Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  The myth of Bowie presenting a knife to Forrest has been dispensed with earlier as well, and the Durand work has been thoroughly scanned without finding any reference to Bowie or his knife. The whole episode may have been the invention of Forrest, who created the story of Bowie giving him a knife, and may just as likely have invented a duel tale to go with it that would lend added interest to the knife he owned. Though the pre-1861 variant of the story had Bowie and his opponent using rifles, and the later versions make it knives, both are tied by the fact that they are the only duel stories in which Bowie's opponent is a Spaniard, and the only ones in which the formalities of issuing challenges and the naming of weapons and places occur. All of the other Bowie duel stories are impromptu fights on the spur of the moment, growing out of cheating at gambling.

  The most influential account, in terms of its numerous and highly exaggerated offshoots and variants, comes from an unidentified writer signing himself only as “L.H.,” in the San Francisco Chronicle, February 28, 1881, and provides a small compendium of such stories. It is the chief—usually the sole—source for them in subsequent Bowie literature. The author began with what purported to be an eyewitness account of the Sandbar brawl. “I stood by the side of my father … and witnessed the fight in question,” he claims. If that was true, then he was describing events witnessed probably as a child, some fifty-three years earlier, and in 1881 must have been at least in his sixties. Everything in the account is wrong. He says that James and Rezin Bowie were natives of Maryland, rather than Kentucky and Tennessee; that they moved to Mississippi in 1821 rather than Louisiana many years earlier. He says that James Bowie and Robert Crain had a long-standing feud prior to the fight, of which there is no evidence, and places the actual brawl on the west bank of the river rather than the east. In the battle itself, Crane attacks Bowie with a sword cane rather than pistols, and then Bowie actually kills Crain—instead of Wright—with a sword cane instead of the big knife. All told, according to “L.H.,” six men were killed and fifteen wounded, whereas only two were really killed, and the whole number involved did not equal fifteen. There is more in a similar vein, but this should be more than sufficient to establish that “L.H.” had not the slightest clue of what he was writing about, and was either indulging in fiction for its own sake, or else was hopelessly senile by the time of writing.

  Thus it should be no surprise that none of the several other duel and fight stories he relates bear scrutiny. They are:

  Bowie finding a master brutally whipping a slave. “He seemed to have a natural disposition to protect the weak from the strong,” says the writer. Bowie took the whip from the brute and lashed him with it, and a duel ensued in which Bowie badly wounded the slave owner. In the end, Bowie paid for the man's medical treatment, and bought the slave from him at twice its value, then freed the black. since no names are mentioned, there is no way to verify any aspect of this tale, though anyone familiar with Bowie the businessman and slave dealer will find it unlikely that he would ever pay a premium for a black, and even more so that he would emancipate a slave. The story is repeated almost verbatim by an anonymous writer in American Notes and Queries 2 (June 2, 1888), 50. Effie Harrison Snyder, in her wildly inaccurate 1931 St. Joseph Tensas Gazette article, offers a garbled variant of this in which Bowie finds a white man whipping an Indian woman, and saves her. Thorp, Bowie-Knife, 133, gives a heavily embellished version of this episode.

  Bowie finding the son of Mississippi Governor William Lattimore being cheated of his father's cotton crop money by a Natchez gambler named Strudivant. Bowie enters the game, detects Sturdivant cheating and confronts him, then wins back all of the Lattimore money and returns it to him. The aggrieved Sturdivant demanded a duel with knives with the two men bound together by their left hands. In the fight Bowie disabled the gambler but refrained from killing him. For a start, William Lattimore was a Mississippi congressman, but never governor. Secondly, no record of a Sturdivant appears in any of the Mississippi or Louisiana censuses for 1810-1830, nor in Natchez property tax records or county title records, even though embellishments to the story date the event in 1829 and have him owning and operating several taverns and brothels. He may have been a genuine character named John or Jack Sturdivant, but or this there is no certainly. the same embellishers make Lattimore the elder a neighbor of Bowie's though Lattimore according to census records and other documents lived in Amite County, Mississippi, more than one hundred miles from Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, where Bowie then lived. There was a David Lattimore who lived near Natchez in those years, and also held property across the river in Condordia, but no evidence connects him with William Lattimore or with this spurious story. John Evans, “The Bowie-Sturdivant Duel,” Alamo Journal 65 (February 1989); 3-5, accepts all of the embellished accounts of the story uncritically, adds nothing to the story, and does not even consult the original source in the “L.H.” article. It must be emphasized that though this tale is widely published in many versions, all are based on the “L.H.” article, which has already been shown to be heavily fictionalized or else so inaccurate of memory as to be dismissed out of hand. It should also be noted that the theme of Bowie detecting a card cheat, winning back from him ill-gotten gains, returning them to the victim, and then fighting the gambler, is a recurring theme, quite probably based on the original 1850 Houston Democratic Telegraph and Texas Register story about the spurious Laffite encounter. Quite probably this Sturdivant story derives from that 1850 article.

