The Bowie Knife & Blood Meridian

(Bonus Episode)

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.

Wells and Maddox were armed with single-shot, muzzleloading pistols—Colt’s five-shot revolver wouldn’t be invented for another nine years—and would conduct their duel according to a set of twenty-six rules derived from the Irish Code Duello. These commandments, as they are called in that 18th century document, are as detailed as any legislative bill or business contract, and offer instruction on everything from how a dueling ground ought to be chosen to how weapons should be selected. Commandment Fifteen, for example, states that “the challenged has the right to choose his own weapons unless the challenger gives his honor he is no swordsman, after which, however, he cannot decline any second species of weapon proposed by the challenged.”

Hollywood has shown us depictions of these murderous contests, but try to forget about those portrayals and imagine actually standing thirty feet away from an opponent, each of you holding a two-pound flintlock pistol. This weapon fires a .54 caliber ball. Entering the body, the bullet will make a quarter-sized hole—the exit wound will be the size of a silver dollar—and the soft lead ball will pulverize the bones it strikes and ruin the organs it punctures. You will die quickly from blood loss or slowly from sepsis. If you happen to live, it will be in poor health and pain.

Wells and Maddox knew the dangers and went through with the ritual anyway. It was eighty-five degrees that September afternoon. Herons waded the shallows, stalking for carp. Bowie watched from a stand of willows about a hundred yards from the duelists. He watched them turn to face each other, then watched as they leveled their pistols and fired.

Both missed. The weapons they’d discharged had smoothbore barrels and were highly inaccurate. The duelists turned to their seconds—men whose duty it was to prepare weapons, make sure the commandments were followed and that the combatants weren’t ambushed. Wells and Maddox handed over their spent weapons, took up loaded ones and, then observing an interval, leveled these pistols and fired again.

They missed again. The duelists stood there, waiting for the clouds of white gun smoke to disperse. Then they approached each other, met in the middle of the dueling ground, and shook hands, resolving their dispute. Their honor and courage had been proven in the sight of witnesses and they could put past grievances behind them and continue their lives in the town of Alexandria. Wells and Maddox, their seconds, and the two attending surgeons—Doctors Denny and Cuny—chose to celebrate survival. They decided to get drunk.

Jim Bowie, and the knife that bears his name, is known to us because of what happened over the next ninety seconds. He and the other men supporting Samuel Wells that day walked toward Maddox and his partisans.

But there was bad blood between two of the men: the Wells’ supporter, General Sam Cuny, and Maddox’s second, Colonel Robert Crain. They’d fought once before. As partisans from both sides moved toward each other, General Cuny called out to Crain, saying, “Colonel Crain, this is a good time to settle our difficulty.”

Crain, as Maddox’s second, had loaded pistols in either hand. He raised one and fired it at Cuny.

The bullet missed its intended target, but slammed into Jim Bowie, shattering his hip and knocking him to the earth. Cuny pulled his own pistol and fired at Crain, hitting him in the arm and causing a minor wound, but Crain was already leveling the second pistol he carried. When he fired, the bullet struck General Cuny in the chest, blowing out his heart.

Bowie struggled to his feet. He drew a knife from its sheath.

“Crain,” he shouted, you have shot me and I will kill you if I can.”

Then he charged the colonel, but Crain gripped one of the empty pistols by its barrel, and wielding it like a club, struck Bowie on the head with such force that the weapon broke into pieces and Bowie went to his knees with a fractured skull.

Another Maddox partisan named Sheriff Norris Wright stood nearby watching all of this. He’d quarreled with Bowie on several occasions, in disputes over land deals and local politics. Bowie had supported the man’s opponent when Wright was running for sheriff of Rapides Parish, and Wright, a bank director, had managed to get one of Bowie’s loan applications turned down. The previous year, when the two men argued in Alexandria, Wright had drawn a pistol and shot Bowie in the chest. The pistol ball did little damage, but Bowie tackled the smaller man and began striking him with his fists. When Wright’s friends tried to restrain Bowie, he seized hold of Wright’s hand and bit it. Wright’s friends managed to pull Bowie off, leaving one of Bowie’s teeth in Wright’s finger. Because of this encounter, Bowie began carrying the hunting knife he now held, kneeling in the sand with a lead ball in his hip and a shattered skull.

