Behind the Bastards - Part One: Jim Bowie: The Worst Texan

Episode Date: May 26, 2020

Robert is joined by Billy Wayne Davis to discuss Jim Bowie, the biggest piece of crap in the Old West.FOOTNOTES: What became of Jim Bowie's famous knife? Hero Tales of the American Soldier Three Roads to the Alamo The Mysterious Illness of Jim Bowie: How Did He Contribute to His Own Decline? James Bowie, Big Dealer Selling the Sandbar: Marketing the Bowie Knife No Wounds In His Back Jim Bowie Before the “Gaudy Legend” Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Podcasts. This is Robert Evans, and that was the introduction from behind the Bastards, which is a podcast, which is why I said the word podcasts today with me in the room that is a digital room and not a physical room because of the plague is Mr. Billy Wayne Davis. Hey, everybody. Hey, Billy. How are you doing? How's your quarantine going?

It's going pretty good. I'm exercising, raising two kids. Yeah. When I saw you last over Skype, you looked like normal Billy, and then suddenly this week you have a mustache and a headband. It's coming together. It's been an interesting quarantine week for you. I'm embracing it. You've got a kukri now, which is a special type of curved Nepalese blade. Very nice. Yes. I went with the Gerber to see if I liked it, and then now I'm going to go to Nepal and get one proper. Yeah, I have a Nepalese bladesmith that I can point you towards. This is a podcast about the worst people in all of history, and Billy, you and I have developed a couple of different niches for ourselves. We have a lot

of niches. One of those niches is medical scammers, and this is not a medical scammer episode, because our other niche is weirdos from the South. Today, we're going to talk about one of the South's great all-time famous weirdo bastards. Billy Wayne Davis, what do you know about Jim Bowie? I know the name. Do you know what I mean? Like growing up in the South, you're just like, you hear it. I don't know what he, there's like, I don't know exactly what he did. You've probably heard of, I'm going to guess everybody listening to this has at least heard of a Bowie knife, which is a great kind of knife, one of my favorite knives. It's basically a small sword that is a dagger, because we call it one instead of a small sword, with a specific kind

of curved end point to the top of the blade. And it's great for hunting and skinning animals, and it's also great for waving around drunkenly at a house party if you're me and 19 years old. The one thing I know about him is the giant mutton, the horrifying facial hair. He had gigantic mutton chops, and he died at the Alamo. Now, I was a Texas boy. So in Texas school, you have a special class called Texas History, and every Texas kid learns a lot about Jim Bowie, and it's all wrong because they only teach you lies about Jim Bowie in Texas school. I know who Jim Bowie is. Yes. Sorry. Yeah. Sorry. Yes, I do. I just came back, it froze, and everything came back, and then you said the Alamo, and I was like immediately like,

oh, I know who this motherfucker is. Yes. Yeah. So Jim Bowie is a giant piece of shit because this is my show, but he's also like a frontier legend. Like he's one of those, he's like Davey Crockett, or like Wild Bill Hickok, like he's one of those like Wild West legends. So this is going to be a hoot of a tail. A hoot. And yeah, let's just get into it. Hoot. So James Bowie was born on March 10th in Logan County, Kentucky in 1796, probably, because again, in Kentucky in 1796, nobody was super good at like birth certificates and the like. Sure. But that's a good guess as to when he was born. He was born three or four days ago. Yeah. Yeah, he came into the world sometime roundabout then. It was the year when we had

that big flood on the river. Yeah. That's kind of how people talked about shit like that back then. So yeah, his brother gives March 10th 1796 as James Bowie's birthday. His older brother, John, gives that as the birth date. And John is kind of the source of a lot of our information on Jim Bowie's early life. But John and every other member of the Bowie family are liars, and unreliable narrators. So it's really, we really take this all with a grain of salt. I know people like that. And they tell you they're liars too. Like, hey, now I'm gonna tell you the story, but keep in mind, I make a lot of stuff up. Yeah. Keep in mind, what with the moonshine, I can't keep much, much together about my own backstory. Yeah. The Bowie family is a bit like

that. And they have financial motives for telling a bunch of saying a bunch of fun shit about Jim Bowie. But I don't think they have much in the way of financial motives about lying about his birth date. So that's probably more or less accurate, at least as well as they could remember it. So Jim was the ninth of 10 children born to resin, which I think was just sort of. So basically, R-E-Z-I-N is how his dad's first name was spelled. And it was supposed to be reason, but they weren't great at spelling in Kentucky back in the 1700s. So they wrote it out as resin. So he was this, yeah. You know what? Not bad for modern Kentucky spelling. Now we're doing, they're doing it right. They're doing right. You get the gist of it. So yeah, he was the son of resin Bowie and

an LV Bowie. And his parents came to the United States as part of a massive Scottish migration across Appalachia and into the Old South, Old South. The Bowie family were basically the archetypal early white Americans, pioneers down to the core of their marrow. Resin had a habit of moving on to wild land in the frontier, developing it by building homes and orchards and stuff. And then when other people would come in and move in around him, he would get angry because he didn't like being around other people. He wanted to be out in the middle of nowhere. And so he'd move somewhere else and start building a homestead again until civilization or whatever caught up with him. This was kind of like how Jim Bowie's dad liked to live. He's the first house slipper. Yeah. Yeah,

that's kind of what he's doing. He's like gentrifying. Yeah, he's like, he's basically gentrifying like the woods. But then he hates it. And he's got to like, yeah, you could call them early hipsters, but instead of like, you know, enjoying artists lofts and artisanal coffee houses, he liked fighting bears with machetes. Every time I civilize a place, these people show up. That's kind of Resin's attitude. So the point I'm making is he wasn't just going about this to like make a home and a living for himself and his family. Like he needed to be at the bleeding edge of the frontier. And so Jim Bowie's early life as a child consisted of many moves. You know, they'd spend a couple of years somewhere and then his father would grow frustrated by the fact that

there were human beings within a half mile of them. And so they'd move somewhere else. I like his dad. I realized he's like, ah, he's people. There's a level of, even though all these people are spoilers, slave owners and colonizers and monsters, there's a level of respect you have to have to anyone who is like, there's people within a mile of me, I'm going to go move out to the middle of nowhere with a hatchet and build another home. Like they're tough. Yeah, I just keep thinking like I'm not as stubborn as I thought. There's a tick tock, right? That's like where the wife comes in and is like, honey, we have to move. The neighbor said hi. And that's these people. Yeah. Yeah, that's Resin Bowie.

Modern times, friends. Billy, what were you saying? I'm going to call you Bowie a couple of times. I'm certain. That's okay. I like it. I don't remember. Oh, good. Fantastic. Well, yeah. So now the Bowie family, when Jim was young, tended to live all the spots they would pick were along the Mississippi River, and they basically moved down the Mississippi as like people filled up the area above them. And moving day for the Bowie family meant they would build by hand a flat bottom boat, toss all of their shit onto it, and then sail down the Mississippi to find a new place to live. So that's what, that's what like the U-Haul of the day is. Yeah, you just wake up and you're like, oh, shit, dad's build a boat. Dad's make it a boat. God damn it.

