Part One: Jim Bowie: The Worst Texan

a headband. It's coming together. It's been an interesting quarantine week for you. I'm embracing it. You've got a cookery now, which is a special type of curb Nepalese blade very nice. I want to the Gerber to see if I liked it, and then now I'm gonna get into Apoll and get one proper. Yeah, I have a Nepalese blade smith that I can point you towards. This is a podcast about the worst pill in all of history. And Billy, you and I have developed a couple of different niches for ourselves.

We're we're 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 Booie? I know the name, Do you know what I mean? Like growing up in the South, You're just like, yeah, you hear it. I don't know what he There's like, I don't know exactly

what you did. You've probably heard of I'm gonna 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. UM, with a specific kind of curved

in point to the top of the blade. And it's it's great for it was initially 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 nineteen years old. Um. The one thing I am about him is the the giant mutton had the horrifying facial hair. He had gigantic mutton chops and he died at the Alumo.

Now I was I was a Texas boy. So in in Texas school, you have a special class called Texas History, and every Texas kid learns a lot about Jim Booie and it's all wrong because they only teaches about Jim Booie at Texas School. I know who Jim Bowie. Yes, yeah, yes I do. I just came back. It froze and everything came back, and then you said the Alumo and I was like immediately on his motherfucker's Yes. Yeah, So Jim Booie is a giant piece of ship because this

is my show. But he's also like a frontier legend, like he's one of those he's like David Crockett Um or like wild Bill Hickock, like he's one of those like wild West legends. So this is gonna be a hoot of a tale. Um And yeah, let's just get into it. So h James Bowie Um was born on March tenth, uh in Logan County, Kentucky, in seventeen nineties six, probably because again in Kentucky in seventeen ninety six, nobody

was super good at like birth certificates and the like. Um, but that's that's a good guess as to when he was born three or four days ago. Yeah, yeah, he came into the world sometime round round about. Then it was the year when we had that big flood on the river. Yeah, that's kind of how people talked about ship like that back then. So yeah, his brother gives March ten six is as James Bowie's birthdays. Older brother

John gives that as the birthdate. And uh, 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 that liars do it. Hey, now I'm gonna tell you the story. But keep in mind, I make a lot of stuff up. Keep in mind, what would the moonshine? I can't keep much much together about my

own back story. Yeah, the Booe families a bit like that, and they have financial motives for telling a bunch of saying a bunch of fun ship about Jim Bullie. But I don't think they have much in the way of financial motives about lying about his birthdates. That's probably more or less accurate, at least as well as they could

remember it. So uh Jim was the ninth of ten children born to Resin, which I think was just sort of so basically our easy 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 seventeen hundreds, so they wrote it out as Resin Um. So he was this Yeah, you know what, not bad for modern Kentucky spelling they're doing right, You

get the gist of it. So, yeah, he was the son of Resin Boo and uh An Elvy Booi 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 Booey 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 moved 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 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. Yeah yeah, but then he hates it and

he's got it. Like, yeah, you could call them early hipsters. But instead of like you know, enjoying artists lofts and uh artisanal coffee houses, he liked fighting bears with machetes. Um, every time I see alize of place, these people shut up. That's kind of resins attitude. So the point of making is he he wasn't just going about this 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 Booie'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. Liked.

I realized, like these people, there's a 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 gonna go move out to the middle of nowhere with an hatchet and build another home, like like they're they're tough, is Yeah. I just keep thinking, I'm like, I'm not as stubborn as

I thought. There there's there's a TikTok r. That's that's that's like where the wife comes in, it's like, honey, we have to move. The neighbor said, hi, and that's these people. Yeah, yeah, that's resin Booie friends, Billy, what were you saying? I'm gonna call you booeye a couple of times and as I'm certain I like it, I don't remember, Oh good, fantastic. Well, uh yeah. So now the Booie family, when Jim was young, tended to live

all the spots they pick. We're along the Mississippi River, and they basically moved down the Mississippi as like people filled up the area above them. UM and moving dot day for the Booey family meant they would build by hand a flat bottom boat, toss all of their ship 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 here. Ship Dad's boat. Dad's making a boat.

