I. Weapons of Every Description
When the scalp hunters ride into Chihuahua City in Chapter VI, readers are granted their first look at Glanton’s Gang:
“a pack of vicious-looking humans mounted on unshod Indian ponies riding half drunk through the streets, bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up with thews and armed with weapons of every description, revolvers of enormous weight and bowie knives the size of claymores and short two-barreled rifles with bores you could stick your thumbs in and the trappings of their horses fashioned out of human skin and their bridles woven up with human hair and decorated with human teeth and the riders wearing scapulars of human ears and the horses raw-looking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like feral dogs and riding also in the company a number of half-naked savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy, brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh.” (82-83)
Like the Pequod in Moby Dick, the men of Glanton’s Gang are “tricked forth in the chased bones of [their] enemy” (Melville 101).
Today, I’m less interested in the scalp hunters and more concerned with these Bowie knives that McCarthy chooses to arm them with. Most people have heard of this weapon, even if they have no idea who Jim Bowie was. In this bonus episode of The Night Does Not End, I’d like to take a deep dive into the history of this man and the origin of this knife that bears his name.
II. The Sandbar Fight
Jim Bowie stepped out of the skiff and followed his friends across the shoal. A land speculator and smuggler, the red-haired Bowie took in frontier America through the blue-gray eyes of a killer. He already had one murder on his conscience—the son of French pirate Jean Lafitte. In an age when most adult males were 5’8”, Bowie stood six feet in height. He towered over the men he was trailing across this sandbar.
There were six of them including Bowie: Samuel Wells, Jefferson Wells, George McWorter, Samuel Cuny and his brother Richard Cuny, a surgeon. The men had rowed across the Mississippi from the Louisiana shore to support Samuel Wells in a duel against a man named Thomas Maddox. Maddox and his own supporters had ridden their horses to this sandy shoal from a nearby plantation. The sandbar was between Natchez, Mississippi and Vidalia, Louisiana, chosen because it was outside the jurisdiction of both towns and the parties would be less liable to prosecution if someone died.
It was midday, the tail-end of summer, and though duels were still fought in the American South, the practice was already on the wane. Men who engaged in mutual combat with matched weapons at an appointed time and place did so to defend what they called their sacred honor, but they were actually defending their money.
There’d be no universally-accepted currency in the U.S. for another thirty-five years. Various banks in the twenty-four United States printed notes, but there was no guarantee that a note issued in Massachusetts would be accepted in Tennessee. Gold and silver were scarce. Men mostly used promissory notes (I.O.U.s) to purchase goods and services. This meant if a member of your community accused you of being a scoundrel or spendthrift, the man wasn’t just insulting you: he was assaulting your good name and quite literally devaluing the promissory notes you used as money. Merchants, hearing that you were profligate or a blackguard, might be less likely to accept your notes, and accusations that went unanswered might lead to your not being able to trade at all.
Dueling was a way to stop someone from making such allegations. Engaging in the practice said you were serious enough about your standing in a community to put your life at hazard, and merely challenging another man to a duel (or accepting one), was often enough to repair your good name.
Which was why Samuel Wells and Thomas Maddox were facing off on that sandbar beside the muddy Mississippi, September 19th, 1827. There were seventeen men in attendance that day: Wells and Maddox, their seconds and supporters, plus five spectators. The possibility of violence always draws a crowd.