Yeah. Now, little Jim Bowie's first memories probably would have been in the Twapiti township in what is now Missouri, and what was then still under French control and part of their New Madrid district. Now the name Twapiti came from the original inhabitants of the land, the Apple Creek Band of the Shawnee tribe. They'd been forced out by white men via unspeakable violence and disease. And young Jim would go on to spend much of his childhood playing in camps that they'd abandoned all throughout the forests and swamps around Twapiti township. Now his earliest memories from age four to six would have been pretty relaxed. Bowie family children weren't expected to work much at that age, and Jim would have spent much of his time

relatively unsupervised in the middle of the woods. The Bowie men were in general, given to spending a lot of time alone in the middle of nowhere. Jim's formal education would have been basically non-existent. His mother, Elvie, taught her children the alphabet, but that was about all she knew, so that was about all they learned. After two years in Twapiti, it got too developed for resin and the family moved. Now during this time, much of the southeast was still run and owned by France, and the French government saw Americans as an ally in their endless bloody war against English people. Which is the only war that really matters in my opinion. Now they were happy to allow Americans to settle in the Louisiana Territory, and they offered generous terms on land grants

for them to do so. The Bowie family kept moving south, and by 1812 they'd staked out a claim on Bayou Vermillion in the Atacapus Parish just south of Opalusus. They got into the timber cutting business, and by now Jim was coming up into a young adult, so he was able to help the family business, as did all of his many brothers. The Bowie boys were close, and for most of his life, Jim Bowie's primary business partners would be his kin. He was raised with a love of exploration and constant motion, as well as an abiding appreciation for owning enslaved human beings. His grandfather had owned people, as had his father. The Bowies weren't rich, but they did not and did not have large fields full of enslaved people, but they kept small families of field hands

enslaved to help them with their work. I'm going to read a quote now from the book Three Roads to the Alamo that describes how slavery was practiced within the Bowie family. It's going to sound like it's making a different point than it is at first, but just listen to the whole quote. Typically for land owned by small farmer slaveholders, Bowie plantations enjoyed benign, even familial relations between blacks and whites. They certainly were for Uncle Riza, who never married but who fathered a son named James by a slave mistress around sometime around 1790 and thereafter openly acknowledged him, gave him his freedom and the family name, and brought him to Louisiana with the rest of the clan. The black James Bowie remained in

Cata Hula while the rest moved south. For years to come, he steadily did land and loan business with both John, senior and junior, even buying and selling slaves himself and achieved some minor position in the community near Sicily Island. Wherever Bowie blood flowed, clan loyalty followed. In later years, the family were remembered as well, stories of Reson's young ... stories of Reson's young James's closeness to an old slave woman named Mandy of the little kindnesses he did for her and of the advice she passed on to the boy. There was never any question that the Bowie slaves were property though, and with the exception of a few favorites like old Mandy, they were usually sold with the land whenever a Bowie moved on. So you've got a really

complicated relationship with slaves here to the point where some of the Bowie men have children with their slaves and those children are seen as Bowies and are generally live lives as freed people. And you have like certain older slaves that are beloved and consider almost a part of the family, but also almost includes a lot of wiggle room. And as much as the Bowies pretended to have familiar relations with their slaves, they sold them whenever they would move because these people were in the end property to them. And this is kind of like, this is a pretty normal sort of master slave relationship to exist in the era at the time with among people who are moving a lot. Like we mainly talk about sort of the old plantation system, but that hadn't really

gotten going in a big way at this point. And yeah, that's kind of how the Bowie family dealt with slavery. It's, it's, yeah, I don't know. It's weird. It sucks that. Yeah, it was bad. It's just, it's very clear they viewed them as livestock. They've used that. It's more messed up than even just that though, because, you know, the Bowies were a close knit family. You had a lot of different uncles and brothers all living together with their families. And when one of them would make another human being with a slave, that that person was considered to be a Bowie and a member of the family. But that person's black cousins and, and, and, you know, half brothers and stuff would be sold off as property. So it's this, it's really kind of weird to wrap your head around.

I don't even know. I can't even really get into the head of the people who would comfortably do that, who could like recognize that like, well, this one's got my blood. So he's family and we're going to treat him like family. But these other people who have, are related to him, but not to me, I'm just going to sell like a dishwasher. Yeah. It's really strange. It is like a weird slip of the coin in their head where they've made, this is the line for us. It's bizarre. It is bizarre. Yeah. It's hard for me to get my head around in any way. And I should note here that because I, my longtime coworker is, is soren Bowie, I'm going to regularly pronounce the Bowie name in a number of different ways. And it's going to frustrate people and they can just, they can just deal with

it. Yeah, deal with it, people. Yeah, it's just going to happen. Sorry. He's a human man. Yeah. So the Bowie family patriarch had to kill other human beings at least once while the Bowie boys were children. When the family moved to Louisiana, they found squatters on their land, a disagreement ensued, and resin killed one of the squatters. Yeah. He was, yeah. Yeah. And this was not uncommon because like land ownership was kind of a murky idea back then. Yeah. Yeah. So it was the idea of squatting too, where you're just like, I'll see you in court and you're not, you're not going to see me in court. Yeah, you're not going to see me in court. I'm just going to shoot you. You're just going to die right now. Yeah. Yeah. So resin killed one of these squatters

and like it went to trial and he got jailed in the wake of the fight while they were waiting for a trial. And his wife actually got a bunch of guns together and one of her slaves and busted him out of jail. So this would have been a pretty early memory of Jim's Bowie is his like mom and one of their slaves busting their dad out of jail for murdering a guy. Yeah. So that's cool. Well, that's that's that that puts an imprint on your foundation as a person, I think. Yeah, that the law is something that you can manipulate via having enough guns. I think would have been. Yeah. Yeah. So Jim's older brother also named resin left home to go have dangerous adventures when he was about 19. And this was desperately hard for young Jim because

he was very close to his brother. A few years later, when the war of 1812 came to Louisiana, Jim was finally old enough to follow resin when he enlisted. James, another one of the Bowie brothers, described resin junior as a perfect rowdy. And Jim, his self was noted to be even wilder and even less thoughtful than his older brother. They were both very excited for their chance to go off and kill English people. Tragically, they arrived too late. The war ended without them having to fire a shot. The Bowie brothers were still in the militia, though, and they remained in it for a couple of months after the battle, taking on boring patrol duties and spending their off duty time in the city of New Orleans. Eventually. In case we get to shoot