Perhaps, Sheriff Wright saw an opportunity to put an end to their quarrels forever. He approached Bowie, drew a sword cane, and drove the blade into Bowie’s chest.

But Bowie’s sternum turned the sword-point and the blade never reached the beating heart behind his breastbone. As Wright was trying to pull the blade free, Bowie reached up, grabbed Wright by the shirt, and yanked him down onto the tip of his soon-to-be famous knife. This blade did what Wright’s had failed to, sinking into the sheriff’s chest and severing his heart. Bowie would later say that he’d twisted the knife inside his opponent, in order to “cut his heart strings.”[i] Sheriff Wright collapsed onto Bowie, dead.

Still kneeling, Bowie was shot yet again by a member of Maddox’s crew—historians cannot decide exactly who. Bowie got to his feet, Wright’s sword still protruding from his chest. The Blanchard brothers, Alfred and Carey, both Maddox partisans, fired at Bowie in unison and he was struck in the arm. Bowie now had three pistol balls in him, a sword cane, and a fractured skull, but he was still standing. He turned, slashing with his knife, and cut off Alfred’s arm. Carey Blanchard fired a second shot at Bowie, missed, then wisely skedaddled. Someone shot at him, missing, then Jefferson Wells put a ball through Alfred’s undamaged arm.

That was the last shot fired in what would become known as the Sandbar Fight. General Cuny and Sheriff Wright were dead. Alfred Blanchard was maimed. Colonel Crain and Dr. James Denny had both suffered injuries.

Jim Bowie was dying. No one believed he would live through the night, but they weren’t going to let a man who’d just absorbed such unbelievable punishment go untended. The five doctors present at the duel bandaged Bowie’s wounds well enough that he could be carried to the skiff and rowed back across the Mississippi to Vidalia. Members of both the Wells and Maddox factions helped carry him.

One of these was Colonel Crain, the man who’d fired the first shot in the brawl: it was Crain’s pistol ball that was presently lodged in Bowie’s hip.

Bowie looked up at the colonel.

“Colonel Crain,” he said, “I do not think, under the circumstances, you ought to have shot me.”

III. Convalescence & Commodity

Bowie lay in bed for almost two months, convalescing. One of the doctors who tended him in the coming weeks said, “How he lived is a mystery to me, but live he did.” It’s a mystery to us as well: in addition to the shattered hip, fractured skull, and punctured lung, he had three bullet holes in him and seven different stab wounds.

As he passed in and out of consciousness, newspaper stories were being written about him. The Natchez press began to report Bowie’s exploits; papers in New York and Philadelphia picked up the story. The most widely read weekly of the day, the Niles Register, reprinted the article and an insatiable curiosity seized hold of Americans concerning this recklessly brave, seemingly unkillable man. For his part in the Sandbar Fight, Jim Bowie had become famous.

He lay in his room at Vidalia House, gradually recovering, receiving visitors. They found him surprisingly cordial: “cool and powerful,” said one friend, “but generous a kind hearted.” A new acquaintance remarked that he “exhibited so much kindness of heart and mildness of manners that a stranger would have selected almost any other man in a crowd of strangers […] as the renowned Jim Bowie.”

His guests brought him news of his growing fame. They wanted to know how he’d managed to survive his injuries. But mostly, they wanted to know about the knife he’d used to defend himself. Could they hold it, perhaps? Where might they procure one for themselves? Those who wrote Bowie letters asked if he’d provide a description of this blade.

Something very strange was happening in this young country and Jim Bowie was at the center of it. Bedridden, he began drawing up plans for his future and for the blade he’d used to kill Norris Wright. When he was able to move about, he decided to leave Louisiana as soon as possible: he’d killed a prominent member of the community and maimed another. Four different men had taken shots at him that day on the sandbar. He wasn’t going to wait around for a fifth.

