American Blades, Arkansas Icons and an Ongoing Legacy Define the Bowie Knife

(Feature photo courtesy of Lin Rhea)

 

In 2019, the Arkansas state legislature passed a bill that would become Act 510, naming the Bowie knife the official state knife. Later that same session, Act 818 christened Washington, Arkansas, the “Birthplace of the Bowie Knife, Arkansas Heritage Site,” and directed the University of Arkansas Hope-Texarkana to “promote and protect the art of bladesmithing and the Bowie knife crafted there.” Thus came to be the James Black School of Bladesmithing & Historic Trades at Historic Washington State Park.

 

 

“The thought behind that was to honor the legacy of James Black, the legendary bladesmith that is credited [with creating] the original Bowie knife and, hopefully, to preserve the craftsmanship of modern bladesmithing and also an ode to the historic trades,” said Jennifer Teresa, dean of business, trade and industry at UAHT.

 

To commemorate the occasion, the UAHT Foundation commissioned a blade from internationally renowned master bladesmith and National Living Treasure Jerry Fisk, whose own interest in the craft had been sparked in part by visits to the blacksmith shop in Historic Washington. Every element of Fisk’s design, called Arkansas No. 1, was carefully chosen, from 1,836 layers of steel representing the year Arkansas became a state to a handle fashioned from the James Black Walnut Tree located in the cemetery where the school’s namesake blacksmith is buried.

 

 

In a press release from UAHT announcing the blade dedication to open the school, Fisk said, “It’s almost like the tree sprung up for this very purpose, to keep the history of James Black and Jim Bowie alive.”

 

“I think this is definitely a source of pride for our community that we have the Bowie knife, which is known all over the world. To have that and have the school in the location where it was believed that it was forged it’s just a really cool thing,” Teresa said. “As far as for the University of Arkansas Hope-Texarkana, we look for things that are innovative. We look for ways that we can meet the needs of our community, and I think this is just one way that we’re able to do that.”

 

 

A KNIFE LIKE BOWIE’S; A KNIFE LIKE BLACK’S

 

The legend of the blade wielded by Bowie runs right through Hempstead County, where frontier Black, it has been said, crafted the knife that would become associated with Bowie and his exploits, from an infamous sandbar in Mississippi to the mission walls of the Alamo. Bowie No. 1, attributed to Black and believed by some to be the first Bowie knife, can be found in the knife gallery at Historic Arkansas Museum in downtown Little Rock.

 

“The Bowie knife is kind of a quintessential American knife,” said Victoria Chandler, curator of collections for the museum. “It is as American as it gets.”

 

The man Bowie first made national headlines by surviving a spectacular, nearly fatal encounter after the “Sandbar Duel” of 1827 in Natchez, Mississippi, where he used his knife to kill one of his attackers and wound another. His death in 1836 at the hands of the Mexican Army in Texas later vaulted him to hero status, and the singular sidearm became irrevocably linked to the Bowie name.

 

Picking up monikers such as “Arkansas toothpick” along the way, “a knife like Bowie’s” became a staple accessory during the years leading up to the Civil War. By some accounts, the Bowie knife made an appearance at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, while Hollywood later placed it at the side of John Rambo and through the undead heart of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, among countless other cameos.

 

“I just don’t think people quite grasp how common the Bowie knife form was in American culture,” Chandler said.

 

 

The problem with legends, however — especially those born along the settler fringes of a young nation — is in the details. Despite what popular imagination has claimed over the years, there is much uncertainty about the origins of Bowie’s knife as such. Later exaggerations and the blurring of related, though not identical, terms such as the “Arkansas toothpick” only complicate matters further.

 

“I define the Bowie by its use, not its form,” said Bill Worthen, former longtime director of Historic Arkansas Museum and a preeminent historian of James Black and knifemaking. “It’s a 19th century American self-defense knife. Once the frontier settlements ‘settled down,’ it fell into disuse, to be revived in the Civil War as a military knife — not too practical in battle in the days of rifles, artillery and repeating pistols — to a style of hunting knife.”

 

In fact, the blade Bowie used to defend himself against all odds in Natchez was described as merely “a big knife” or “large butcher knife” with little else to go on by way of looks. Bowie’s brother, Rezin, claimed to have designed the knife used at the sandbar, and even then, he simply referred to it as a hunting knife. According to Mark Zalesky, leading Bowie knife historian as well as publisher and editor of Knife Magazine, it was only after Bowie’s death at the Alamo that stories playing up his connection to the popular blade started to circulate.

 

“What came about, as the idea of the Bowie knife became popular, was carrying a larger knife and carrying it openly,” Zalesky said. “As a result, the knife had more utility than just a dagger for stabbing, and also, if you’re carrying it prominently, you’d like it to look like something nice. You want it to convey the message, ‘I have fine taste; look at this elegant object I have. I can afford an object like that — oh, and by the way, I have this knife handy, so don’t mess with me.’”