God damn it. Yeah. Now Will Jim Bowie's first memories probably would have been in the Twapay Township in what is now Missouri uh and what was then still under French control and part of their new Madrid district now. The name Twapati 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 had abandoned all throughout the forests and swamps around Twapty Township. UM. 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. Um. The Booey men were in general uh 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 Elvi, taught her children the alphabet, but that was about all she knew, so that was about all they learned. Um. After two years in Twopity, it got too developed for

resident 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. That's that's yeah. 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 eighteen twelve they'd staked out a claim on buyou vermillion in the Atta Kappas parish just south of opelousas Uh. 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 but they did not and did not have large fields full of enslaved people, but they kept small families of field hands enslave to help them with their work. And I'm gonna read a quote now from the book Three Roads to the Alamo that describes sort of how slavery was

practiced within the Bowie family. It's gonna sound like it's making a different point than it is at first, but just 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 wore for where for Uncle Reza, who never married, but who fathered a son named James by a slave mistress around sometime around seventeen ninety, 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 cattle 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, clanned loyalty followed. In later years, the family were remembered well stories of resins Young Uh, stories of resins 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 Buoye slaves were property, though, and with the exception of a few favorites like old Mandy, they were usually sold with the land whenever a buoy moved on. So you've got a really complicated relationship with slaves here. To the point where some of the Boweymen have children, um with with their slaves, and those children are seen as

Buoy's and are generally live lives as freed people. Um. And you have like certain older slaves that are beloved and considered almost a part of the family, but also almost um includes a lot of wiggle room. And as much as the Buoys pretended to have familiar relations with their slaves, they sold them, um 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 don't we mainly talk about sort of the old plantation system, but that hadn't really gotten going in a big way at this point. Um. And yeah, that's kind of how the Booey family dealt with slavery. Um. It's it's yeah, I don't know, it's weird, it sucks, but yeah, it was bad. It's just it's very clear

they've viewed them as livestock. They've used that's it's it's it's more messed up than even just that though, because you know, the buoys 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 buoy and a member of the family. Um, 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 gonna treat him like family. But these other people who have are related to him, but not to me. I'm just gonna sell like a dishwasher. It's really strange. It's such a weird flip of the coin in their head

where they've made this is the line for us. It's bizarre. Yeah, it's hard for me to get my head around in anyway. And I should note here that because I my longtime co worker uh is Sore and 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 gonna happen. Sorry. 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 in suit, and Resin killed one of the squatters. He was jail. Yeah, yeah, and this was not uncommon because, like, land ownership was kind of a murky idea back then, you know. Yeah, so was the idea of squatting too, where you're just say in court you're not you're yeah, you're not gonna see me in court. I'm just gonna

shoot ye right now. Yeah. So Residin 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 Booie is his like mom and one of their slaves busting their dad out of jail for murdering a guy. Um, yeah, so that's cool. 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 their brother also named Resin, left home to go have dangerous adventures when he was about nineteen, and this was desperately hard for young Jim because he was very close to his brother. A few years later, when the War of eighteen twelve came to Louisiana, Jim was finally old enough

to follow Resin when he enlisted. Uh James, another one of the Bowie brothers, described Resin Jr. As a perfect rowdy and Jim hisself 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 Bullie 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. Somebody, we'll hang out for a couple of moments. Yeah, yeah, that's basically what happens. But they don't get a chance to shoot anybody, and they muster out with about twenty one dollars each

for their troubles. So yeah, that's that's kind of Jim's a man now, like he he doesn't get his chance to murder anybody, but he's got twenty one dollars in his pocket. He's like seventeen years old. That's as much of an adulthood as you, um, you get at that that period in time and his high school graduation and in New Orleans. That's a good place to be seventeen with the pocket full of money. That is a good place to be then and now, well no, not now