somebody, we'll hang out for a couple of moments. Just in case. Yeah. Yeah. That's basically what happens. But they don't get a chance to shoot anybody and they muster out with about $21 each for their troubles. So yeah, that's that's kind of Jim's a man now. Like he doesn't get his chance to murder anybody, but he's got $21 in his pocket. He's like 17 years old. That's as much of an adulthood as you get at that period in time. This is high school graduation. And in New Orleans, that's a good place to be 17 with the pocket full of money. That is that is a good place to be then and now. Well, no, not now because of the coronavirus. But then then for sure. Yeah. So Jim was frustrated at the fact that his war experience hadn't ended with him getting to shoot

anybody. But he also, you know, he was exciting still. You know, he got to do some patrols and stuff as part of the militia. He got to get wasted in New Orleans. And his taste of being out in the world made it impossible for him to return home. So he took to the same basic tactic as the men his father had murdered a couple of years back and started squatting on a patch of land above Bayou Booth in Opalosus. James Bowie, Jim's older brother. And I'm sorry, the Bowie names are all very complicated because there's multiple James's and multiple resins and Johns. It's very frustrated. We forgot what we named the other one and we named him the same one. The feeling you get from the Bowie brothers names is that they were expecting the parents were

expecting most of them to die and then they didn't because the Bowie's tended to be pretty tough. And so you wind up with a bunch of kids who have the same fucking name. I don't know. Name James again. I don't give a shit. Yeah, we didn't expect as many of them would make it to 18 as did. I gotta make a boat. There's people over here. Yeah. So James Bowie, another one of Jim's, another one of Jim Bowie's older brothers would later describe 18-year-old Jim Bowie this way. Quote. He was, oh, sorry, John Bowie. I was like, I was like, Jesus, I'm sorry, the Bowie names are so fucking complicated. How many siblings does he have? Do they all have weirded? He has 10. He has 10 brothers. Are they all Jim, John, Joe? Jim, John. There's a couple.

There's a resin in there. Yeah, resin junior. It's very frustrating. But Jim Bowie's older brother would later describe Jim at 18 this way. Quote. He was young, proud, poor and ambitious without any rich family connections or influential friends to aid him in the battle of life. After reaching the age of maturity, he was a stout, rather raw-boned man of six feet height, weighed 180 pounds and about as well-made as any man I ever saw. His hair was light-colored, not quite red. His eyes were gray, rather deep set in his head, very keen and penetrating in their glance. His complexion was fair, his cheekbones rather high. Taken together, he was a manly, fine-looking person. And by many of the fair ones, he was called handsome. The fair ones are women.

He was possessive of a fucking friend. Band and brother a little bit. Yeah, and his brother a little bit. Yeah, you know, you get the idea that maybe some Bowie brothers got up to some some things. They were in French country. It wasn't weird. Good-looking brother I got right there. Yeah, I got some sexy brothers and I know from sexy brothers. He was possessive of an open frank disposition with a rather good temper unless aroused by some insult when the displays of his anger were terrible and frequently terminated in some tragical scene. So he was a friendly guy unless he got angry in which case he got really violent. That's it. He had a pretty fair temper unless he made it mad. That's what he just said. Yeah, that's literally what he's saying. Oh,

I forgot you just learned the alphabet. I forgot about it. Yeah, that's your only education. He was never known to abuse a conquered enemy or to impose upon the weak and defenseless. A man of very strong social feelings. He loved his friends with all the ardor of youth and hated his enemies and their friends with all the rank or of the Indian. He was social and plain with all men fond of music and the amusements of the day. It would take a glass and a merry mood to drive dull care away but seldom allowed it to steal away his brains or transform him into a beast. This is what his brother claims and a lot of its lies because he was a famous drunk. But yeah, that's how his older brother described him at 18.

Now by any accounts, Jim Bowie was a pretty good frontiersman. He squatted on land, chopped and sold cypress wood which he saw down in the planks and then floated down by the river into town. He also hunted a great deal and his brother John wrote that he developed a particularly painful way of hunting bears. Quote, in the summer season when the bears were constantly ravaging little patches of green corn of the early settlers, he adopted the following novel plan to entrap them. After finding a place where they usually enter the field, he would find like a stump, a tree stump that was kind of hollow on the inside and he'd fit the inside of the stump with spikes that were facing inward and then he'd pour honey into the stump and so the bear would

stick its snout in the stump to get honey and then as it pulled its head out the spikes would gouge into its face and so its head would be trapped inside the log like with iron spikes gouged into its mouth and then while the bear was like in horrible agony trying to free itself and blinded because its head stuck in a stump he would just shoot it in the head. I mean I feel like he went a step barbaric for that but you know it was different times I guess. So yeah that's the kind of hunter Jim is. He's a cunning man and good at surviving but also clearly not against horrific cruelty even like I mean even among sort of the ways you hear about people trapping that's pretty rough. Yeah so he was very successful at living on the frontier and he made enough money

that after two years living this way he'd saved up 300 dollars to use as a down payment on the land he'd been squatting on and he had enough left over from that nest egg after he bought the land to buy some human beings a family of four that he purchased on credit from his father. Over the next couple of years Jim Bowie used their unpaid labor and very questionable credit math to work out a series of loans and deferred payments for three more parcels of land. Now these were days in which no one had much hard currency and most deals relied heavily on the amount of personal trust the loanee was able to gain from whoever issued the loan. It like it wasn't like today where you actually had to have the money one way or the other you know if you got like a bank to front it to you

like a lot of loans were based on like you're a trustworthy guy. And Jim Bowie was good initially at least at convincing people that he was worth taking a risk on. Before long using only his own elbow greased and the uncompensated labor of four enslaved people Jim was able to turn these four plots of land into a productive and valuable piece of property. He would eventually sell it for significantly more than he paid for it. What Jim succeeded with was essentially the goal of the smartest pioneers. They were land speculators looking to turn labor into real estate value and eventually get to the point where they could profit from investments without spending three years clearing timber. In the time when he wasn't working Jim Bowie was sociable. As three roads

to the Alamo notes society was important to James Bowie. He loved company and his open frank manner and even temper attracted others to him. He was also ambitious and he knew and he knew it to be in his interest to cultivate friendships with what John Bowie called the better class of people. And there on rare occasion when there were too many glasses and the merriment turned to harsh words his other side might emerge. He would not abide an insult. When enraged James Bowie became entirely single-minded in his determination to vent his anger on a foe. What observers took for fearlessness was as much an entire forgetfulness of his own safety in the grips of his fury. He soon acquired a reputation as a man to both respect and fear. That's an elegant way to put

that like once he got drunk and you kissed him off he would fight you till he couldn't fight you anymore. Yeah it's this thing where like and this is like this constant state of realization as you like go over the stories of like frontier legends and wild west heroes and stuff that like oh if these people were around in 2020 you would call them violent drunks who commit murder when they get wasted. Like and there there's like he was a good friend and a dangerous enemy which just means that like when he got drunk and he thought you had muttered something about him he would just start shooting. Yeah and that person a good friend and a dangerous enemy that shouldn't be the same person. Yeah yeah. He shouldn't be your good friend and then in the same day also be your worst enemy.

