black story.  He pursued evidence for a silversmith in Philadelphia by the name of James Black, but concluded that the artisan listed in 1795 could not be the same person who was born, according to the Jones account, in 1800.  He asked a series of questions, such as where are the knives that Black is supposed to have made? Would he have failed to mark his work?  He concluded that Jones was not old enough to see Black work before his eyesight failed, and that Jones, a “wide eyed little boy” served as an eager audience to “the blind pauper playing the great man.  Later, tales told by a senile old man.  Of such stuff dreams are made, and all too often, History.”

https://www.historicarkansas.org/pdf/RevisitingBlackQuestion.pdf

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• …
• 27
• Next ›
• Page