because of the coronavirus, but then yeah, yeah. Uh so Jim was frustrated at the fact that his war experience hadn't ended with him getting to shoot anybody. Um, but he also, you know, it 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. Um 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 Opalosis h James Bowie, Jim's older there, and I'm sorry. The Booey names are all very complicated because there's multiple James and multiple Resins and John's. It's very frustrated. We forgot what we name the other one. 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 Bowies tended to be pretty tough, and so you wind up with a bunch of kids. We have the same fucking name name James. Yeah. We didn't expect as many of them would make it eight teen, as did I'm gonna make a boat. There's people over here, yeah yeah, so. Uh. James Bowie, another one of Jim's another one of Jim Bowie's older brothers, would later describe

eighteen year old Jim Bowie this way. Quote he was Yeah, sorry, John Bowie, Jim's older Ye, Jesus, I'm sorry. The booing names are so fucking competent. How many siblings does he have to? They all have weird he has Tim has Tim? Are they all? Jim just sucks? Jim? John Right, there's a couple. There's a resident in there, Yeah, resident Jr. It's very frustrating. But Jim Bowie's older brother would later

describe Jim at eighteen this way quote. He was young, proud, poor, and ambitious, without any rich family connections or influential fringe to aid him in the battle of life. After reaching the age of maturity. He was a stout, rather raw boned man of six ft height, with a hundred and eighty 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 or women he was possessed of, and his brother a little bit Yeah, you know, you get the idea that maybe some boowie brothers got up to some some things. They were in French country. It wasn't weird good looking brother. I got

some sexy brothers, and I know from sexy brothers. He was possessed 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 he had a pretty fair temper unless he made him mad. That's what he just said. That's literally what he's saying. Oh,

I forgot. You just learned the alphabet I forgot. Yeah, that's your only education. Uh. 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 rancor of the Indian. He was social and playing with all men,

fond of music and the amusements of the day. It would take a glass in a merry mood to drive dol caraway, 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 it's lies because he was a famous drunk um. But yeah, that's that's that's how his his older brother described him at eighteen UM. Now,

by any accounts, Jim Booie was a pretty good frontiersman. Um. 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 uh and his brother John wrote that he developed a particularly painful way of hunting bears uh 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 filled 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 it snout in the stumps. 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 with iron spikes gouged into its mouth. And then while the bear was like in horrible agony trying to free itself and blinded because it's head stuck in a stump, he would just shoot it in the head. I mean, I feel like he went a step Barbara for that, but

you know, it's different times, I guess. So, yeah, that's the kind of hunter Jim is. He's a he's a a cunning man and good at surviving, but also clearly uh not against horrific cruelty. Um even like I mean, even amongst sort of the ways you hear about people trapping,

that's pretty rough. Uh yeah. So uh. He was very successful at living on the frontier um, and he made enough money that after two years living this way, he'd saved up three hundred dollars to use as a down payment on the land he'd been squatting on um and he had enough left over from that nest dagg 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 loanie was able to gain from whoever issued the loan. Um 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 um and And Jim Bowie was good initially at least at convincing people that he was worth taking a risk on. Before long, Using only the 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 they're on rare occasion, when there were too many glasses in 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 elegent way to put that. Like, Once he got drunk and kissed him off. He would fight you

till he couldn't fight you anymore. Yeah, it's this thing where like this is like this constant state of realization as you like go over the stories of like frontier legends and wild West heroes and off that, like, oh, if these people were around in twenty you would call them violent drunks who commit murder when they get wasted.