That's not that's not a good dude. Yeah he got pissed easily especially when drinking which is it was more of a romantic thing back then than I think we tend to consider it. It's just it's fun. Yeah we didn't have terms like violent alcoholic back then instead you were you were just known as being rambunctious and a man to respect and fear like that's what you called a guy who was really good with a gun and got drunk and angry too often. There's that guy that's gonna kill us he's so funny. He's so funny I really respect his ability to murder people when he's wasted. I like that we don't know what he's gonna do ever that's my favorite part about him. I like how unpredictable he is with that six gun he always carries. Yeah yeah and also how

talented he is at using it that part mixed in with the unpredictable is awesome. Yeah it's so good. Robert you know what else is so good. I was gonna say you know what also is unpredictable with a handgun. Sure let's go with that. The sponsors of this podcast you can never predict what they'll do with their guns that's how we vet all of our sponsors is their unpredictability with a firearm. Just throw one at them see what happens. See what happens. You can never predict it. Here's a product. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you hey let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show

we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records we've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say for one my personal history is raw inspiring and mind-blowing and for another do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads. From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know

is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space and when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories but there was this one that really stuck with me about a soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the soviet union is falling apart and now he's left defending the union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the

forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are back and we're talking

about Jim Bowie. So back during his brief time in the militia, Jim had been in near contact with a guy named Dr. James Long, a surgeon who'd served in the Battle of New Orleans and was pretty well known by the excitable and heavily armed men of Louisiana. In the summer of 1819 Long began making plans to invade Texas. Now, then as in today, Texas was a violent and lawless wasteland. Mexico was ostensibly in charge, but they weren't great at being in charge. And the United States had only recently yielded her claim over Texas in the Adams-Ones Treaty. A lot of people were being honest. Mexico is still in charge of large swaths of Texas. Yeah, but they're not there. Again, they're still not good at it. No one's really ever been good at being in charge of Texas,

which is part of it. So a lot of Texas is charm and a lot of what makes Texas such a bad place to be. Oh, so you think one person's going to tell all these dickheads what to do? Okay. No, no, no, they don't even listen to each other. They're not going to listen to you. Yeah. Oh, everyone voted? Okay. Okay. Yeah, it's just like people talk about Austin being the capital of Texas. The capital of Texas has always been whatever the most men with guns in a given part of Texas want the law to be. That's just how it works. Yeah. So, yeah, a lot of Southern white dudes weren't happy that the U.S. had kind of backed off on attempting to take over Texas. And mainly this was because they wanted to take over a bunch of Texas for themselves because other parts of the Southeast

were kind of filling up. So this Dr. James Long started putting together a crude militia of what you would either call freedom fighters or violent extremists, depending on their complexion and your complexion and how you feel about complexions in general. And there were about 75 of these guys. And their plan was to launch an expedition through the territory and claim it for the United States. They marched through Louisiana on their way over and Jim Bowie could not resist the urge to get into a series of gunfights and maybe also get rich. So he signed up along the way. Wait, wait, we're going where? Sure. Sure, I'm going. You need a violent guy? I'm a violent guy. I'm really bummed that I didn't get into more gunfights when the war happened. I would love

a chance to do that again. I never shot over that one before. Yeah. Yeah. So by the time Long reached Nacogdoches, one of the three or four towns in Texas that every Texan elementary student learns how to spell, it was late June. And Long and his men declared a new government and started proclaiming laws. Now as a general rule, when white folks with guns in the middle of nowhere started announcing laws in this period of time, one of two things would happen. One would be a violent shit show and two would be the United States of America. Unfortunately, that had already happened. And so this turned into a violent shit show. Yeah. So Long knew that his 300 men or so wouldn't be much of a match for the entire Mexican army. So he attempted to draw more filibusters

down by offering them land at a dollar an acre, which was a pretty good price. And so for a couple of months, he succeeded in drawing in a few hundred guys who wanted very cheap land. And Jim Bowie was immediately one of the most popular of these filibusters, mainly because he was really good at getting into gunfights, which happened pretty regularly during this period of time. And the various fights that Jim got into around now would have been his first taste of mortal combat. But it was pretty obvious that Long was outmanned and outclassed by the Spanish authorities. And by October of 1819, they'd driven him and his men out of Nacogdoches. Within a month or so, the expedition was a shambles and Jim Bowie fled back to Louisiana because he didn't really want

to get his ass kicked. So we got into a couple of gunfights. He gets to have an adventure, but it doesn't really work out in the long run. I got fled out of Nagabesha this one time. Yeah, it's a right of passage for every Texas Texan. So Jim Bowie was a trailblazer in that. Got hammered and they're like, you need to leave down. I was like, that makes sense. Now, this would not be the last time that James Bowie would try and fail to conquer Texas. And thankfully, there were no consequences at this point for invading another nation's sovereign territory and trying to take over a part of it. Like he and the other filibusters kind of went back to Louisiana and everything was fine. Like that. I mean, it's kind of like

the Bundys. Yeah. Yeah, it is a little bit like that. Yeah. With more gunfire than with the Bundys. So or Jim would return home and kind of got together with his brothers, John and resin. And they all kind of agreed that they were ready to make a whole big fucking pile of money. And in those days, as now, the best way to make a whole big fucking pile of money was to sell illegal and desirable products. Now, today, that means cocaine. In the early 1800s, it meant enslaved human beings. Slavery was obviously a big business and a big part of the economy of the South. But by 1819, most American slaves had been born in or around the United States because the federal government had banned Americans from buying African slaves

about a decade earlier in 1808. Now, some of this had been due to moral pressure to end the Atlantic slave trade. But it only happened because America's political leaders assumed that existing slaves would breed enough to, you know, settle demand. But the massive growth of the plantation system in the South in this period surprised people. And before long, the demand for slaves in the old South far outstripped the supply. This was obvious. Jesus Christ. What? That surprises you? No, but just to hear it. Yeah, I mean, there's no way it's weird because like these are these are human beings. And we should always talk about this as the crime that it was. But also, I think if you talk about it,