As many enterprising Americans did in the 1820s, Bowie traveled to Texas, arriving in Stephen F. Austin’s colony the following year—an Anglo settlement authorized by the Mexican government who had, at present, a Comanche problem and wanted a barrier between themselves and the tribe.

Visiting the town of San Felipe, he walked into the blacksmith shop of twenty-year-old Noah Smithwick. The two would become fast friends.

Smithwick writes of their first encounter in his memoir, The Evolution of a State. He’d read quite a bit about the Sandbar Fight, Jim Bowie, and the famous knife, so imagine his surprise when Bowie walked into his shop and handed Smithwick the fabled blade:

The blood christened weapon which had saved its owner’s life twice within a few seconds was an ordinary affair with a plain wooden handled, but when Bowie recovered from his wound, he had the precious blade polished and set into an ivory handle mounted with silver; the scabbard also being silver mounted. Not wishing to degrade it by ordinary use, he brought the knife to me in San Felipe to have a duplicate made. The blade was about ten inches long and two broad at the widest part. When it became known that I was making a genuine Bowie knife, there was a great demand for them, so I cut a pattern and started a factory, my jobs bringing from $5.00 to $20.00, according to finish. (emphasis mine)

You can hear Smithwick’s wonder at finding out the most famous knife in American history was “an ordinary affair,” but his recounting of this episode is even more wondrous to contemporary readers who, when they picture a Bowie knife, immediately think of a large, fixed-blade sheath knife with a cross guard and clip point. Smithwick discovered that the knife Bowie used in his famous fight had neither cross guard nor clip point. Other witnesses would describe it as a butcher knife with a simple wooden handle.

What made the Bowie knife legendary obviously had nothing to do with size or shape or lack of handguard. The famous blade had slashed its way into American myth due to its association with Jim Bowie and what he’d managed to do in ninety seconds on the sandy banks of the Mississippi. He’d not only defended himself, killed a man and maimed another; he’d given Anglo-America its first totem—an emblem of 828,000 square miles acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, an object soon to be as ubiquitous as the Kentucky long rifle. Every frontiersman of the period—and a good many men who’d never stepped foot in the woods—had to get his hands on one.

IV. Legislation & Legend

The imaginations of legislatures around the fledgling country—just fifty years old—had also been inflamed. State after state began passing laws prohibiting the carry of Bowie’s famous knife. The blade had become so mythic, its exploits so exaggerated, that 19th-century officials spoke of it the way 21st-century officials speak about the AR-15. It was the first weapon ever banned in America.

Alabama passed the first laws regulating the blade: any man who killed someone with a Bowie knife would be charged with premediated murder. Louisiana and Virginia outlawed concealed carry of the knife, as did Mississippi. Tennessee made carry of the Bowie knife a felony and its law further stated:

That if any person carrying any knife or weapon known as a Bowie knife ... or any knife or weapon that shall in form, shape, or size resemble a Bowie knife, on a sudden encounter, shall cut or stab another person with such knife or weapon, whether death ensues or not, such person so stabbing or cutting shall be guilty of a felony, and upon conviction thereof shall be confined in the jail and penitentiary house of this State, for a period of time not less than three years.

Texas, of all places, prohibited the carry of a Bowie knife—the law passed in 1871 would stay on the books until 2017.

But there were no such laws in 1849, the year Glanton’s Gang comes riding into Chihuahua City, armed with “bowie knives the size of claymores.” As these scalp hunters are larger than life, it makes sense that McCarthy would give them larger-than-life weapons. A claymore is a two-handed sword from the medieval period, most often associated with the Scottish (and popularized by Mel Gibson’s Braveheart). No one has ever heard of a fifty-inch Bowie knife outside of Blood Meridian, but it makes a strange kind of mythic sense that Glanton’s men are equipped with such ridiculously long blades, presumably using them to scalp the Apache they’ve been contracted to hunt by the Mexican government (we will later see the gang employing these as cavalry swords).

The Bowie knife is another violent piece of 19th century Americana that McCarthy fits into his Apocalyptic puzzle, a fitting prop for his actors in this tragedy of blood.