Like like in 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, Like 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 piste usually easily, especially when drinking um, which is it was more of a romantic thing back then that I think we tend to consider it. It's just it's fun. Yeah. We we didn't have terms like violent alcoholic back then. Instead, you were, uh, you were just known as being rambunctious and a man to respect. Didn't fear like that's what you called the guy who was really good with a gun and got drunken angry too often. There's that guy that's gonna feel 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, and also how how talented he is at using it. That part mixed in with the unpredictable is awesome. It's so good. You know what else, he's 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've had all of our sponsors, is their unpredictability with a firearm. We just throw one at them. See what happened. You can never predict it. Here's product. Al Right,

we are back and we're talking about Jim Booie. 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 had 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 eighteen nineteen, Long began making plans to invade Texas. Uh. 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 OWNUS Treaty. A lot of her being honest, Mexico was stealing in charges. Yeah, large swaths of texts. 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 Yeah, it's a lot of Texas is charm and a lot of what makes Texas is such a

bad place to be. Um. So you think one person is gonna tell all these dickads what to do? Okay, No, No, they don't even listen to each other. They're now you gonna listen to you? Ye Oh that everyone voted? Okay, okay, yeah, 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. It's just how it works. Yeah,

um so yeah, yeah. A lot of southern white dudes weren't happy that the US 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. Um So, this doctor James Long, started putting together a crude militia of what you would either call freedom fighters or violent extremists, depending on you know their complexion and your complexion and how you feel about complexions in general. Uh, and are about seventy five 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. But wait, white, we're going where? Sure 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 Nakodoches, one of every one of the three or four towns in Texas that every Texan elementary student learns how to spell. Um, it was late June, and Long and his men declared a new government and started proclaiming laws. Now, it was a general rule when white folks with guns in the middle of nowhere started announcing laws in this period of times, one of two things would happen. One would be a violent ship show, and two would be the United States

of America. Unfortunately, that had already happened, and so this turned into a violent ship show. Um yeah. So Long knew that his three hundred 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. Uh. And so for a couple of months he succeeded in drawing in a few hundred guys who

wanted very cheap land. Um 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. Um And and the various fights that Jim got into around now would have been his first taste of Mortal Kombat. But it was pretty obvious that Long was outmanned and outclassed by the Spanish authorities, and by October of night of eighteen nineteen,

they'd driven him and his men out of Nakodoches. 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 magadish this one time. Yeah, it's a write of passage for every Texas Texans. So Jim Bowie was a trailblazer in that hammered and they're like,

you need to leave down. I was like that, now this would not be the last time that James Bowie would try and fail to conquer Texas um. 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 and the other Filibusters just kind of went back to Louisiana and everything was fine like that. I mean, it's it's kind of like the Bundy's. Yeah, yeah, it is a little bit like that, yeah, with with

more gunfire than I heard, Yeah, with the Bundy's. So or Jim would return home and kind of got together with his brothers, John and Resin, and they all kind of agreed that, uh, they were ready to make a whole, big fucking pile of money. Um. 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. UM. Now, today that means cocaine. In nearly eighteen hundreds, it meant

enslaved human beings. Slavery was obviously a big business and a big part of the economy of the South, but by eighteen nineteen, 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 eighteen o eight. Now, some of this had been

due to moral pressure to in the Atlantic slave trade. Um, but it only happened because America's political leaders assumed that existing slaves would breed enough to you know, settled 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 obviously christ what that surprises, you know, 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 hime 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. Um. Jim Booie was looking at like the fact that, oh, you know, slaves aren't having enough babies to meet for the demands, so someone needs to bring in more people to enslave. Um. 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 the more he thought about it, like, hey, there's not enough

prisoners in my prison too for the stockholders to make money. Yeah. Yeah, he would have owned a private prison or at least invested in one if he 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 um. So, yeah, this is a complicated business. So I I I have

to explain some peculiar and some peculiarities of Louisiana law. First, so, slaves smuggling was a big business um 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. It had to erase, 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 ship 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 you captured a bunch of slaves, you just made a shipload