I think it actually, it actually gets across how horrible it was when we do use terms like supply and demand and product, because that's how these people viewed them. Jim Bowie was looking at like the fact that, oh, you know, slaves aren't having enough babies to meet for the demand. So someone needs to bring in more people to enslave. He was looking at it the same way that like today we're like, oh, there's not enough toilet paper. We need to manufacture more toilet paper. That's how they thought about human beings who were enslaved at this point in time. And that's important. Or he thought about it like, hey, there's not enough prisoners in my prison for the stockholders to make money. Yeah, yeah, he would have owned a private prison or at least invested in one if

he'd lived in the modern day. But he didn't. And so he got up to what I can only call like a slave trading con. Wow. Yeah, this is a complicated business. So I have to explain some peculiarities of Louisiana law first. So slave smuggling was a big business. And because the state was fundamentally racist, it had no desire to like, the state didn't want people smuggling slaves, right? It had to it had to try to stop that had to arrest slave smugglers and it had to confiscate the smuggled slaves. But those smuggled slaves were still property. So when illicit slave traders were caught bringing African slaves illegally into the United States, those slaves were not freed and they sure as shit weren't returned home. Instead, they were auctioned off by the government for

profit. This meant captured smuggled slaves were super profitable for the government because if they captured a bunch of slaves, you just made a shitload of money as the government. So the government had a real interest in actually people telling them where contraband enslaved human beings were. So they would pay a bounty on people who could turn in contra like, who could point out like, Hey, there's a bunch of contraband slaves here. Such helpful citizens received a percentage of the sale price of the slaves as a reward. Are you seeing how this could be the system could be gamed yet? I yeah. Yeah. So all this brings me to the story of Jean Lafitte, a French pirate who spent half of his year robbing and raping and stealing whole ships full of booty on the

Spanish main and half of his year hanging out an fortified compound called Snake Island near Galveston, which is objectively cool. It is cool to be a pirate with yeah. There's like a couple things that he shouldn't have done, but everything else sounds awesome. Yeah. Snake pirate with living on Snake Island. That's cool as hell. Like, I mean, it's awful that he's trading and enslaved human beings, but Snake Island, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, he would sell stolen goods from his base in Snake Island. And throughout 1818, 1819, Lafitte and his pirates were particularly successful in stealing ship loaves of enslaved people bound for South America. And Lafitte's barracks on Snake Island soon held more than 600 of these people. Now,

can I just make a terrible just like one of these other pirates like scratching his head on the island? Like this place used to be a lot more fun. It sounds like all he cares about is money now. This is not what I had in mind when I signed up. It used to just be about the pillaging. Yes, exactly. So around this same time, Jim Bowie had developed a bit of a reputation in this area as a rough customer and an exciting guy. He was a land speculator, but he also made cash as a roper and a tamer of wild horses and as an alligator rider, which what? But do you understand that everyone around this time was a rough character? So for everyone else to be like, that guy's fucking, he's crazy. The average person in like the southeast, southwest in this period

of time who could make it to 20 would have just wiped the floor with any given MMA fighter today, largely because they would have immediately pulled a knife. Yeah. I thought we was fighting. This is a fight. I just stabbed him. That's how we fight. He did. He didn't stab me back. I don't understand it. He's dumb. That guy was dumb. He kept trying to punch me. So Jim Bowie was like really popular among like the whole area around Snake Island because he was just this tough dude who would ride alligators and shit, who tried to invade Texas. He was seeing as kind of a cool guy. So James, you know, his popularity eventually brings him into a conversation with Jean Lafitte

and the two became instant friends because they were both dangerous sociopaths and eventually the pirate let Jim in on a little secret. He had a shitload of slaves, but a lot of them were sick and so he just couldn't sell them and he wasn't allowed to legally sell any of them in the United States because they were all from Africa. Now, at this point in time, a healthy slave went for about a dollar a pound, which is how Jean Lafitte sold human beings. But again, the sick ones were unsellable. So Bowie came to visit Lafitte on Snake Island and took a look at his inventory and he returned from the trip, got together with his brothers and together they launched a plan. So Jean Bowie, who was part of this plan, would later write, quote,

we first purchased 40 Negroes from Lafitte at the rate of $1 per pound or an average of $140 for each Negro. We bought them into the limits of the United States, delivered them to a custom house officer and became the informers ourselves. The law gave the informer half the value of the Negroes, which were put up and sold by the United States Marshal and we became the purchasers of the Negroes, took half as our reward for informing and obtained the Marshal's sale for 40 Negroes, which entitled us to sell them within the United States. We continued to follow this business until we made $65,000. So you see what the scam is here, Billy. They're buying slaves that are illegal to bring into the United States from their pirate friend Jean Lafitte and then they

turned the slaves in to the government and say, we caught these illegal slaves being smuggled in and the reward the government gave them was half the value of the slaves and then the government would auction off the slaves and they would buy the slaves at auction and basically get subsidized for the price of the slaves because they'd get, you know, half of the value of them as a reward and then once they bought the slaves at auction, they would be legal slaves in the United States and they could go on and sell them to other people and it also worked because Lafitte, a lot of his slaves were elderly and old and sick and so nobody was going to buy them from the pirate but they would buy the slaves, turn them into the United States and get half of the value

because they were valued by weight. They'd still get money for these slaves that were actually valueless slaves and then the government would just be stuck with them. So like, yeah, this was like the slavery con that Jim Bowie made his fortune in. Wow. Yeah. It's like Robin drug dealers but worse because there's not, because you're still a terrible person. Yeah, it's, I don't even really have a word for it but like slavery is one of the worst things a human being can do but in this time it was legal and so they found a way to take this horrible legal thing and also break the law while doing it. Yeah, we're doing slavery but shady. Yeah. What is that? How did you do that? Yeah. It's a gift. It's a gift. Now, Billy, you know who won't illegally

commit tax fraud by sneakily importing slaves in and then turning them into the customs officers in order to take advantage in a loophole in the law? You know who won't do that, Billy? I don't want to guess. The products and services that support this podcast. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic

historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was

this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system

today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we're back. So the bully boys spent months engaging in this business of buying slaves from a pirate, taking them into the United States, smuggling them in and then

turning them into the government. And true to form, Jim Bowie had the most personally violent task of the whole enterprise. And I'm going to quote now from William C. Davis's book, Three Roads to the Alamo, quote, James himself did the most dangerous work of conveying the contraband through the swamps and bayous, bringing them in lots of 40 at a time. As many as one or two men could handle. Although the blacks were chained, Bowie found little need for fetters. The frightened Africans knew nothing of the country and had nowhere to go. While they were told enough of alligators, snakes, and hostile natives to know that safety, if not happiness, lay with the Bowies. On one trip, a few slaves may have escaped, not to be found again. But for

the rest, James Bowie felt secure that they would not run. He even told the feat on one of his visits to Campichi that he rarely lost a slave because he was armed and he knew they feared him. Instilling fear in others was something James Bowie did with ease. It sounds like not with ease, like with pride. With pride, yeah. Yeah, he's like, no, I have this gift that I'll kill you. Yeah, I'm really good at scaring chained up people with a gun as I lead them through unfamiliar territory. Because they look at me and without question, they know that I will murder them. Yeah, I don't give a shit. It means nothing to me. It's like blinking. Yeah. Yeah, it's, and people, people tell me it's a gift, but it's just who I am.