  Andrew Marschalk, editor of a Natchez newspaper, publishing an unflattering article about Bowie, and the aggrieved subject appearing in his office with a whip and two pistols and giving the editor the choice of being horsewhipped, or else fighting a duel. Marschalk immediately retracts his story, and the two amicably settle the affair over a brandy. Marschalk was quite definitely a very real character who edited five different newspapers in or around Natchez, and was known to be contentious. However, Marschalk was all but out of the newspaper business by the late 1820's when Bowie would have acquired sufficient notoriety to be the subject of any editorials, and none of the surviving issues of his papers—nor any of the many Natchez newspapers—carry a single article about Bowie. Indeed, the only time his name is known to have appeared in a Natchez newspaper was in the few references to him as “Mr. Bowie” in the Ariel and others when they reported on the 1827 Sandbar fight. The Bowie story in “L.H.” is almost certainly a confusion of a real incident in 1815—when Bowie was just nineteen—when George Poindexter caned Marshchalk in his office for a libelous article.

  A. J. Sowell in the aforementioned May 4, 1917, San Antonio Light gives another duel story that takes place on an unnamed steamboat, in which a Major Ryan and wife were on their way to New Orleans when two gamblers plied him with drink and cheated him out of his money. Bowie enters the game and wins it all back, and when he catches the two sharps cheating, a fight ensues, and he kills both of them with his knife. This is an obvious variation on the original Laffite story, interesting in that Sowell goes on to tell the Richardson/Musgrove variation in the same article, both myths having a common origin. The original 1850 newspaper article has now led to two different strains of descendant myths, with the names of the victims engrafted onto the legend, and a host of other details, including extensive conversation, that were not a part of the original story.

  In the James Bowie Biographical File (DRT) there is a peculiar typewritten manuscript narrative of twelve pages, author and date unknown. Internal evidence indicates that it is a revision done in 1936 or later of an earlier version written sometime after 1911, and titled “Lure of the Frontier.” The first three pages are almost verbatim drawn from a newspaper account identified by internal evidence as being by James Madison Wells, “James Bowie: Something of His Romantic Life and Tragic Death,” published post 1912 but obviously written many years earlier (Bowie Biographical File, DRT). However, the balance is certainly not written by Wells, for the author speaks of moving to San Antonio in his boyhood in
company with his father, and there getting acquainted with the aged Madame Candelaria, whereas Wells remained in Louisiana all his life. The Wells account, both in the post-1912 newspaper article and in the post-1936 typewritten version, includes an account of a fight during a card game between Bowie and twins named Parker, one of whom was his rival for a young woman. Bowie killed them both and was tried and acquitted. This has been discussed in chapter 4, note 36, and largely dismissed, since none of the characters mentioned in the story can be found to have been living in Louisiana or Mississippi during the years 1810-30, when such an event would have taken place. The “Lure of the Frontier” manuscript also contains a story, attributed to Perry Barksdale, the source of Wells's account of the above fight, that does not appear in the post-1912 Wells account, and thus may be an addition by the unknown author of the balance of the post-1936 account. It has Bowie engaging in a duel with a Frenchman, the “Count de Wantein,” over the daughter of a Spanish nobleman named Montejo of New Orleans. Bowie dangerously wounded the count and was painfully injured himself, but lost the women, who decided to enter a convent. Again, no Montejo appears in any of the Louisiana censuses for the years 1810-30, nor is it possible to identify any Barksdale in Louisiana at the time, even thought he was supposed to have been close friend of Bowie's for many years. The supposed Barksdale told the anonymous writer and/or Wells these stories in San Antonio sometime after the writer moved there as a boy, which would date the original telling of the stories to around the 1880s, since Madame Candelaria is spoken of as an old woman at the time. Thus they were told fifty years or more after the fact—if they were based on genuine events. The facts that they survive only in thirdhand accounts, written as much as another fifty years or more after being heard, were supposedly told to a boy by a man whose existence cannot be verified, and involved several other people who cannot be found in any records, all mitigate against their having any validity.

  One other near-fight story should be mentioned, and this is the supposed episode on a stagecoach somewhere in the East when Bowie and Henry Clay shared the coach with a young woman and a rude brute who refused to quit smoking his cigar when the woman asked him to. Bowie intervened, drawing his knife and threatening violence until the other man threw out his cigar. Speer and Brown, Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 436-37, published the story in 1881 as told by William McGinley of Kansas, who claimed to be the only other passenger on the same coach. The story was supposedly told by Clay to many people, including Jefferson Davis, and eight years later someone identified only as “Collector” of Butte, Montana Territory, sent the supposed Davis version of the story to American Notes and Queries, which published it in vol. 3 (July 27, 1889), 155. This version says that the offending smoke was a pipe rather than a cigar, and that the only passengers were Clay, Bowie, the woman, and the brute—McGinley has somehow disappeared. There is no contemporary record in the papers of either Clay or Davis, or the recollections of their associates, to verify that either ever told this story, and its suspect nature has already been discussed earlier in this work.