 

 

Rather than referring to any one feature, the term Bowie knife captured a whole host of knives concerned with more conspicuous modes of self-defense. The lack of a specific origin date, Worthen said, is because the knives were already being used before they came to be associated with a certain name.

 

Worthen and Zalesky presented as much — and much more — in their exhibit “A Sure Defense: The Bowie Knife in America” at Historic Arkansas Museum from 2013 to 2014. Arriving as the most extensive public exhibit of Bowie knives ever held, the collection comprised more than 200 knives important to the blade’s history. A book of the same name documents the exhibit over the course of 400 pages, along with essays and an in-depth telling of the Bowie knife story from two men at the forefront of the field.

 

What, then, of Black? As it turned out, his place in history was almost a victim of the blade’s success — at least as it was spun up in subsequent retellings. By the 1950s, the Bowie knife had become, similar to the man, an avatar of American frontier folklore and the aggrandizing of a bygone era.

 

“We had this whole wave of people during this craze for the Alamo and Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie and all that, so people are writing stories left and right, and they’re pure fiction, and they’re all associated with James Black,” Zalesky said.

 

The mid-1900s saw audiences enthralled by such works as Raymond Thorp’s Bowie Knife, published in 1948, and The Iron Mistress, a 1951 novel by Paul Iselin Wellman adapted to film in 1952. Though familiar enough with the Black story, Thorp nevertheless took artistic liberties when it came to illustrations of the famed knife. The Iron Mistress went so far as to have the bladesmith incorporating the remains of a meteorite into Bowie’s legendary weapon.

 

 

 

“When people started coming along in the ‘60s and became interested in Bowie knives as the ultimate knife collectible — in America, anyway — they saw all this baloney about James Black that had started being created in ‘48, and they took all of it and threw it in the trash,” Zalesky said. “The whole James Black thing was ignored because of the nonsense that came along in ‘48 and all through the ‘50s and ‘60s.”

 

Black’s rightful place in the true story of the Bowie knife was at risk of being thrown out with the bathwater, as it were, trapped between layers of fiction and midcentury myth-making. It was Worthen’s research that would eventually help bring Black out of the mire of skepticism into which Black had sunk over the years.

 

“Bill Worthen, in ‘92, wrote the story that started turning the tide on Black and got us looking back at Black again,” Zalesky said. “It’s kind of fascinating how this little bit of fiction involved turned into a big bunch of fiction turned into, ‘Ah, it’s all baloney,’ and then it took Worthen to start bringing it back.”

 

According to Worthen, Black did make a knife for Rezin Bowie, and he likely made one for Jim Bowie. It was not until 1841 that the Bowie knife’s “invention” was attributed to Black by the Washington Telegraph. Yet it was nevertheless Black’s version of the blade — with an eye-catching coffin-shaped handle and silver wrapping — that had taken off in the meantime. Cutlers as far away as England eagerly copied the look, and they seemed well aware of the design’s Arkansas origins.

 

“It was the marketers of the knives who really established the names,” Worthen said. “The folks in Sheffield, [England], etched ‘Arkansas Toothpick’ and ‘Bowie knife’ on their blades until some states passed laws controlling their use, and then they started using more generic terms like ‘hunting knife.’”

 

THE FORGED-BLADE RENAISSANCE

 

The bladesmithing world was not yet done with southwest Arkansas after that, though time had taken a serious toll on the blacksmith trade by the 1950s. Mechanization and modernization pushed a large number of blacksmiths into other professions, many later listed as mechanics.

 

“There is such a thing as knifemaking, knifesmithing, and then there is bladesmithing, and they’re very different,” Chandler said. “You can grind a knife and make a knife by different means, but when you’re forging a knife with an anvil, with a fire, it’s a different process. You have to know how to be a blacksmith first.”

 

New enthusiasm for forged rather than grinded blades was spearheaded by pioneering bladesmith Bill Moran, who at midcentury was one of few remaining blacksmiths in the United States. His rediscovery of “modern Damascus” or pattern-welded steel in the 1960s followed by the founding of the American Bladesmith Society in 1976 set the stage for a resurgence in interest in the art.

 

 

Collaboration between the ABS, Arkansas officials and Texarkana College in nearby Bowie County, Texas, led to the opening of a first-of-its-kind bladesmithing school in 1988. The school, located on the grounds of Historic Washington State Park until 2019, was renamed the Bill Moran School of Bladesmithing following Moran’s retirement from teaching in 2001.

 

“There was an — let’s call it an explosion over time, to where the largest knifemaking group in the world is now bladesmiths, forging knifemakers, knifemakers who hand-forge, and it’s all centered around Arkansas and North Texas and all because of the presence of the school,” Zalesky said. “The school caused that to happen.”

 

Attracting students from all over the world to Historic Washington, the school trained up scores of bladesmiths near the very place where Black had quite literally forged his own legacy well more than a century and a half earlier. One such alumnus, master bladesmith and Arkansas Living Treasure Lin Rhea, studied at the ABS school while it was still in Washington and teaches classes at the newer University of Arkansas outfit.

 

“I was a knifemaker first, before I became a historic blacksmith, and after I started going down that road of historic blacksmithing, it changed everything for me,” Rhea said. “It changed the complexion of my work, literally. I had new ideas. I had new confidence.”

 

 

As a blacksmith trained in historical techniques, Rhea has also played an integral role at Historic Arkansas Museum’s reproduction blacksmith shop since it opened in 2011. Having access to several historic knives through the museum gave Rhea insights into his own evolving craft, and his perspective as a contemporary bladesmith has likewise aided ongoing research efforts into the blades, their construction and the original forging techniques of blacksmiths such as Black — an area of investigation still turning up new information all the time.

 

“We had archaeologists, historians and people who had their areas of expertise that had not made a knife,” Rhea said. “They had worked around knifemakers and knew something about knifemaking, but they hadn’t really completed knives directly themselves. I had that perspective, and so I could give the perspective of a knifemaker.

 

“What would this guy do in this case, if there was a problem? How would he make it better? What about the historic knives that we see and that we’ve researched — what about them makes them either superior to other knives from that period, or what weaknesses do they have, and does it correlate with the condition that we find the knives in?”

 

Rhea is also a particularly apt example of the interplay between historical knowledge and modern innovation in bladesmithing today. During his training as a historic blacksmith, Rhea was making objects with the assistance of Peter Ross, whom Rhea called “one of if not the best historic blacksmith in the United States.” Learning a variety of techniques he could mix and match to suit his creative needs, Rhea found he could “get out of that historic mindset and come right back into the 21st century,” borrowing from the old ways to “give the new objects a totally different look.”

 

In the course of that work, he decided he would craft something new but with an added challenge — he would only use one piece of material with no additions.

 

 

“It took me a while to do it. I’m talking about probably two to three years I had to develop a forging process [and] a design that was improving year by year,” Rhea said. “I went back and looked at my photographs on my phone year by year, and I could see the improvements, and when this feature, this little improvement took place, and then this other improvement the next year, and so on.”

 

The result was the X-Rhea Knife, Rhea’s original design forged from a single piece of steel. In an online description, Rhea called the development of the X-Rhea knife “a fine exercise in hammer control for the smith, yet it produces a strong, beautiful and unique knife.” Rhea then set to work on another, this time in the Bowie knife style, and said it was “quite a shock” to people when he first began to show off the new blade.

 

“People just didn’t know what to think,” he said. “They thought it was going to be really, really heavy or not be strong enough or something. They just thought it was [going to] have problems, but it didn’t, and it doesn’t. I considered all those things that I learned in historic blacksmithing, and the principles that I used in making everything from padlocks to scissors to pliers to anything else.”

 

 

BLADES OF YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW

 

Rhea’s namesake contribution to the American bladesmith canon is also on display in HAM’s knife gallery. The first gallery in the country dedicated to the history of the Bowie knife and the forged blade in America, the knife gallery has been a part of HAM since the museum center opened in 2001.

 

“That’s our focus with Historic Arkansas Museum’s mission is to talk about and educate the public on Arkansas’s early history but also its creative legacy,” Chandler said.

 

 

The gallery was refurbished in 2023, giving the museum team a chance to recalibrate and sharpen the exhibit’s focus. With every exhibit, Chandler said, the question is one of what story HAM wants to tell and what visitors will take away. In considering the next chapter of the knife gallery, it became clear that the revival of bladesmithing past and present would take center stage.

 

“Part of the exhibit that we wanted to touch on a little bit more was less about the history of the Bowie knife in pop culture and more looking [at] the artisans themselves,” Chandler said. “We have a new section in there, and it’s all about the art of the forged blade and looking at [the history], from Bill Moran starting the American Bladesmith Society and rediscovering Damascus steel and how blacksmiths kind of disappeared to today, with all the contemporary makers and especially celebrating our Arkansas contributions to that.”

 

 

Central to meeting that aim has been HAM’s ongoing partnership with the American Bladesmith Society. A large feature of the exhibit has always been to display American bladesmith knives, Chandler said, and the gallery is also home to the American Bladesmith Society Hall of Fame.

 

“The case that’s kind of in the center or in the middle of the gallery is this double view-through. On one side, it has historical blades, and on the other side, it’s contemporary blades,” Chandler said. “It’s just looking at the influence so you can see that continuity of what styles remain the same, how they’re forging the blades. You can physically see that [and] make that connection.” 

 

SEE THE FEATURE BELOW AND IN OUR SEPTEMBER ISSUE OF AY MAGAZINE.