Now, James was very much taken with the slave smuggling business. He saw it as an easy way to make outsized profits while committing what he considered to be a victimless crime. The state made money, the pirate made money, and he made money. No one got harmed. No one, not a person, not one human being got harmed. Yeah. Yeah. Now, one thing Jim Bowie was capable of doing was nursing a deep and abiding love for knives. Obviously, Bowie is most famous for the enormous blade that bears his name, which we'll be talking about in detail here. The GM knife. The GM knife. Yep, the old gym knife. Yep. You know the old saying, you got a gym on your hip, never go hiking without a gym. Yeah. So, and I have to confess

here that my Bowie knives are my favorite kind of knife. I love, there's nothing like having like a fucking pound and a half knife on your hip and just really fucking up a piece of wood or a severed skull of a cow, whatever you got to fuck up with a knife when you're hiking around in the middle of nowhere, a Bowie knife can do it. And, and I feel it's a shame that these solid knives have gotten tarnished by the name of this slave owning monster. And this is the story of why, because he did not invent the knife. Yeah, but I feel like he probably did it justice. He did. He did. And we're going to talk about why his knife got famous here. So, the knife was initially, the knife that he got famous for was initially a gift from his brother.

Probably. You'll hear a couple of different stories about how he got his, the first Bowie knife from a couple of different people. And it's not really important to get into each of the different stories in detail. But the, the, the details we can synthesize that they kind of all have in common boil down to Jim Bowie received a really fucking big knife either as a gift or as a purchased he like commissioned himself from a blacksmith. And it was made by a local Louisiana blacksmith to be significantly larger and heavier than most hunting knives of the era were. So, he just gets an unusually large knife either his brother has it made for him or he pays a guy to make it. But he winds up with this huge fuck off knife. Now, it's a hobbit sword. I got a hobbit

sword. It is a hobbit sword. Yeah. And his brother, John would later claim that he bought the knife for Jim and, and John had significant financial motivation to making this claim because the Bowie family got rich off of the fact that their name was attached to a famous kind of knife. And John also had a vested interest in making it seem as if his brother was like a knife wielding prodigy, like an artist with a blade. And the reality is very different from that. Now, Jay Frank Dobie, a historian who studied Bowie and produced a pretty fair biography of him in 1957 noted, Big Jim Bowie in conveying smuggled slaves armed himself with three or four knives so that he could transfix any captive who tried to break away jerking a knife out was easier than reloading

a horse pistol at the muzzle. Both Jim and resin could keep several knives moving in the air at the same time without allowing one to touch the ground at 20 paces either could send a knife clean through a small wooden target. So that's probably untrue, but these are the kind of stories people started to tell about Jim Bowie that he was like, yeah, like a master of the blade. And the reason that he got this reputation for being an artist with a knife is because of something that happened in 1827, the infamous sandbar fight. So it's amazing to me because a lot of people get stabbed to death in fights even today. And nobody cares about those fights. And they're kind of written down as like the result of thugs and criminals, just having access to knives. But

when a bunch of white dudes stab each other to death, this is what happens. Yeah, on a sandbar. Yeah, on a sandbar. So it's good to know that people have always been doing nonsense on sandbars in the Gulf of Mexico. Yeah. Yeah. And this sandbar, we'll talk about the sandbar. So Jim spent most of the 1820s engaging in a series of land cons in Arkansas. And basically, he had committed dozens of acts of fraud and basically sold people land. And to this day in Arkansas, business. Business. Yeah. He would sell people land that he didn't have any right to and then take their money and fuck off. This is not too mad. He did that for decades. Like as a general rule, if you're wondering what Jim Bowie was doing during a period of his life where we don't have a lot

of detail, he was scamming people into buying land he didn't own. So he did this a bunch in Arkansas and it pissed off a lot of people. And he also like the only way he was able to get away with it is that he relied heavily on banks to lend him the credit to do land speculation. And at one point in the late 1820s, he was infuriated to find that the sheriff of a nearby parish had basically put in a bad word against him and stopped the bank from giving him a loan that he needed to continue his cons. So he got into an argument with the person who'd put with that sheriff and they got into a fight on the street. And the sheriff, a guy named Norris Wright, shot at Jim Bowie and only failed to kill him because the bullet hit a silver dollar in Bowie's

pocket. Jim fired back, but his pistol misfired. And so he charged Norris Wright to try to beat him to death with his bare hands. But his friends intervened and stopped the whole thing from ending in murder. And that really pissed Jim off. And he promised after that point that he would never be caught without an enormous knife on his body so that if that happened again and his gun misfired, he could just stab a guy to death and maybe stab his friends to death for trying to stop him from stabbing a guy to death. No, for sure stab his friends because those aren't his friends anymore. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it did not take long for Jim Bowie to find an occasion to use his giant fuck off knife to stab a man. So the sandbar fight is really romanticized in Texas

history, although it didn't happen in Texas, but it involves Jim Bowie. And so we all learned about it. And the short of it is that Bowie wound up on one side of a formal duel, which was held on a sandbar between Louisiana and Mississippi. Dueling was actually illegal in both states. And because the sandbar wasn't really in either state, it was a popular place for men to get together with their friends and try to murder other men. And they later use that same loophole for gambling. Yes. Yeah, it's the same basic idea. Now, one of the fun things about the sandbar duel is that no one really has a good explanation as to why it started. There were two different camps. One camp was focused around two brothers named Wells and their friends, including Jim Bowie. And the other on the

other side was a guy named Robert Crane, a doctor named Thomas Maddox and Bowie's old enemy Norris Wright. Now, all of these people had beef with each other for a bunch of reasons ranging from business disputes to allegations of voter fraud. And mainly they just didn't like each other. William C. Davis writes that, quote, chances were that by late summer of 1827, none of them knew the true origins of their feud. So it's just a bunch of men who hate each other and they agree to meet up at the sandbar will. It's okay to try to murder each other to try to murder each other. So they meet up there in the summer of 1827 against any of this at this point. It sounds like everyone's willing to meet at the sandbar. So you bet. Well, I'm gonna be on the

bank and I'm gonna watch. This is the only victimless crime that we've run into so far. Two gives a shit. And these are all probably monsters. Like these are all slave owners, all pieces. I don't care. Yeah. So all these guys meet up at the sandbar and they exchange insults and they waived guns at each other in the nearby city of Alexandria first. And like, so they all meet in the city near the sandbar first and they like wave guns and yell at each other. And it's kind of like a pro wrestling thing, right? Like they all, they all get everyone around them fired up. And so the citizens in Alexandria like realize, oh, there's a feud going to be happening. And so like when these guys meet up at the sandbar. Yeah, that's exactly what this is. This is a fucking WWE match.