of money as the government. So the government had a real interest and actually people telling them where contraband enslaved human beings were, so they would pay a bounty on people who could turn in contract 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 in a 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 of things that you 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 eighteen eighteen eighteen nineteen, Lafitte and his pirates were particularly successful in stealing shiploads of enslaved people bound for South America, and Lafitte's barracks on Snake Island soon

held more than six hundred of these people. Now, can I just make a terrible just like one of his other projects, like scratching his head on the I like this place used to be a lot more fun. Um it sounds like all he cares about his money. Now, this is yeah, not what I had in mind when I signed up. It used to just be about the pillaging exactly. So. Around this same time, Jim Bowie had developed a bit of a reputation in this area um as a a rough customer and 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 writer, which what do you Understandly everyone around this time was a rough character, so everyone else to be like that guy's fucking. The average person in like the southeast Southwest in this period of time who could make it to twenty would have just wiped the floor with any given m M A fighter today, largely because they would have immediately pulled a knife. Yeah, well,

he said, I thought 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 was dumb. So Jim Billie was like really popular among like the whole area around Snake Island because he was just this this tough dude who would write alligators and ship who tried to evade Texas. He was a cool seen as

kind of a cool guy. So James, you know, his popularity eventually brings him into 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 shipload of slaves but a lot of them were sick um and so he just couldn't sell them um. 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 Booie came to visit the fit on Snake Island and took a look at his inventory, and he returned from the trip, got together with these brothers,

and together they launched a plan. So gen bow John Bowie, who was part of this plan, would later write, quote, we first purchased forty negroes from Lafitte at the rate of one dollar per pound, or an average of a hundred and forty dollars 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 award for informing and obtained the marshal sale for forty negroes, which entitled us to sell them within the United States. We continued to follow this business until we made sixty five thousand dollars. So you see what

the scam is here, Billy. They're buying slaves that are illegal to bring into the United States um from their pirate fringe, John Lafitte. And then they turned the slaves into 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 um 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 um 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, it was that. This was like the slavery con that that Jim Bowie made his fortune in. Wow. Yeah, it's it's like Robin drug dealers, but worse because there's not because you're still a terrible person. Yeah, it's 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 illegal, and so they found out found a way to take this horrible legal thing and also break the law while

doing it. Like it's yeah, we're doing slavery, but shady. Yeah what is that? How did you do that? 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 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

ducks and services that support this podcast. So we're back. Um. So, the Bowie 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 gonna quote now from William C. Davis's book Three Roads to the Alamo.

Quote James himself did the most dangerous work of conveying the contrabands through the swamps and bayous, bringing them in lots of forty 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 to know that safety, if not happiness, lay

with the Bowie's. 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 feet on one of his visits to Campeache that he rarely lost a slave because he was our and he knew they feared him, and stilling fear in others was something James Bowie did with ease. It sounds like, not with ease, like with pride. He's right, yeah, yeah, He's like, no, I have this gift, then 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 that. Yeah. I don't give a ship. It means nothing to me. It's like, yeah, people, people tell me it's a gift, but I issues 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, not one human being got harm. 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. 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 gotta funk 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 and detail. Um, but the the details we can synthesize that they kind of all have in common. Boiled 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 arrow were. So he just gets an unusually large knife.

Either his brother hasn't made for him, or he pays a guy to make it, but he winds up with his huge funk off knife. Um. Now 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. Um. 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. Um, and the reality is very different from that. Um Now. J Frank Adbe a historian who studied Bowie and produced a pretty fair biography of him in nineteen fifty seven noted big Jim Bowie and conveying smuggled slaves, armed himself with three or four knives 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 Resident could keep several knives moving in the air at the same time without allowing one to touch the ground. At twenty 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 eighteen seven, the infamous Sandbar fight. So it's amazing to me because a lot of people get stabbed to death and fights even today, and nobody cares about those fights, and they're kind of written down as like the result of thugs and criminals, um just having access to knives. Uh, But when a bunch of white dudes stab each other to death, this is what happens.

Um well, 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 eighteen twenties engaging in a series of land cons in Arkansas. Um 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 funk off. This is not too mad at that he did that for decade. It's like, is 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 known. Um. So he did this a bunch of Arkansas and it

piste off a lot of people. Um 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. UM. And at one point in the late eighteen twenties, 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 um 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 Right 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 prom 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 guide to death, and maybe stab his

friends to death for trying to stop him from stabbing a guided death, 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 funk Off knife to stab a man. So the sand Bar 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 sand bar between Louisiana and Mississippi. Dueling was actually illegal in both states, and because the sand bar wasn't really in either state, was a popular place for men to get together with their friends and try to murder other men. And they later used that same bluephole 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 um one camp was focused around two brothers named Wells and their friends, including Jim Bowie and the others. On the other side was a guy named Robert Crane,

a doctor named Thomas Maddox, and Bowie's old enemy Norris. Right. 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 eighteen seven, 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. Um, So they meet up there in the summer of eighteen seven. Against any of this at this point, No, No, it sounds like everyone's willing to meet at the sandbar. So, 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 again, two gives a ship 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 waved guns at each other in the nearby city of Alexandria first and like, so they all meet in the city near the sand bar 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 realized, oh, there's a feud got to

be happening. And so like when these guys meet up at the sands, yeah, that's exactly what this is. This is a fucking w w E 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. Um is kind of the the

in summary of what happens. So eventually, on July, like the two kind of ringleaders of both groups, uh Norris Right and a guy named Hall, agree to have a gunfight the sandbar, and two people show up to observe the fight. Yeah yeah, yeah, um, 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, I'm not ready to fight yet, but we're gonna have

a big fight in September. That's when we're gonna do it September. It's like a fucking I can't get over how much like the fucking w W E this is? Um. Yeah, So everybody kind of waits until the fall and then the alright, alright, okay, so we all come back in the fall. Yeah, So the aggrieved parties, I'll gather back at the sand bar in September nine seven to try to murder each other for reasons which again are completely unclear. It's very boredom seems to be the main driver in

all this. Now, officially the duel was between well and Maddox this time, UM, and everyone else was seconds, including Jim Booie. 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 onto the sandbar. So Wells and Maddox face off at ten 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 ten feet away. Um. 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 best baseball team finishes a game, like both sides convened 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 in holding each other, and an argument sparks up. And if we don't know exactly what happens, there's different stories.

One of them is that uh one of the doctor Doctor Maddox pulls out his gun and tries to shoot another guy and accidentally shoots Jim Bowie in the leg

Um three Roads. The Alamo claims that the fight started with 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 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 have to. I can't. I have to. I can't over emphasize how bad guns are in this period of time. Like these men are all firing multiple shots from tin foot distance and they can't fucking hit. That's what I'm gonna say. It's like it's I don't

think it's like a marksman problem. It's like a it's a main 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 ship. 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 proof killing tool, the gigantic funk 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 proper, pretty proper.

So Crane panics and he only he doesn't have a loaded gun, but he has an empty gun and it weighs like ten pounds because guns are big back then. So he throws it at Bowie's 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 hitting this guy in the face with. This is if we wrote this kick us out of the network, get out here. This is famous for being one of the most badass fights of the Old West. And it reads

like a fucking Binnie Hill skin. So he probably gives Bowie a concussion from this, Like nobody concussions weren't the thing back then. But he like he just based on the reports he would like this fox Bowie up getting hit in the head with this gun like really hurts. Him. Um. 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 duellists, 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 Right draws another pistol and aims at 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. 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. Yeah, that's so bad at shooting each other. So Right pulls his second pistol and Bowie yells at him to shoot and be damned, and Right 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 Right draws a third pistol and fires again and hits.

So he finally did hit somebody. Um So the ball passes through directly through Denny's hand in 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 and his lung and a fucking concussion charges Norris Right, waving a gigantic knife. He got about fifteen 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 Right 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 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 coast and repeatedly stabbed with sword canes 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 in the arms. In response, they stab him through the hands and the wrist. I'm gonna quote now from William C. David, his book on how the fight ended. Quote Bowie got himself up to a sitting position. Then in one lunge, he reached up to grab Norris Right by the collar and his right tried to straighten himself, he inadvertently helped raise Bowie

to a near standing position. As Bowie later told the story to Reson in Their Friend, he said in Wright's ear, now, Major, you die with a single savage thrust. He drove the knife through Right's chest, boasting afterwards that he twisted it to cut his heart strings. Ah, well he's not, he's not. That's not how that works. But yeah, he guts him is how most people related. Is he just he pulls this guy down while being stabbed and just opens his belly with his gigantic sword knife, and yeah, it kills

the ship out of him. Yeah. So Jim Bowie passes out immediately after stabbing Norris Right 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, Jimbowie 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 a common people to die in them. But the Sandbar fight became legend for one reason. Jim Bowie Davis writes that in typical frontier fights quote, the real fighters risked themselves only when they seem to have the advantage and happily ran to cover otherwise. But Booie, 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 he 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 when he doesn't what Bowie does, Like, Yeah, he because 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.

So yeah, there's also probably he's not the guy that like afterwards, while he's like healing, he's also enough the kind of guy I was, like, I got carried away. No, No, he was just like, yeah, come at me again. Yeah, you 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 Americas start talking about Jim Booie, and Booie'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 and the steady stream of well wishers who came by to talk to him. Um. 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. Um. And I found a fun right up on sort of the spread of the Booeye knife in the wake of this, by a site called the History Bandits, and it is 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 would have 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 at the time of it. 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 purchase Booie knives is a symbol of the frontier. Even backwoodsman who were used to such knives adopted the new terminology of the eighteen thirties

and requested buoy knives. It's by name, It's Smithy's from St. Louis to the Mexican border. The Red Rible, The Red River Herald of Necatochez, Louisiana, claimed that, with hyperbole, that all the steel in the country, it seemed, had immediately been converted into Booie knives. By eighteen thirty, the Booie knife became a staple at forgeries across the American continent. So that's cool. Yeah, it's just it's yeah, it's reassuring that America has always kind of been like this. Yeah,

it's fun. The right up I found on this actually compares the Booie Brothers in particular to Bear Grills Um, because Bear Girls 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 the knife companies like Gerber like, hey, what if we made a knife and stick your name on it, And sure enough, now they're incredibly pop You can find

them in any outdoorsman story and they're not bad knives. Um. I don't like the hill very much, but whatever, Uh, so in the Booie Like, what I find interesting about this right 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 Gruels has done. 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 energy to it. Well, it's the same area, 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

get killing each other. Yeah. So yeah, Jim Bowie, slave trader, land con artist, and 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 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 kukrie. You would want it to be a cookery kind of

like that. I really I'm enjoying the cookery. I like it a lot. Yeah, cookeries are nice. I enjoy the uh. I enjoy the the feel of a kukery. If I was going to have a Robert knife, I would want it to be I wanted 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'm more like a bayonet for an eighteen 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. If they ever give us the TV show, we could make

that happen. We could make that happen. All right, Well, um, if you want me to uh get my own branded knife, uh find bear girls on Twitter and send him pictures, send him your favorite Simpsons 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 Wayne Davis. Billy, you want to tell the people where they can find you? Yes, I at Billy Wayne Davis on Twitter and Instagraham. If I ever start touring again, we're allowed to bet bd tour dot com. And then I have a podcast about the people that make up cannabis communities and it's called Grown Local. In season one is based in Eugene, or

speaking of both the marijuana industry and Eugene, Oregon. A lot of people getting stabbed to death with large knives. Definitely lots of that, not in your podcast, necessarily, just in the industry and in Eugene, Oregon. Yeah, and probably not even related, no no, no, I mean yeah, alright, Episode done