  Once more, it needs to be remembered that Rezin Bowie, the one person in the world closest to James, stated unequivocally in his August 24, 1838, letter (“The Bowie Knife,” Nile's Register 55 September 29, 1838, 70) that “neither col. James Bowie nor myself, at any period of our lives, ever had a duel with any person soever.” Moreover, he also stated that the only occasion on which James Bowie ever used a knife as a weapon was in the Sandbar brawl. While James Bowie may have been cavalier with the truth, no evidence has surfaced to indicate that his brother Rezin was anything other than truthful. More to the point, if James ever had been in a duel, the ethic in the South at the time would have made it something to burnish rather than tarnish his reputation, and Rezin, so watchful of his brother's memory, would have had no conceivable reason to try to deny any such feats of heroism. And certainly, if James Bowie was ever in a fight or duel, the one person guaranteed to know of it would be his most intimate confidant and friend, his brother Rezin. consequently, in the complete absence of verifiable and directly contemporary evidence to the contrary, it has to be concluded that all the above duel and fight stories, as well as others omitted, are false, either the result of mistake and exaggeration, or of the conscious frontier myth-making prevalent in the 1840s-1870s. This is not to say that James Bowie was not capable of being in a duel, or other spontaneous “chancemedleys” like the Sandbar, nor that he may not have been in one or even several for which reliable record has not survived. If ever there was a man willing to fight, it was him. But if he was in any such encounters, all record remains lost to history, while all of the accounts that have been, and continue to be, published are myths and fabrications.

  Similarly hard to pin down are the facts about the West portrait—purportedly of Bowie—revealed by his grandnephew John S. Moore in 1889. The identification is probably correct, but problems exist, not least the fact that Moore was born in 1846 and never saw his granduncle. Almost everything members of Rezin's family wrote about James from the 1870s onward has proved to be chiefly based on erroneous stories they gleaned from newspapers, showing that they had no real oral tradition passed down in the family. Yet it can only be from family members—or his own assumption—that Moore derived his identification of this portrait. His mother, Matilda, or her sister Elve might have told him, but they saw James infrequently after 1826, and were in their early and mid-teens at the latest when they last possibly saw him, probably in 1833. The only reliable source would have been Rezin's widow, who certainly knew James well, and who lived until 1876, long enough to pass identification on to her grandchildren. Thus it seems most likely that this is indeed James.

  However, in the full portrait the man holds the hilt of a militia officer's sword in his right hand. There is no record of James ever serving as an officer in any Louisiana militia, while his brief service in Texas with the honorific title of “colonel” was too hectic, and too brief, for him to have had the portrait painted in late 1835. Moreover, despite contemporaneous references to him carrying a pistol and the knife, no source puts a sword in his possession. If he did own one, it would have been a sword cane of the kind affected by civilian men of his time and place, such as the one with which Norris Wright nearly killed him in the Sandbar brawl. Significantly, his brother Rezin had been an officer of the Avoyelles Mounted Rifles in the 1820s. He still had what he called his “arms & militia accoutrements” in 1832, and certainly these included a sword. As of this writing, Rezin's descendants still own not only this portrait— and one identified as Rezin—but also a militia officer's sword they believe to have been James's. In light of the above, however, it seems more likely that the sword belonged to Rezin. In some features it resembles the one in the portrait, and if it is, then logic suggests at least the possibility that it is Rezin in the painting, not James. Keeping in mind the misinformation about James and Rezin unwittingly disseminated by the latter's grandchildren, none of whom ever met either of them, it has to be considered possible that family tradition included a confusion about the identity of this and other portraits. In fact family tradition later attributed this and two more paintings to G.P.A. Healy, which is all but impossible in the case of the others, and highly improbable with this one. The Healy attribution has also been questioned by the National Portrait Gallery.

  69. William B. Worthen, “The Term ‘Bowie Knife,’”, Knife World 21 (November 1995): 15.

  70. These statements come from Thorp, Bowie Knife, 44, 70-71, a notoriously unreliable source on Bowie himself, and have not been verified by the author.

  71. Kuykendall, “A Short Review of My Life,” December 1, 1849, Bancroft Library.

  72. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, P. 541.

  73. Ibid., p.631.

  74. New York United States Telegraph, May 19, 1836.

  75. New York Evening Star, April 22, 1836.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The published literature on these three men, and especially on the last da
ys of their lives, is extensive, though of vastly varying quality. Only one previous book-length attempt has been made to produce a combined biography of them, Virgil A. Baugh's Rendezvous at the Alamo: highlights in the Lives of Bowie, Crockett, and Travis (1960). It is throughout a careless and inaccurate work, casually researched at best, and mainly a reiteration of the tired old myths and legends, especially in the case of Bowie and Travis. J. Milton Nance's “Rendezvous at the Alamo: The Place of Bowie, Crockett, and Travis in Texas History,” West Texas Historical Association Year Book 63 (1987), is almost equally unsatisfactory, and unduly critical of Travis in particular.