And so when they meet up at the sandbar, like hundreds of people surround the sandbar to watch this like fight start, it was very, very silly is kind of the end summary of what happens. So eventually on July 26th, like the two kind of ringleaders of both groups, Norris Wright and a guy named Hall, agree to have a gunfight on the sandbar and 200 people show up to observe the fight. But yeah, they did. Yeah. Yeah, I would. I would. But Norris Wright doesn't show up for the fight. Instead, he gathers a heavily armed posse and shows up near the site of the duel and like sends a representative in to say like, not ready to fight yet, but we're gonna have a big fight in September. That's when we're going to do it. September. It's like a fucking,

I can't get over how much like the fucking WWE this is. Yeah, so everybody kind of waits until the fall and then we all come back in the fall. Yeah. So the aggrieved parties all gather back at the sandbar on September 19th, 1827 to try to murder each other for reasons, which again, are completely unclear. It was very. We don't have football yet. So this is what we're going to do. Boredom seems to be the main driver in all this. Now, officially, the duel was between Wells and Maddox this time. And everyone else was seconds, including Jim Bowie. But there was so much hatred between all the different men on both sides that the organizers of the duel started to worry it might turn into a gigantic bloody fight. And to avoid that,

they limited each side to bringing three men on to the sandbar. So Wells and Maddox face off at 10 paces. And because Wells was nearly blind, they had to be extra close, but it didn't matter if they were extra close. They're both terrible shots and they both miss at fucking 10 feet away. And so the duel ends and nobody's hurt and both men shake hands and Wells and Maddox are actually like fine with this. They're like, now we can be friends again. We tried to shoot each other. Nobody died. This is great. And so kind of like at the end of when a fucking children's baseball team finishes a game, like both sides convene together to shake hands. And this is where things go awry because the other friends who hadn't shot at each other are

still really pissed and they start insulting each other and an argument sparks up. And we don't know exactly what happens. There's different stories. One of them is that one of the doctor, Dr. Maddox pulls out his gun and tries to shoot another guy and accidentally shoots Jim Bowie in the leg. Three roads. The Alamo claims that the fight started when Jim Bowie and another man named Crane both drew their guns and everyone else tried to calm them down. And then Crane shot at Bowie and missed him. And then Bowie fired back and missed Crane. And then Crane drew his second pistol and fired again and missed again, but hit one of Bowie's friends in the leg and severed an artery. And then Crane realized he'd fucked up and he ran like hell away.

And so Jim Bowie drew his second pistol and fired while Crane was running and he missed again because none of these guys are good at... I can't overemphasize how bad guns are in this period of time. Like these men are all firing multiple shots from 10 foot distance and they can't fucking hit. That's what I was gonna say. I don't think it's like a marksman problem. It's a manufacturing issue. No, they're metal tubes with explosives and a ball in them. Like guns are so shitty at this point in time. And yeah, none of these people can hit for shit. So Bowie misses with his second shot and at this point he makes the wise decision to stop relying on his guns and go with an idiot-proofed killing tool, the gigantic fuck-off knife that

he had strapped to his hip. So roaring like a madman, he draws the knife and he like charges into the crowd of his adversaries because the guy who shot him like ran back to his friends. And Bowie just rushes towards them wielding what is essentially a small sword. The survivors describe him as seeming like a tiger as he shouted out, Crane, you have shot at me and I will kill you if I can. So... Still pretty proper. Pretty proper. So Crane panics and he doesn't have a loaded gun but he has an empty gun and it weighs like 10 pounds because guns are big back then. So he throws it at Bowie as Bowie's charging and he hits him in the head and like seriously injures him because it's again a heavy piece of metal that he's hit this guy in

the face with. This is, if we wrote this, it would kick us out of the network. This is famous for being one of the most badass fights of the old west and it reads like a fucking Benny Hill skin. So it does. He probably gives Bowie a concussion from this like nobody concussions weren't a thing back then but he like he just based on the reports he would like this fucks Bowie up getting hit in the head with this gun like really hurts him. Yeah so he falls down to his knees as a result of getting hit in the face with this gun and then Maddox, one of the duelists, the doctor who by some accounts had accidentally started the fight by accidentally shooting Bowie but who knows. Dr. Maddox charges Bowie like just to like fist fight him and Bowie

throws him away like just because tosses him and so then Crane and their other friend Norris Wright who is the guy who had had a gunfight with Bowie months ago charge in to try to deal with Bowie and Wright draws another pistol and aims it at Bowie who yells back at him you damned rascal don't you shoot. Don't you dare shoot me you rascal. You damned rascal. Yeah he swore. He's mad. Norris Wright like stands there with a gun pointed at Bowie and the two shout at each other for a while until one of Bowie's friends runs up and hands Jim a gun and both men fire at each other at point blank range and of course both miss again. Now their hands hurt. Yeah they're so bad at shooting each other so Wright pulls his second pistol and Bowie yells at him to shoot and be damned

and Wright shoots again and of course he misses a second time. Now at this point one of the few not dangerously unhinged men present a guy named Denny runs up in between Bowie and Wright and pleads with Bowie this must be stopped sir this must be stopped he's just like please for the love of god stop fighting and he puts a hand on Bowie's chest just as Wright draws a third pistol and fires again and hits so he finally did hit somebody. So the ball passes through directly through Denny's hand and it into Jim Bowie's lung and with a concussion and a bullet in their lung most men probably would have stopped fighting but as one of Jim Bowie's friends later noted if there ever lived a man who never felt the sensation of fear it was James Bowie it was his

habit to settle all difficulties without regard to time or place and this it was the same whether he met one or many enemies so Jim Bowie bullet in his lung in a fucking concussion charges Norris Wright waving a gigantic knife he got about 15 feet when two of Wright's friends arrived with fresh guns and opened fire one bullet hit Jim Bowie in the thigh and took him down again now Wright had been running away from the madman with the sword but as soon as Bowie dropped Norris Wright whipped out a sword cane and charged him again now the guy who'd shot Bowie in the thigh also pulled out a sword cane and the two just start stabbing Jim Bowie to death a bunch so the next moment in this fight is the one that would earn the name Bowie knife a proud place in

the long history of human fighting implements shot through the lung and the thigh probably can cost and repeatedly stabbed with sword canes, Bowie draws his giant knife again and fights off both men's sword canes parrying their jabs with his mighty dagger he gashed both of them repeatedly on the hands and the arms in response they stab him through the hands and the wrist I'm gonna quote now from William C. Davis's book on how the fight ended quote Bowie got himself up to a sitting position that in one lunge he reached up to grab Norris Wright by the collar and as Wright tried to straighten himself he inadvertently helped raise Bowie to a near standing position as Bowie later told the story to resin and their friend he said in Wright's ear now major you die

with a single savage thrust he drove the knife through Wright's chest boasting afterwards that he twisted it to cut his heartstrings well he's not he's not that's not how that works but yeah he guts him is how most people relate is he just he he pulls this guy down while being stabbed and just opens his belly with his gigantic sword knife and yeah kills the shit out of him yeah so Jim Bowie passes out immediately after stabbing Norris Wright to death and the attending physician who observed him after this found a gash on his forehead seven stab wounds and two bullet wounds they all kind of assumed he was going to die of his injuries but he didn't and over the next two months Jim Bowie gradually recovered from his many injuries meanwhile the story of how

he stabbed a dude to death became national news so most duels were all like regional stories um and it wasn't uncommon for people to die in them but the sandbar let fight became legend for one reason Jim Bowie Davis writes that in typical frontier fights quote the real fighters risk themselves only when they seem to have the advantage and happily ran to cover otherwise but Bowie impelled by the rage that blinded him to fear or self-protection stood his ground and simply kept fighting that was the sort of thing that turned brutal pointless brawling into legend yeah i mean it does because yeah you're not human anymore yeah it's totally human to like stand in front of another guy and you both shoot at each other and one of you dies and one of you doesn't

what Bowie does is like yeah he's like a fucking superhero because he does he survives this and because he goes so fucking far beyond what any rational person would do in the era well then there's also probably he's not the guy that like afterwards while he's like healing he's also not the kind of guy was like i got carried away you guys no he's just like yeah come at me again and you're like okay dude you gotta chill out and that's exactly what happens so newspapers write huge spreads about the sandbar fight and of course they exaggerate everything that happens in it and people are in america start talking about Jim Bowie and Bowie's canny enough to lean into the legend so he spent weeks bedridden like from gunshot wounds but he would invite reporters

and to talk to him and he would tell all of them the story of the fight and he would always have his knife strapped to his chest while he was in his sick bed so he could show it off to reporters in the steady stream of well-wishers who came by to talk to him so the Bowie knife becomes incredibly famous as a result of this and suddenly like every guy who feels who wants to feel like a badass has to have a Bowie knife and i found a fun write-up on sort of the spread of the Bowie knife in the wake of this by a site called the history bandits and it does a pretty good job of tracing how Jim and all of his brothers capitalized on the fame of the family knife quote the Bowie family quickly made efforts to actively link the Bowie name with the famous knife's design and quality

Bowie's older brother resin who had allegedly given Jim his blade before the sandbar incident began promoting similar knives which he advertised more trustworthy in the hands of a strong man than a pistol which given the fact that everyone missed at the duel is not necessarily inaccurate yeah yeah within months of the incident the name of Bowie was forever linked with the large hilted knives of the southern back country as the story of Jim Bowie's feats with his knife spread blacksmiths across the country began to receive requests from customers to make them a knife like Bowie's as far afield as england the Bowie knife became a novelty in knife shops and easterners of the united states purchased Bowie knives as a symbol of the frontier even

back woodsman who were used to such knives adopted the new terminology of the 1830s and requested Bowie knives it's by name at smithy's from st louis to the mexican border the red river the red river herald of necotoches louisiana claimed that with hyperbole that all the steel in the country it seemed had immediately been converted into Bowie knives by 1830 the Bowie knife became a staple at forgeries across the american continent so that's cool it yeah it's just cool and good yeah it's reassuring that america's always kind of been like this yeah it's fun the the write-up i found on this actually compares the Bowie brothers in particular to bear grills um because bear grills has like an incredibly popular series of knives um made just based off the fact that he's

good at being in the woods and has been on camera like using you know camping knives and stuff so like knife companies like gerber are like hey what if we made a knife and stick your name on it and sure enough now they're incredibly popular you can find them in any outdoorsman store and they're not bad knives um i don't like the hills very much but whatever uh so in the Bowie like the the what i find interesting about this write-up is that they kind of say make the point that like the Bowie family is the first the first in that line like they do basically what bear grills has done they they create a brand with their family name for giant fuck-off knives that's kind of neat the duck dudes too yeah like duck dynasty this is like the very first time that happened in american

history right the Bowie family definitely has some powerful duck dynasty uh energy to it well it's the same area too yeah and it is the same area they might in fact be related well yes there's not a lot of people down there because they kept killing each other yeah so yeah Jim Bowie slave trader land con artist and the guy who stabbed a person to death becomes a celebrity mainly for stabbing a person to death and uh yeah we'll talk about what comes next and how he gets to the alamo in part two but for right now billy it's time for you to celebrate your own knife what would a billy knife be billy it would probably just be like a form of the kukri you would want it to be a kukri kind of like that i love i really i'm enjoying the kukri i like it a lot yeah kukris

are nice i enjoy the uh i enjoy the uh the the the feel of a kukri if i was gonna have a robert knife i would want it to be i want it to be a knife that's too large to be wielded i would like it to be like a hunting knife but one that has to actually be mounted to the bed of a truck like you know how they have technicals in the middle east with machine guns in the back i want that but with a knife that you have to like drive at a target you want to stab it you just want a bayonet for a humby yeah i want a bayonet for i more like a bayonet for an 18 wheeler that's pretty cool yeah yeah that would be i would like a robert knife to be a knife that requires as much steel as a small skyscraper that would be that would be the legacy i'd like to have

that sounds nice we can if they ever give us the tv show we could we'd make that happen we could make that happen yeah all right well um if you want me to uh get my own branded knife uh find bear grills on twitter and send him pictures send him your favorite simpson screen grab let's make it confusing for old bear um and if you want to find us on the internet you can find us at behind the bastards dot com uh you can find t-shirts on t-public and i have a podcast called the women's war that is about rojava and uh does include a little bit about knives so there we go it's an optimistic podcast it is optimistic also optimistic is my co-host today mr billy wane davis billy you want to tell the people where they can find you yes i at billy wane davis on

twitter and instagram uh if i ever start touring again we're allowed to bwdtour.com and then i have a podcast about the people that make up cannabis communities and uh it's called grown local and season one is based in eugene origan speaking of both the marijuana industry and eugene origan a lot of people getting stabbed to death with large knives yeah definitely lots of that not in your podcast necessarily just in the industry and in eugene origan yeah and probably not even related no no no i mean or maybe yeah all right episode done what would you do if the secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the united states told you hey let's start a coup back in the 1930s a marine named smithley butler was all that stood between the

us and fascism i'm ben boland i'm alex french and i'm smithley butler join us for this sordid tale of ambition treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands listen to let's start a coup on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows what if i told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like csi isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences in a life without parole my youngest i was incarcerated two days after her first birthday listen to csi on trial on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast did you know lance bass is a russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a

secret facility outside moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space well i ought to know because i'm lance bass and i'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the soviet union collapsing around him he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world listen to the last soviet on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts