Speaker 1: M podcasts. This is Robert Evans and that was the
Speaker 1: introduction from Behind the Bastards, which is a podcast, which
Speaker 1: is why I said the word podcasts. Today with me
Speaker 1: in the room that is a digital room and not
Speaker 1: a physical room because of the plague. Is Mr Billy
Speaker 1: Wayne Davis. Everybody, Hey, Billy, how are you doing? How's
Speaker 1: your quarantine going? It's doing pretty good exercising. Yeah. When
Speaker 1: I saw you last over Skype, you look like normal Billy,
Speaker 1: and then suddenly this week you have a mustache and
Speaker 1: a headband. It's coming together. It's been an interesting quarantine
Speaker 1: week for you. I'm embracing it. You've got a cookery now,
Speaker 1: which is a special type of curb Nepalese blade very nice.
Speaker 1: I want to the Gerber to see if I liked it,
Speaker 1: and then now I'm gonna get into Apoll and get
Speaker 1: one proper. Yeah, I have a Nepalese blade smith that
Speaker 1: I can point you towards. This is a podcast about
Speaker 1: the worst pill in all of history. And Billy, you
Speaker 1: and I have developed a couple of different niches for ourselves.
Speaker 1: We're we're we have a lot of niches. One of
Speaker 1: those niches is medical scammers. And this is not a
Speaker 1: medical scammer episode because our other niche is weirdos from
Speaker 1: the South. Today, we're going to talk about one of
Speaker 1: the South's great, all time famous weirdo bastards, Billy Wayne Davis.
Speaker 1: What do you know about Jim Booie? I know the name,
Speaker 1: Do you know what I mean? Like growing up in
Speaker 1: the South, You're just like, yeah, you hear it. I
Speaker 1: don't know what he There's like, I don't know exactly
Speaker 1: what you did. You've probably heard of I'm gonna guess
Speaker 1: everybody listening to this has at least heard of a
Speaker 1: bowie knife, which is a great kind of knife, one
Speaker 1: of my favorite knives. It's basically a small sword that
Speaker 1: is a dagger because we call it one instead of
Speaker 1: a small sword. UM, with a specific kind of curved
Speaker 1: in point to the top of the blade. And it's
Speaker 1: it's great for it was initially It's great for hunting
Speaker 1: and skinning animals, and it's also great for waving around
Speaker 1: drunkenly at a house party if you're me and nineteen
Speaker 1: years old. Um. The one thing I am about him
Speaker 1: is the the giant mutton had the horrifying facial hair.
Speaker 1: He had gigantic mutton chops and he died at the Alumo.
Speaker 1: Now I was I was a Texas boy. So in
Speaker 1: in Texas school, you have a special class called Texas History,
Speaker 1: and every Texas kid learns a lot about Jim Booie
Speaker 1: and it's all wrong because they only teaches about Jim
Speaker 1: Booie at Texas School. I know who Jim Bowie. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: yes I do. I just came back. It froze and
Speaker 1: everything came back, and then you said the Alumo and
Speaker 1: I was like immediately on his motherfucker's Yes. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: Jim Booie is a giant piece of ship because this
Speaker 1: is my show. But he's also like a frontier legend,
Speaker 1: like he's one of those he's like David Crockett Um
Speaker 1: or like wild Bill Hickock, like he's one of those
Speaker 1: like wild West legends. So this is gonna be a
Speaker 1: hoot of a tale. Um And yeah, let's just get
Speaker 1: into it. So h James Bowie Um was born on
Speaker 1: March tenth, uh in Logan County, Kentucky, in seventeen nineties six,
Speaker 1: probably because again in Kentucky in seventeen ninety six, nobody
Speaker 1: was super good at like birth certificates and the like. Um,
Speaker 1: but that's that's a good guess as to when he
Speaker 1: was born three or four days ago. Yeah, yeah, he
Speaker 1: came into the world sometime round round about. Then it
Speaker 1: was the year when we had that big flood on
Speaker 1: the river. Yeah, that's kind of how people talked about
Speaker 1: ship like that back then. So yeah, his brother gives
Speaker 1: March ten six is as James Bowie's birthdays. Older brother
Speaker 1: John gives that as the birthdate. And uh, John is
Speaker 1: kind of the source of a lot of our information
Speaker 1: on Jim Bowie's early life. But John and every other
Speaker 1: member of the Bowie family are liars and unreliable narrators.
Speaker 1: So it's really we really take this all with a
Speaker 1: grain of salt. I know people like that and they
Speaker 1: tell you that liars do it. Hey, now I'm gonna
Speaker 1: tell you the story. But keep in mind, I make
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff up. Keep in mind, what would
Speaker 1: the moonshine? I can't keep much much together about my
Speaker 1: own back story. Yeah, the Booe families a bit like that,
Speaker 1: and they have financial motives for telling a bunch of
Speaker 1: saying a bunch of fun ship about Jim Bullie. But
Speaker 1: I don't think they have much in the way of
Speaker 1: financial motives about lying about his birthdates. That's probably more
Speaker 1: or less accurate, at least as well as they could
Speaker 1: remember it. So uh Jim was the ninth of ten
Speaker 1: children born to Resin, which I think was just sort
Speaker 1: of so basically our easy I n is how his
Speaker 1: dad's first name was spelled, and it was supposed to
Speaker 1: be Reason, but they weren't great at spelling in Kentucky
Speaker 1: back in the seventeen hundreds, so they wrote it out
Speaker 1: as Resin Um. So he was this Yeah, you know what,
Speaker 1: not bad for modern Kentucky spelling they're doing right, You
Speaker 1: get the gist of it. So, yeah, he was the
Speaker 1: son of Resin Boo and uh An Elvy Booi and
Speaker 1: his parents came to the United States as part of
Speaker 1: a massive Scottish migration across Appalachia and into the Old
Speaker 1: South Old South. The Booey family were basically the archetypal
Speaker 1: early White Americans pioneers down to the core of their marrow.
Speaker 1: Resin had a habit of moving on to wild land
Speaker 1: in the frontier, developing it by building homes and orchards
Speaker 1: and stuff, and then when other people would come in
Speaker 1: and move in around him. He would get angry because
Speaker 1: he didn't like being around other people. He wanted to
Speaker 1: be out in the middle of nowhere, and so he
Speaker 1: moved somewhere else and start building a homestead again until
Speaker 1: civilization or whatever caught up with him. This was kind
Speaker 1: of like how Jim Bowie's dad liked to live first
Speaker 1: house slipper. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of what he's doing.
Speaker 1: He's like gentrifying. Yeah, he's like he's basically gentrifying, like
Speaker 1: the woods. Yeah yeah, but then he hates it and
Speaker 1: he's got it. Like, yeah, you could call them early hipsters.
Speaker 1: But instead of like you know, enjoying artists lofts and
Speaker 1: uh artisanal coffee houses, he liked fighting bears with machetes. Um,
Speaker 1: every time I see alize of place, these people shut up.
Speaker 1: That's kind of resins attitude. So the point of making
Speaker 1: is he he wasn't just going about this like make
Speaker 1: a home and a living for himself and his family,
Speaker 1: like he needed to be at the bleeding edge of
Speaker 1: the frontier. And so Jim Booie's early life as a
Speaker 1: child consisted of many moves. You know, they'd spend a
Speaker 1: couple of years somewhere, and then his father would grow
Speaker 1: frustrated by the fact that there were human beings within
Speaker 1: a half mile of them, and so they'd move somewhere else. Liked.
Speaker 1: I realized, like these people, there's a there's a level
Speaker 1: of even though all these people are spoilers, slave owners
Speaker 1: and colonizers and monsters, there's a level of respect you
Speaker 1: have to have to anyone who is like, there's people
Speaker 1: within a mile of me, I'm gonna go move out
Speaker 1: to the middle of nowhere with an hatchet and build
Speaker 1: another home, like like they're they're tough, is Yeah. I
Speaker 1: just keep thinking, I'm like, I'm not as stubborn as
Speaker 1: I thought. There there's there's a TikTok r. That's that's
Speaker 1: that's like where the wife comes in, it's like, honey,
Speaker 1: we have to move. The neighbor said, hi, and that's
Speaker 1: these people. Yeah, yeah, that's resin Booie friends, Billy, what
Speaker 1: were you saying? I'm gonna call you booeye a couple
Speaker 1: of times and as I'm certain I like it, I
Speaker 1: don't remember, Oh good, fantastic. Well, uh yeah. So now
Speaker 1: the Booie family, when Jim was young, tended to live
Speaker 1: all the spots they pick. We're along the Mississippi River,
Speaker 1: and they basically moved down the Mississippi as like people
Speaker 1: filled up the area above them. UM and moving dot
Speaker 1: day for the Booey family meant they would build by
Speaker 1: hand a flat bottom boat, toss all of their ship
Speaker 1: onto it, and then sail down the Mississippi to find
Speaker 1: a new place to live. So that's what. That's what
Speaker 1: like the U haul of the day is, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: just wake up here. Ship Dad's boat. Dad's making a boat.
Speaker 1: God damn it. Yeah. Now Will Jim Bowie's first memories
Speaker 1: probably would have been in the Twapay Township in what
Speaker 1: is now Missouri uh and what was then still under
Speaker 1: French control and part of their new Madrid district now.
Speaker 1: The name Twapati came from the original inhabitants of the land,
Speaker 1: the Apple Creek band of the Shawnee tribe. They'd been
Speaker 1: forced out by white men via unspeakable violence and disease,
Speaker 1: and young Jim would go on to spend much of
Speaker 1: his childhood playing in camps that they had abandoned all
Speaker 1: throughout the forests and swamps around Twapty Township. UM. Now.
Speaker 1: His earliest memories from age four to six would have
Speaker 1: been pretty relaxed. Bowie family children weren't expected to work
Speaker 1: much at that age, and Jim would have spent much
Speaker 1: of his time relatively unsupervised in the middle of the woods. Um.
Speaker 1: The Booey men were in general uh given to spending
Speaker 1: a lot of time alone in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1: Jim's formal education would have been basically non existent. His
Speaker 1: mother Elvi, taught her children the alphabet, but that was
Speaker 1: about all she knew, so that was about all they learned. Um.
Speaker 1: After two years in Twopity, it got too developed for
Speaker 1: resident and the family moved now. During this time, much
Speaker 1: of the southeast was still run and owned by France,
Speaker 1: and the French government saw Americans as an ally in
Speaker 1: their endless, bloody war against English people, which is the
Speaker 1: only war that really matters in my opinion. That's that's yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: they were happy to allow Americans to settle in the
Speaker 1: Louisiana territory, and they offered generous terms on land grants
Speaker 1: for them to do so. The Bowie family kept moving south,
Speaker 1: and by eighteen twelve they'd staked out a claim on
Speaker 1: buyou vermillion in the Atta Kappas parish just south of
Speaker 1: opelousas Uh. They got into the timber cutting business, and
Speaker 1: by now Jim was coming up into a young adult,
Speaker 1: so he was able to help the family business, as
Speaker 1: did all of his many brothers. The Bowie boys were close,
Speaker 1: and for most of his life, Jim Bowie's primary business
Speaker 1: partners would be his kin. He was raised with a
Speaker 1: love of exploration and constant motion, as well as an
Speaker 1: abiding appreciation for owning enslaved human beings. His grandfather had
Speaker 1: owned people, as had his father. The Bowies weren't but
Speaker 1: they did not and did not have large fields full
Speaker 1: of enslaved people, but they kept small families of field
Speaker 1: hands enslave to help them with their work. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna read a quote now from the book Three Roads
Speaker 1: to the Alamo that describes sort of how slavery was
Speaker 1: practiced within the Bowie family. It's gonna sound like it's
Speaker 1: making a different point than it is at first, but
Speaker 1: just just listen to the whole quote. Typically, for land
Speaker 1: owned by small farmer slaveholders, Bowie plantations enjoyed benign, even
Speaker 1: familial relations between blacks and whites. They certainly wore for
Speaker 1: where for Uncle Reza, who never married, but who fathered
Speaker 1: a son named James by a slave mistress around sometime
Speaker 1: around seventeen ninety, and thereafter openly acknowledged him, gave him
Speaker 1: his freedom and the family name, and brought him to
Speaker 1: Louisiana with the rest of the clan. The Black James
Speaker 1: Bowie remained in cattle cata Hula while the rest moved south.
Speaker 1: For years to come, he steadily did land and loan
Speaker 1: business with both John Senior and Junior, even buying and
Speaker 1: selling slaves himself, and achieved some minor position in the
Speaker 1: community near Sicily Island, wherever Bowie blood flowed, clanned loyalty followed.
Speaker 1: In later years, the family were remembered well stories of
Speaker 1: resins Young Uh, stories of resins Young James's closeness to
Speaker 1: an old slave woman named Mandy, of the little kindnesses
Speaker 1: he did for her, and of the advice she passed
Speaker 1: on to the boy. There was never any question that
Speaker 1: the Buoye slaves were property, though, and with the exception
Speaker 1: of a few favorites like old Mandy, they were usually
Speaker 1: sold with the land whenever a buoy moved on. So
Speaker 1: you've got a really complicated relationship with slaves here. To
Speaker 1: the point where some of the Boweymen have children, um
Speaker 1: with with their slaves, and those children are seen as
Speaker 1: Buoy's and are generally live lives as freed people. Um.
Speaker 1: And you have like certain older slaves that are beloved
Speaker 1: and considered almost a part of the family, but also
Speaker 1: almost um includes a lot of wiggle room. And as
Speaker 1: much as the Buoys pretended to have familiar relations with
Speaker 1: their slaves, they sold them, um whenever they would move,
Speaker 1: because these people were in the end property to them.
Speaker 1: And this is kind of like, this is a pretty
Speaker 1: normal sort of master slave relationship to exist in the
Speaker 1: era at the time with among people who are moving
Speaker 1: a lot like we don't we mainly talk about sort
Speaker 1: of the old plantation system, but that hadn't really gotten
Speaker 1: going in a big way at this point. Um. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that's kind of how the Booey family dealt with slavery. Um.
Speaker 1: It's it's yeah, I don't know, it's weird, it sucks,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it was bad. It's just it's very clear
Speaker 1: they've viewed them as livestock. They've used that's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's more messed up than even just that though, because
Speaker 1: you know, the buoys were a close knit family. You
Speaker 1: had a lot of different uncles and brothers all living
Speaker 1: together with their families, and when one of them would
Speaker 1: make another human being with a slave, that that person
Speaker 1: was considered to be a buoy and a member of
Speaker 1: the family. Um, but that person's black cousins and and
Speaker 1: and you know, half brothers and stuff would be sold
Speaker 1: off as property. So it's this it's really kind of
Speaker 1: weird to wrap your head around. I don't even know.
Speaker 1: I can't even really get into the head of the
Speaker 1: people who would comfortably do that, who could like recognize that, like, well,
Speaker 1: this one's got my blood, so he's family, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna treat him like family. But these other people who
Speaker 1: have are related to him, but not to me. I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna sell like a dishwasher. It's really strange. It's
Speaker 1: such a weird flip of the coin in their head
Speaker 1: where they've made this is the line for us. It's bizarre. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's hard for me to get my head around in anyway.
Speaker 1: And I should note here that because I my longtime
Speaker 1: co worker uh is Sore and Bowie, I'm going to
Speaker 1: regularly pronounce the Bowie name in a number of different ways,
Speaker 1: and it's going to frustrate people and they can just
Speaker 1: they can just deal with it. Yeah, deal with it people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just gonna happen. Sorry. Yeah, So the Bowie family
Speaker 1: patriarch had to kill other human beings at least once
Speaker 1: while the Bowie boys were children. When the family moved
Speaker 1: to Louisiana, they found squatters on their land. A disagreement
Speaker 1: in suit, and Resin killed one of the squatters. He
Speaker 1: was jail. Yeah, yeah, and this was not uncommon because, like,
Speaker 1: land ownership was kind of a murky idea back then,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, so was the idea of squatting too,
Speaker 1: where you're just say in court you're not you're yeah,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna see me in court. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: shoot ye right now. Yeah. So Residin killed one of
Speaker 1: these squatters and like it went to trial and he
Speaker 1: got jailed in the wake of the fight while they
Speaker 1: were waiting for a trial, and his wife actually got
Speaker 1: a bunch of guns together and one of her slaves
Speaker 1: and busted him out of jail. So this would have
Speaker 1: been a pretty early memory of Jim's Booie is his
Speaker 1: like mom and one of their slaves busting their dad
Speaker 1: out of jail for murdering a guy. Um, yeah, so
Speaker 1: that's cool. That's that's that that puts an imprint on
Speaker 1: your foundation as a person. I think, yeah, that the
Speaker 1: law is something that you can manipulate via having enough guns.
Speaker 1: I think would have been yeah. Yeah. So Jim's their
Speaker 1: brother also named Resin, left home to go have dangerous
Speaker 1: adventures when he was about nineteen, and this was desperately
Speaker 1: hard for young Jim because he was very close to
Speaker 1: his brother. A few years later, when the War of
Speaker 1: eighteen twelve came to Louisiana, Jim was finally old enough
Speaker 1: to follow Resin when he enlisted. Uh James, another one
Speaker 1: of the Bowie brothers, described Resin Jr. As a perfect
Speaker 1: rowdy and Jim hisself was noted to be even wilder
Speaker 1: and even less thoughtful than his older brother. They were
Speaker 1: both very excited for their chance to go off and
Speaker 1: kill English people. Tragically, they arrived too late. The war
Speaker 1: ended without them having to fire a shot. The Bullie
Speaker 1: brothers were still in the militia, though, and they remained
Speaker 1: in it for a couple of months after the battle,
Speaker 1: taking on boring patrol duties and spending their off duty
Speaker 1: time in the city of New Orleans. Somebody, we'll hang
Speaker 1: out for a couple of moments. Yeah, yeah, that's basically
Speaker 1: what happens. But they don't get a chance to shoot anybody,
Speaker 1: and they muster out with about twenty one dollars each
Speaker 1: for their troubles. So yeah, that's that's kind of Jim's
Speaker 1: a man now, like he he doesn't get his chance
Speaker 1: to murder anybody, but he's got twenty one dollars in
Speaker 1: his pocket. He's like seventeen years old. That's as much
Speaker 1: of an adulthood as you, um, you get at that
Speaker 1: that period in time and his high school graduation and
Speaker 1: in New Orleans. That's a good place to be seventeen
Speaker 1: with the pocket full of money. That is a good
Speaker 1: place to be then and now, well no, not now
Speaker 1: because of the coronavirus, but then yeah, yeah. Uh so
Speaker 1: Jim was frustrated at the fact that his war experience
Speaker 1: hadn't ended with him getting to shoot anybody. Um, but
Speaker 1: he also, you know, it was exciting still. You know,
Speaker 1: he got to do some patrols and stuff as part
Speaker 1: of the militia. He got to get wasted in New
Speaker 1: Orleans and his taste of being out in the world
Speaker 1: made it impossible for him to return home. Um so
Speaker 1: he took to the same basic tactic as the men
Speaker 1: his father had murdered a couple of years back, and
Speaker 1: started squatting on a patch of land above Bayou Booth
Speaker 1: in Opalosis h James Bowie, Jim's older there, and I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: The Booey names are all very complicated because there's multiple
Speaker 1: James and multiple Resins and John's. It's very frustrated. We
Speaker 1: forgot what we name the other one. We named him
Speaker 1: the same one. The feeling you get from the Bowie
Speaker 1: brothers names is that they were expecting. The parents were
Speaker 1: expecting most of them to die, and then they didn't
Speaker 1: because the Bowies tended to be pretty tough, and so
Speaker 1: you wind up with a bunch of kids. We have
Speaker 1: the same fucking name name James. Yeah. We didn't expect
Speaker 1: as many of them would make it eight teen, as
Speaker 1: did I'm gonna make a boat. There's people over here,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, so. Uh. James Bowie, another one of Jim's
Speaker 1: another one of Jim Bowie's older brothers, would later describe
Speaker 1: eighteen year old Jim Bowie this way. Quote he was Yeah, sorry,
Speaker 1: John Bowie, Jim's older Ye, Jesus, I'm sorry. The booing
Speaker 1: names are so fucking competent. How many siblings does he
Speaker 1: have to? They all have weird he has Tim has Tim?
Speaker 1: Are they all? Jim just sucks? Jim? John Right, there's
Speaker 1: a couple. There's a resident in there, Yeah, resident Jr.
Speaker 1: It's very frustrating. But Jim Bowie's older brother would later
Speaker 1: describe Jim at eighteen this way quote. He was young, proud, poor,
Speaker 1: and ambitious, without any rich family connections or influential fringe
Speaker 1: to aid him in the battle of life. After reaching
Speaker 1: the age of maturity. He was a stout, rather raw
Speaker 1: boned man of six ft height, with a hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty pounds, and about as well made as any man
Speaker 1: I ever saw. His hair was light colored, not quite red.
Speaker 1: His eyes were gray, rather deep set in his head,
Speaker 1: very keen and penetrating in their glance. His complexion was fair,
Speaker 1: his cheekbones rather high. Taken together, he was a manly,
Speaker 1: fine looking person, and by many of the fair ones
Speaker 1: he was called handsome. The fair ones or women he
Speaker 1: was possessed of, and his brother a little bit Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, you get the idea that maybe some boowie
Speaker 1: brothers got up to some some things. They were in
Speaker 1: French country. It wasn't weird good looking brother. I got
Speaker 1: some sexy brothers, and I know from sexy brothers. He
Speaker 1: was possessed of an open, frank disposition, with a rather
Speaker 1: good temper unless aroused by some insult, when the displays
Speaker 1: of his anger were terrible and frequently terminated in some
Speaker 1: tragical scene. So he was a friendly guy unless he
Speaker 1: got angry, in which case he got really violent. That
Speaker 1: he had a pretty fair temper unless he made him mad.
Speaker 1: That's what he just said. That's literally what he's saying. Oh,
Speaker 1: I forgot. You just learned the alphabet I forgot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's your only education. Uh. He was never known to
Speaker 1: abuse a conquered enemy, or to impose upon the weak
Speaker 1: and defenseless. A man of very strong social feelings. He
Speaker 1: loved his friends with all the ardor of youth, and
Speaker 1: hated his enemies and their friends with all the rancor
Speaker 1: of the Indian. He was social and playing with all men,
Speaker 1: fond of music and the amusements of the day. It
Speaker 1: would take a glass in a merry mood to drive
Speaker 1: dol caraway, but seldom allowed it to steal away his
Speaker 1: brains or transform him into a beast. This is what
Speaker 1: his brother claims, and a lot of it's lies because
Speaker 1: he was a famous drunk um. But yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: that's how his his older brother described him at eighteen UM. Now,
Speaker 1: by any accounts, Jim Booie was a pretty good frontiersman. Um.
Speaker 1: He squatted on land, chopped and sold cypress wood, which
Speaker 1: he saw down in the planks, and then floated down
Speaker 1: by the river into town. He also hunted a great
Speaker 1: deal uh and his brother John wrote that he developed
Speaker 1: a particularly painful way of hunting bears uh quote. In
Speaker 1: the summer season, when the bears were constantly ravaging little
Speaker 1: patches of green corn of the early settlers, he adopted
Speaker 1: the following novel plan to entrap them. After finding a
Speaker 1: place where they usually enter the field, he would find
Speaker 1: like a stump, a tree stump that was kind of
Speaker 1: hollow on the inside, and he'd filled the inside of
Speaker 1: the stump with spikes that were facing inward, and then
Speaker 1: he'd pour honey into the stump, and so the bear
Speaker 1: would stick it snout in the stumps. The stump to
Speaker 1: get honey, and then as it pulled its head out,
Speaker 1: the spikes would gouge into its face, and so its
Speaker 1: head would be trapped inside the log like with with
Speaker 1: iron spikes gouged into its mouth. And then while the
Speaker 1: bear was like in horrible agony trying to free itself
Speaker 1: and blinded because it's head stuck in a stump, he
Speaker 1: would just shoot it in the head. I mean, I
Speaker 1: feel like he went a step Barbara for that, but
Speaker 1: you know, it's different times, I guess. So, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the kind of hunter Jim is. He's a he's a
Speaker 1: a cunning man and good at surviving, but also clearly
Speaker 1: uh not against horrific cruelty. Um even like I mean,
Speaker 1: even amongst sort of the ways you hear about people trapping,
Speaker 1: that's pretty rough. Uh yeah. So uh. He was very
Speaker 1: successful at living on the frontier um, and he made
Speaker 1: enough money that after two years living this way, he'd
Speaker 1: saved up three hundred dollars to use as a down
Speaker 1: payment on the land he'd been squatting on um and
Speaker 1: he had enough left over from that nest dagg after
Speaker 1: he bought the land to buy some human beings, a
Speaker 1: family of four that he purchased on credit from his father.
Speaker 1: Over the next couple of years, Jim Bowie used their
Speaker 1: unpaid labor and very questionable credit math to work out
Speaker 1: a series of loans and deferred payments for three more
Speaker 1: parcels of land. Now, these were days in which no
Speaker 1: one had much hard currency, and most deals relied heavily
Speaker 1: on the amount of personal trust the loanie was able
Speaker 1: to gain from whoever issued the loan. Um it like.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like today where you actually had to have
Speaker 1: the money one way or the other, you know, if
Speaker 1: you got like a bank to front it to you like.
Speaker 1: A lot of loans were based on like you're a
Speaker 1: trustworthy guy um and And Jim Bowie was good initially
Speaker 1: at least at convincing people that he was worth taking
Speaker 1: a risk on. Before long, Using only the his own
Speaker 1: elbow greased and the uncompensated labor of four enslaved people,
Speaker 1: Jim was able to turn these four plots of land
Speaker 1: into a productive and valuable piece of property. He would
Speaker 1: eventually sell it for significantly more than he paid for it.
Speaker 1: What Jim succeeded with was essentially the goal of the
Speaker 1: smartest pioneers. They were land speculators looking to turn labor
Speaker 1: into real estate value and eventually get to the point
Speaker 1: where they could profit from investments without spending three years
Speaker 1: clearing timber. In the time when he wasn't working, Jim
Speaker 1: Bowie was sociable, as Three Roads to the Alamo notes,
Speaker 1: Society was important to James Bowie. He loved company, and
Speaker 1: his open, frank manner and even temper attracted others to him.
Speaker 1: He was also ambitious, and he knew and he knew
Speaker 1: it to be in his interest to cultivate friendships with
Speaker 1: what John Bowie called the better class of people. And
Speaker 1: they're on rare occasion, when there were too many glasses
Speaker 1: in the merriment turned to harsh words, his other side
Speaker 1: might emerge. He would not abide an insult. When enraged,
Speaker 1: James Bowie became entirely single minded in his determination to
Speaker 1: vent his anger on a foe. What observers took for
Speaker 1: fearlessness was as much an entire forgetfulness of his own
Speaker 1: safety in the grips of his fury. He soon acquired
Speaker 1: a reputation as a man to both respect and fear.
Speaker 1: That's an elegent way to put that. Like, Once he
Speaker 1: got drunk and kissed him off. He would fight you
Speaker 1: till he couldn't fight you anymore. Yeah, it's this thing
Speaker 1: where like this is like this constant state of realization
Speaker 1: as you like go over the stories of like frontier
Speaker 1: legends and wild West heroes and off that, like, oh,
Speaker 1: if these people were around in twenty you would call
Speaker 1: them violent drunks who commit murder when they get wasted.
Speaker 1: Like like in there, there's like he was a good
Speaker 1: friend and a dangerous enemy, which just means that like
Speaker 1: when he got drunk and he thought you had muttered
Speaker 1: something about him, he would just start shooting, Like yeah,
Speaker 1: and that person a good friend and a dangerous enemy.
Speaker 1: That shouldn't be the same person. Yeah, Yeah, he shouldn't
Speaker 1: be your good friend and then in the same day
Speaker 1: also be your worst enemy. That's not that's not a
Speaker 1: good dude. Yeah, he got piste usually easily, especially when
Speaker 1: drinking um, which is it was more of a romantic
Speaker 1: thing back then that I think we tend to consider it.
Speaker 1: It's just it's fun. Yeah. We we didn't have terms
Speaker 1: like violent alcoholic back then. Instead, you were, uh, you
Speaker 1: were just known as being rambunctious and a man to respect.
Speaker 1: Didn't fear like that's what you called the guy who
Speaker 1: was really good with a gun and got drunken angry
Speaker 1: too often. There's that guy that's gonna feel us. He's
Speaker 1: so funny. He's so funny. I really respect his ability
Speaker 1: to murder people when he's wasted. I like that we
Speaker 1: don't know what he's gonna do. Ever, that's my favorite
Speaker 1: part about him. I like how unpredictable he is with
Speaker 1: that six gun he always carries. Yeah, and also how
Speaker 1: how talented he is at using it. That part mixed
Speaker 1: in with the unpredictable is awesome. It's so good. You
Speaker 1: know what else, he's so good. I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: you know what, also is unpredictable with a handgun? Sure,
Speaker 1: let's go with that. The sponsors of this podcast. You
Speaker 1: can never predict what they'll do with their guns. That's
Speaker 1: how we've had all of our sponsors, is their unpredictability
Speaker 1: with a firearm. We just throw one at them. See
Speaker 1: what happened. You can never predict it. Here's product. Al Right,
Speaker 1: we are back and we're talking about Jim Booie. So
Speaker 1: back during his brief time in the militia, Jim had
Speaker 1: been in near contact with a guy named Dr. James Long,
Speaker 1: a surgeon who had served in the Battle of New
Speaker 1: Orleans and was pretty well known by the excitable and
Speaker 1: heavily armed men of Louisiana. In the summer of eighteen nineteen,
Speaker 1: Long began making plans to invade Texas. Uh. Now, then,
Speaker 1: as in today, Texas was a violent and lawless wasteland.
Speaker 1: Mexico was ostensibly in charge, but they weren't great at
Speaker 1: being in charge, and the United States had only recently
Speaker 1: yielded her claim over Texas in the Adams OWNUS Treaty.
Speaker 1: A lot of her being honest, Mexico was stealing in charges. Yeah,
Speaker 1: large swaths of texts. Yeah, but they're not there again.
Speaker 1: They're still not good at it. No one's really ever
Speaker 1: been good at being in charge of Texas, which is
Speaker 1: part of Yeah, it's a lot of Texas is charm
Speaker 1: and a lot of what makes Texas is such a
Speaker 1: bad place to be. Um. So you think one person
Speaker 1: is gonna tell all these dickads what to do? Okay, No, No,
Speaker 1: they don't even listen to each other. They're now you
Speaker 1: gonna listen to you? Ye Oh that everyone voted? Okay, okay, yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just like people talk about Austin being the capital
Speaker 1: of Texas. The capital of Texas has always been whatever
Speaker 1: the most men with guns in a given part of
Speaker 1: Texas want the law to be. It's just how it works. Yeah,
Speaker 1: um so yeah, yeah. A lot of southern white dudes
Speaker 1: weren't happy that the US had kind of backed off
Speaker 1: on attempting to take over Texas, and mainly this was
Speaker 1: because they wanted to take over a bunch of Texas
Speaker 1: for themselves because other parts of the Southeast were kind
Speaker 1: of filling up. Um So, this doctor James Long, started
Speaker 1: putting together a crude militia of what you would either
Speaker 1: call freedom fighters or violent extremists, depending on you know
Speaker 1: their complexion and your complexion and how you feel about
Speaker 1: complexions in general. Uh, and are about seventy five of
Speaker 1: these guys, and their plan was to launch an expedition
Speaker 1: through the territory and claim it for the United States.
Speaker 1: They marched through Louisiana on their way over, and Jim
Speaker 1: Bowie could not resist the urge to get into a
Speaker 1: series of gunfights and maybe also get rich, so he
Speaker 1: signed up along the way. But wait, white, we're going where?
Speaker 1: Sure you need a violent guy. I'm a violent guy.
Speaker 1: I'm really bummed that I didn't get into more gunfights
Speaker 1: when the war happened. I would love a chance to
Speaker 1: do that again. I never shot over that one before.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. So by the time Long reached Nakodoches, one
Speaker 1: of every one of the three or four towns in
Speaker 1: Texas that every Texan elementary student learns how to spell. Um,
Speaker 1: it was late June, and Long and his men declared
Speaker 1: a new government and started proclaiming laws. Now, it was
Speaker 1: a general rule when white folks with guns in the
Speaker 1: middle of nowhere started announcing laws in this period of times,
Speaker 1: one of two things would happen. One would be a
Speaker 1: violent ship show, and two would be the United States
Speaker 1: of America. Unfortunately, that had already happened, and so this
Speaker 1: turned into a violent ship show. Um yeah. So Long
Speaker 1: knew that his three hundred men or so wouldn't be
Speaker 1: much of a match for the entire Mexican army, so
Speaker 1: he attempted to draw more filibusters down by offering them
Speaker 1: land at a dollar an acre, which was a pretty
Speaker 1: good price. Uh. And so for a couple of months
Speaker 1: he succeeded in drawing in a few hundred guys who
Speaker 1: wanted very cheap land. Um And Jim Bowie was immediately
Speaker 1: one of the most popular of these filibusters, mainly because
Speaker 1: he was really good at getting into gunfights, which happened
Speaker 1: pretty regularly during this period of time. Um And and
Speaker 1: the various fights that Jim got into around now would
Speaker 1: have been his first taste of Mortal Kombat. But it
Speaker 1: was pretty obvious that Long was outmanned and outclassed by
Speaker 1: the Spanish authorities, and by October of night of eighteen nineteen,
Speaker 1: they'd driven him and his men out of Nakodoches. Within
Speaker 1: a month or so, the expedition was a shambles, and
Speaker 1: Jim Bowie fled back to Louisiana because he didn't really
Speaker 1: want to get his ass kicked. So we got into
Speaker 1: a couple of gunfights. He gets to have an adventure,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't really work out in the long run.
Speaker 1: I got fled out of magadish this one time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a write of passage for every Texas Texans. So
Speaker 1: Jim Bowie was a trailblazer in that hammered and they're like,
Speaker 1: you need to leave down. I was like that, now
Speaker 1: this would not be the last time that James Bowie
Speaker 1: would try and fail to conquer Texas um. And thankfully
Speaker 1: there were no consequences at this point for invading another
Speaker 1: nation's sovereign territory and trying to take over a part
Speaker 1: of it. Like he and and the other Filibusters just
Speaker 1: kind of went back to Louisiana and everything was fine
Speaker 1: like that. I mean, it's it's kind of like the Bundy's. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is a little bit like that, yeah, with with
Speaker 1: more gunfire than I heard, Yeah, with the Bundy's. So
Speaker 1: or Jim would return home and kind of got together
Speaker 1: with his brothers, John and Resin, and they all kind
Speaker 1: of agreed that, uh, they were ready to make a whole,
Speaker 1: big fucking pile of money. Um. And in those days,
Speaker 1: as now, the best way to make a whole, big
Speaker 1: fucking pile of money was to sell illegal and desirable products. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: today that means cocaine. In nearly eighteen hundreds, it meant
Speaker 1: enslaved human beings. Slavery was obviously a big business and
Speaker 1: a big part of the economy of the South, but
Speaker 1: by eighteen nineteen, most American slaves had been born in
Speaker 1: or around the United States. Because The federal government had
Speaker 1: banned Americans from buying African slaves about a decade earlier,
Speaker 1: in eighteen o eight. Now, some of this had been
Speaker 1: due to moral pressure to in the Atlantic slave trade. Um,
Speaker 1: but it only happened because America's political leaders assumed that
Speaker 1: existing slaves would breed enough to you know, settled demand.
Speaker 1: But the massive growth of the plantation system in the
Speaker 1: South in this period surprised people, and before long the
Speaker 1: demand for slaves in the Old South far outstripped the supply.
Speaker 1: This was obviously christ what that surprises, you know, But
Speaker 1: just to hear it, yeah, I mean, there's no way
Speaker 1: it's weird, because like these are these are human beings
Speaker 1: and we should always talk about this as the hime
Speaker 1: that it was. But also I think if you talk
Speaker 1: about it, I think it actually it actually gets across
Speaker 1: how horrible it was when we do use terms like
Speaker 1: supply and demand and product, because that's how these people
Speaker 1: viewed them. Um. Jim Booie was looking at like the
Speaker 1: fact that, oh, you know, slaves aren't having enough babies
Speaker 1: to meet for the demands, so someone needs to bring
Speaker 1: in more people to enslave. Um. He was looking at
Speaker 1: it the same way that like today we're like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's not enough toilet paper. We need to manufacture more
Speaker 1: toilet paper. That's how they thought about human beings who
Speaker 1: were enslaved at this point in time. And that's the
Speaker 1: more he thought about it, like, hey, there's not enough
Speaker 1: prisoners in my prison too for the stockholders to make money. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he would have owned a private prison or at least
Speaker 1: invested in one if he lived in the modern day,
Speaker 1: but he didn't, and so he got up to what
Speaker 1: I can only call like a slave trading con um. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a complicated business. So I I I have
Speaker 1: to explain some peculiar and some peculiarities of Louisiana law. First, so,
Speaker 1: slaves smuggling was a big business um and because the
Speaker 1: state was fundamentally racist, it had no desire to Like,
Speaker 1: the state didn't want people smuggling slaves, right, it had to.
Speaker 1: It had to try to stop that. It had to erase,
Speaker 1: arrest slave smugglers, and it had to confiscate the smuggled slaves.
Speaker 1: But those smuggled slaves were still property. So when illicit
Speaker 1: slave traders were caught bringing African slaves illegally into the
Speaker 1: United States. Those slaves were not freed, and they sure
Speaker 1: as ship weren't returned home. Instead, they were auctioned off
Speaker 1: by the government for profit. This meant captured smuggled slaves
Speaker 1: were super profitable for the government because if they you
Speaker 1: captured a bunch of slaves, you just made a shipload
Speaker 1: of money as the government. So the government had a
Speaker 1: real interest and actually people telling them where contraband enslaved
Speaker 1: human beings were, so they would pay a bounty on
Speaker 1: people who could turn in contract like who could point out, like, hey,
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of contraband slaves here. Such helpful citizens
Speaker 1: received a percentage of the sale price of the slaves
Speaker 1: as a reward. Are you seeing how this could be
Speaker 1: the system could be gamed yet? I yeah? Yeah, So
Speaker 1: all this brings me to the story of Jean Lafitte,
Speaker 1: a French pirate who spent half of his year robbing
Speaker 1: and raping and stealing whole ships full of booty on
Speaker 1: the Spanish main and half of his year hanging out
Speaker 1: in a fortified compound called Snake Island near Galveston, which
Speaker 1: is objectively cool. It is cool to be a pirate with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's like a couple of things that you shouldn't have done,
Speaker 1: but everything else sounds awesome. Yeah, Snake pirate with living
Speaker 1: on Snake Island, that's cool as hell. Like, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's awful that he's trading and enslaved human beings, but
Speaker 1: Snake Island, you know, yeah, yeah, so uh yeah. He
Speaker 1: would sell stolen goods from his base in Snake Island,
Speaker 1: and throughout eighteen eighteen eighteen nineteen, Lafitte and his pirates
Speaker 1: were particularly successful in stealing shiploads of enslaved people bound
Speaker 1: for South America, and Lafitte's barracks on Snake Island soon
Speaker 1: held more than six hundred of these people. Now, can
Speaker 1: I just make a terrible just like one of his
Speaker 1: other projects, like scratching his head on the I like
Speaker 1: this place used to be a lot more fun. Um
Speaker 1: it sounds like all he cares about his money. Now,
Speaker 1: this is yeah, not what I had in mind when
Speaker 1: I signed up. It used to just be about the
Speaker 1: pillaging exactly. So. Around this same time, Jim Bowie had
Speaker 1: developed a bit of a reputation in this area um
Speaker 1: as a a rough customer and and an exciting guy.
Speaker 1: He was a land speculator, but He also made cash
Speaker 1: as a roper and a tamer of wild horses and
Speaker 1: as an alligator writer, which what do you Understandly everyone
Speaker 1: around this time was a rough character, so everyone else
Speaker 1: to be like that guy's fucking. The average person in
Speaker 1: like the southeast Southwest in this period of time who
Speaker 1: could make it to twenty would have just wiped the
Speaker 1: floor with any given m M A fighter today, largely
Speaker 1: because they would have immediately pulled a knife. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: he said, I thought this is a fight. I just
Speaker 1: stabbed him. That's how we fight. He did. He didn't
Speaker 1: stab me back. I don't understand it. He was dumb.
Speaker 1: So Jim Billie was like really popular among like the
Speaker 1: whole area around Snake Island because he was just this
Speaker 1: this tough dude who would write alligators and ship who
Speaker 1: tried to evade Texas. He was a cool seen as
Speaker 1: kind of a cool guy. So James, you know, his
Speaker 1: popularity eventually brings him into conversation with Jean Lafitte, and
Speaker 1: the two became instant friends because they were both dangerous sociopaths,
Speaker 1: And eventually the pirate let Jim in on a little secret.
Speaker 1: He had a shipload of slaves but a lot of
Speaker 1: them were sick um and so he just couldn't sell
Speaker 1: them um. And he wasn't allowed to legally sell any
Speaker 1: of them in the United States because they were all
Speaker 1: from Africa. Now, at this point in time, a healthy
Speaker 1: slave went for about a dollar a pound, which is
Speaker 1: how Jean Lafitte sold human beings. But again the sick
Speaker 1: ones were unsellable. So Booie came to visit the fit
Speaker 1: on Snake Island and took a look at his inventory,
Speaker 1: and he returned from the trip, got together with these brothers,
Speaker 1: and together they launched a plan. So gen bow John Bowie,
Speaker 1: who was part of this plan, would later write, quote,
Speaker 1: we first purchased forty negroes from Lafitte at the rate
Speaker 1: of one dollar per pound, or an average of a
Speaker 1: hundred and forty dollars for each negro. We bought them
Speaker 1: into the limits of the United States, delivered them to
Speaker 1: a custom house officer, and became the informers ourselves. The
Speaker 1: law gave the informer half the value of the negroes
Speaker 1: which were put up and sold by the United States Marshal,
Speaker 1: and we became the purchasers of the negroes, took half
Speaker 1: as our award for informing and obtained the marshal sale
Speaker 1: for forty negroes, which entitled us to sell them within
Speaker 1: the United States. We continued to follow this business until
Speaker 1: we made sixty five thousand dollars. So you see what
Speaker 1: the scam is here, Billy. They're buying slaves that are
Speaker 1: illegal to bring into the United States um from their
Speaker 1: pirate fringe, John Lafitte. And then they turned the slaves
Speaker 1: into the government and say we caught these illegal slaves
Speaker 1: being smuggled in and the reward the government gave them
Speaker 1: was half the value of the slaves. And then the
Speaker 1: government would auction off the slaves and they would buy
Speaker 1: the slaves at auction and basically get subsidized for the
Speaker 1: price of the slaves because they'd get, you know, half
Speaker 1: of the value of them um as a reward. And
Speaker 1: then once they bought the slaves at auction, they would
Speaker 1: be legal slaves in the United States and they could
Speaker 1: go on and sell them to other people. And it
Speaker 1: also worked because Lafitte a lot of his slaves were
Speaker 1: elderly and old and sick um and so nobody was
Speaker 1: going to buy them from the pirate, but they would
Speaker 1: buy the slaves, turn them into the United States and
Speaker 1: get half of the value because they were valued by weight.
Speaker 1: They'd still get money for these slaves that were actually
Speaker 1: valueless slaves, and then the government would just be stuck
Speaker 1: with them. So like, yeah, it was that. This was
Speaker 1: like the slavery con that that Jim Bowie made his
Speaker 1: fortune in. Wow. Yeah, it's it's like Robin drug dealers,
Speaker 1: but worse because there's not because you're still a terrible person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's I don't even really have a word for it,
Speaker 1: but like, slavery is one of the worst things a
Speaker 1: human being can do, but in this time, it was illegal,
Speaker 1: and so they found out found a way to take
Speaker 1: this horrible legal thing and also break the law while
Speaker 1: doing it. Like it's yeah, we're doing slavery, but shady.
Speaker 1: Yeah what is that? How did you do that? It's
Speaker 1: a gift? Now, Billy? You know who won't illegally commit
Speaker 1: tax fraud by sneakily importing slaves in and then turning
Speaker 1: them into the customs officers in in order to take
Speaker 1: advantage in a loophole in the law. You know who
Speaker 1: won't do that? Billy? I don't want to guess the
Speaker 1: ducks and services that support this podcast. So we're back. Um. So,
Speaker 1: the Bowie Boys spent months engaging in this business of
Speaker 1: buying slaves from a pirate, taking them into the United States,
Speaker 1: smuggling them in, and then turning them into the government.
Speaker 1: And true to form, Jim Bowie had the most personally
Speaker 1: violent task of the whole enterprise. And I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: now from William C. Davis's book Three Roads to the Alamo.
Speaker 1: Quote James himself did the most dangerous work of conveying
Speaker 1: the contrabands through the swamps and bayous, bringing them in
Speaker 1: lots of forty at a time as many as one
Speaker 1: or two men could handle. Although the blacks were chained,
Speaker 1: Bowie found little need for fetters. The frightened Africans knew
Speaker 1: nothing of the country and had nowhere to go. While
Speaker 1: they were told enough of alligators, snakes, and hostile natives
Speaker 1: to know to know that safety, if not happiness, lay
Speaker 1: with the Bowie's. On one trip, a few slaves may
Speaker 1: have escaped, not to be found again. But for the
Speaker 1: rest James Bowie felt secure that they would not run.
Speaker 1: He even told the feet on one of his visits
Speaker 1: to Campeache that he rarely lost a slave because he
Speaker 1: was our and he knew they feared him, and stilling
Speaker 1: fear in others was something James Bowie did with ease.
Speaker 1: It sounds like, not with ease, like with pride. He's right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: He's like, no, I have this gift, then I'll kill you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm really good at scaring chained up people with a
Speaker 1: gun as I lead them through unfamiliar territory because they
Speaker 1: look at me and without question, they know that I
Speaker 1: will murder that. Yeah. I don't give a ship. It
Speaker 1: means nothing to me. It's like, yeah, people, people tell
Speaker 1: me it's a gift, but I issues who I am now.
Speaker 1: James was very much taken with the slave smuggling business.
Speaker 1: He saw it as an easy way to make outsized
Speaker 1: profits while committing what he considered to be a victimless crime.
Speaker 1: The state made money, the pirate made money, and he
Speaker 1: made money. No one got harmed, not one human being
Speaker 1: got harm. Yeah. Yeah. Now, one thing Jim Bowie was
Speaker 1: capable of doing was nursing a deep and abiding love
Speaker 1: for knives. Obviously, Bowie is most famous for the enormous
Speaker 1: blade that bears his name, which we'll be talking about
Speaker 1: in detail here. Yep, the old gym knife. Yep, you
Speaker 1: know the old saying, you got a gym on your hip,
Speaker 1: never go hiking without a gym. Yeah. So, and I
Speaker 1: have to confess here that my bowie knives are my
Speaker 1: favorite kind of knife. I love. There's nothing like having
Speaker 1: like a fucking pound and a half knife on your
Speaker 1: hip and just really fucking up a piece of wood
Speaker 1: or a severed skull of a cow. Whatever you gotta
Speaker 1: funk up with a knife when you're hiking around in
Speaker 1: the middle of nowhere. A bowie knife can do it.
Speaker 1: And and I feel it's a shame that these solid
Speaker 1: knives have gotten tarnished by the name of this slave
Speaker 1: owning monster. And this is the story of why. Because
Speaker 1: he did not invent the knife. Yeah, but I feel
Speaker 1: like he probably did it justice he did. He did,
Speaker 1: And we're going to talk about why his knife got
Speaker 1: famous here. So the knife was initially the knife that
Speaker 1: he got famous for was initially a gift from his brother.
Speaker 1: Probably you'll hear a couple of different stories about how
Speaker 1: he got his the first bowie knife from a couple
Speaker 1: of different people, and it's not really important to get
Speaker 1: into each of the different stories and detail. Um, but
Speaker 1: the the details we can synthesize that they kind of
Speaker 1: all have in common. Boiled down to Jim Bowie received
Speaker 1: a really fucking big knife, either as a gift or
Speaker 1: as a purchased he like commissioned himself from a blacksmith,
Speaker 1: and it was made by a local Louisiana blacksmith to
Speaker 1: be significantly larger and heavier than most hunting knives of
Speaker 1: the arrow were. So he just gets an unusually large knife.
Speaker 1: Either his brother hasn't made for him, or he pays
Speaker 1: a guy to make it, but he winds up with
Speaker 1: his huge funk off knife. Um. Now it is a
Speaker 1: hobbit sword. Yeah. And his brother John would later claim
Speaker 1: that he bought the knife for Jim. And and John
Speaker 1: had significant financial motivation to making this claim because the
Speaker 1: Bowie family got rich off of the fact that their
Speaker 1: name was attached to a famous kind of knife. Um.
Speaker 1: And John also had a vested interest in making it
Speaker 1: seem as if his brother was like a knife wielding prodigy,
Speaker 1: like an artist with a blade. Um, and the reality
Speaker 1: is very different from that. Um Now. J Frank Adbe
Speaker 1: a historian who studied Bowie and produced a pretty fair
Speaker 1: biography of him in nineteen fifty seven noted big Jim
Speaker 1: Bowie and conveying smuggled slaves, armed himself with three or
Speaker 1: four knives that he could transfix any captive who tried
Speaker 1: to break away. Jerking a knife out was easier than
Speaker 1: reloading a horse pistol at the muzzle. Both Jim and
Speaker 1: Resident could keep several knives moving in the air at
Speaker 1: the same time without allowing one to touch the ground.
Speaker 1: At twenty paces. Either could send a knife clean through
Speaker 1: a small wooden target. So that's probably untrue, but these
Speaker 1: are the kind of stories people started to tell about
Speaker 1: Jim Bowie that he was like, yeah, like a master
Speaker 1: of the blade. And the reason that he got this
Speaker 1: reputation for being an artist with a knife is because
Speaker 1: of something that happened in eighteen seven, the infamous Sandbar fight.
Speaker 1: So it's amazing to me because a lot of people
Speaker 1: get stabbed to death and fights even today, and nobody
Speaker 1: cares about those fights, and they're kind of written down
Speaker 1: as like the result of thugs and criminals, um just
Speaker 1: having access to knives. Uh, But when a bunch of
Speaker 1: white dudes stab each other to death, this is what happens.
Speaker 1: Um well, on a sandbar. Yeah, on a sandbar. So
Speaker 1: it's good to know that people have always been doing
Speaker 1: nonsense on sandbars in the Gulf of Mexico. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this sandbar, we'll talk about the sandbar. So Jim
Speaker 1: spent most of the eighteen twenties engaging in a series
Speaker 1: of land cons in Arkansas. Um And basically he had
Speaker 1: committed dozens of acts of fraud and basically sold people
Speaker 1: land and to this day in Arkansas business business. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he would sell people land that he didn't have any
Speaker 1: right to and then take their money and funk off.
Speaker 1: This is not too mad at that he did that
Speaker 1: for decade. It's like, is a general rule if you're
Speaker 1: wondering what Jim Bowie was doing during a period of
Speaker 1: his life where we don't have a lot of detail,
Speaker 1: he was scamming people into buying land he didn't known. Um.
Speaker 1: So he did this a bunch of Arkansas and it
Speaker 1: piste off a lot of people. Um And he also
Speaker 1: like the only way he was able to get away
Speaker 1: with it is that he relied heavily on banks to
Speaker 1: lend him the credit to do land speculation. UM. And
Speaker 1: at one point in the late eighteen twenties, he was
Speaker 1: infuriated to find that the sheriff of a nearby parish
Speaker 1: had basically put in a bad word against him and
Speaker 1: stopped the bank from giving him a loan that he
Speaker 1: needed to continue his cons um So he got into
Speaker 1: an argument with the person who'd put with that sheriff,
Speaker 1: and they got into a fight on the street, and
Speaker 1: the sheriff, a guy named Norris Wright, shot at Jim
Speaker 1: Bowie and only failed to kill him because the bullet
Speaker 1: hit a silver dollar in Bowie's pocket. Jim fired back,
Speaker 1: but his pistol misfired, and so he charged Norris Right
Speaker 1: to try to beat him to death with his bare hands,
Speaker 1: but his friends intervened and stopped the whole thing from
Speaker 1: ending in murder, and that really pissed Jim off, and
Speaker 1: he prom after that point that he would never be
Speaker 1: caught without an enormous knife on his body, so that
Speaker 1: if that happened again and his gun misfired, he could
Speaker 1: just stab a guide to death, and maybe stab his
Speaker 1: friends to death for trying to stop him from stabbing
Speaker 1: a guided death, because those aren't his friends anymore. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, it did not take long for Jim Bowie
Speaker 1: to find an occasion to use his giant funk Off
Speaker 1: knife to stab a man. So the sand Bar Fight
Speaker 1: is really romanticized in Texas history, although it didn't happen
Speaker 1: in Texas, but it involves Jim Bowie, and so we
Speaker 1: all learned about it. And the short of it is
Speaker 1: that Bowie wound up on one side of a formal
Speaker 1: duel which was held on a sand bar between Louisiana
Speaker 1: and Mississippi. Dueling was actually illegal in both states, and
Speaker 1: because the sand bar wasn't really in either state, was
Speaker 1: a popular place for men to get together with their
Speaker 1: friends and try to murder other men. And they later
Speaker 1: used that same bluephole for gambling. Yes, yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: same basic idea. Now, one of the fun things about
Speaker 1: the Sandbar Duel is that no one really has a
Speaker 1: good explanation as to why it started. There were two
Speaker 1: different camps um one camp was focused around two brothers
Speaker 1: named Wells and their friends, including Jim Bowie and the others.
Speaker 1: On the other side was a guy named Robert Crane,
Speaker 1: a doctor named Thomas Maddox, and Bowie's old enemy Norris. Right. Now,
Speaker 1: all of these people had beef with each other for
Speaker 1: a bunch of reasons, ranging from business disputes to allegations
Speaker 1: of voter fraud, and mainly they just didn't like each other.
Speaker 1: William C. Davis writes that quote, chances were that by
Speaker 1: late summer of eighteen seven, none of them knew the
Speaker 1: true origins of their feud. So it's just a bunch
Speaker 1: of men who hate each other. And they agree to
Speaker 1: meet up at the sandbar. Will it's okay to try
Speaker 1: to murder each other, to try to murder each other. Um,
Speaker 1: So they meet up there in the summer of eighteen seven.
Speaker 1: Against any of this at this point, No, No, it
Speaker 1: sounds like everyone's willing to meet at the sandbar. So, well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be on the bank and I'm gonna watch.
Speaker 1: This is the only victimless crime that we've run into.
Speaker 1: So again, two gives a ship and these are all
Speaker 1: probably monsters, like these are all slave owners, all pieces.
Speaker 1: I don't care. Yeah, So all these guys meet up
Speaker 1: at the sandbar and they exchange insults, and they waved
Speaker 1: guns at each other in the nearby city of Alexandria
Speaker 1: first and like, so they all meet in the city
Speaker 1: near the sand bar first, and they like wave guns
Speaker 1: and yell at each other, and it's kind of like
Speaker 1: a pro wrestling thing, right, Like they all they all
Speaker 1: get everyone around them fired up. And so the citizens
Speaker 1: in Alexandria like realized, oh, there's a feud got to
Speaker 1: be happening. And so like when these guys meet up
Speaker 1: at the sands, yeah, that's exactly what this is. This
Speaker 1: is a fucking w w E match. And so when
Speaker 1: they meet up at the sandbar, like hundreds of people
Speaker 1: surround the sandbar to watch this like fight start. It
Speaker 1: was very very silly. Um is kind of the the
Speaker 1: in summary of what happens. So eventually, on July, like
Speaker 1: the two kind of ringleaders of both groups, uh Norris
Speaker 1: Right and a guy named Hall, agree to have a
Speaker 1: gunfight the sandbar, and two people show up to observe
Speaker 1: the fight. Yeah yeah, yeah, um, But Norris Wright doesn't
Speaker 1: show up for the fight. Instead, he gathers a heavily
Speaker 1: armed posse and shows up near the site of the
Speaker 1: duel and like sends a representative in to say, like,
Speaker 1: I'm not ready to fight yet, but we're gonna have
Speaker 1: a big fight in September. That's when we're gonna do
Speaker 1: it September. It's like a fucking I can't get over
Speaker 1: how much like the fucking w W E this is? Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So everybody kind of waits until the fall and then
Speaker 1: the alright, alright, okay, so we all come back in
Speaker 1: the fall. Yeah, So the aggrieved parties, I'll gather back
Speaker 1: at the sand bar in September nine seven to try
Speaker 1: to murder each other for reasons which again are completely unclear.
Speaker 1: It's very boredom seems to be the main driver in
Speaker 1: all this. Now, officially the duel was between well and
Speaker 1: Maddox this time, UM, and everyone else was seconds, including
Speaker 1: Jim Booie. But there was so much hatred between all
Speaker 1: the different men on both sides that the organizers of
Speaker 1: the duel started to worry it might turn into a gigantic,
Speaker 1: bloody fight, and to avoid that, they limited each side
Speaker 1: to bringing three men onto the sandbar. So Wells and
Speaker 1: Maddox face off at ten paces, and because Wells was
Speaker 1: nearly blind, they had to be extra close. But it
Speaker 1: didn't matter if they were extra close. They're both terrible shots,
Speaker 1: and they both miss at fucking ten feet away. Um.
Speaker 1: And so the duel ends, and nobody's hurt, and both
Speaker 1: men shake hands, and Wells and Maddox are actually like
Speaker 1: fine with this, They're like, now we can be friends again.
Speaker 1: We tried to shoot each other, nobody died. This is
Speaker 1: great and so kind of like at the end of
Speaker 1: when a fucking children's best baseball team finishes a game,
Speaker 1: like both sides convened together to shake hands, and this
Speaker 1: is where things go awry because the other friends who
Speaker 1: hadn't shot at each other are still really pissed, and
Speaker 1: they start in holding each other, and an argument sparks up.
Speaker 1: And if we don't know exactly what happens, there's different stories.
Speaker 1: One of them is that uh one of the doctor
Speaker 1: Doctor Maddox pulls out his gun and tries to shoot
Speaker 1: another guy and accidentally shoots Jim Bowie in the leg
Speaker 1: Um three Roads. The Alamo claims that the fight started
Speaker 1: with when Jim Bowie and another man named Crane both
Speaker 1: drew their guns and everyone else tried to calm them down,
Speaker 1: and then Crane shot at Bowie and missed him, and
Speaker 1: then Bowie fired back and missed Crane, and then Crane
Speaker 1: drew his second pistol and fired again and missed again
Speaker 1: but hit one of Bowie's friends in the leg and
Speaker 1: severed an artery. And then Crane realized he fucked up,
Speaker 1: and he ran like hell away, and so Jim Bowie
Speaker 1: drew his second pistol and fired while Crane was running,
Speaker 1: and he missed again. Because none of these guys are
Speaker 1: good at I have to. I can't. I have to.
Speaker 1: I can't over emphasize how bad guns are in this
Speaker 1: period of time. Like these men are all firing multiple
Speaker 1: shots from tin foot distance and they can't fucking hit.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm gonna say. It's like it's I don't
Speaker 1: think it's like a marksman problem. It's like a it's
Speaker 1: a main manufacturing issue. No, they're metal tubes with explosives
Speaker 1: and a ball in them. Like guns are so shitty
Speaker 1: at this point in time. And yeah, none of these
Speaker 1: people can hit for ship. So Bowie misses with his
Speaker 1: second shot, and at this point he makes the wise
Speaker 1: decision to stop relying on his guns and go with
Speaker 1: an idiot proof killing tool, the gigantic funk Off knife
Speaker 1: that he had strapped to his hip. So, roaring like
Speaker 1: a madman, he draws the knife and he like charges
Speaker 1: into the crowd of his adversaries because the guy who
Speaker 1: shot him like ran back to his friends and Bowie
Speaker 1: just rushes towards them wielding what is essentially a small sword.
Speaker 1: The survivors describe him as seeming like a tiger as
Speaker 1: he shouted out, Crane, you have shot at me, and
Speaker 1: I will kill you if I can, so proper, pretty proper.
Speaker 1: So Crane panics and he only he doesn't have a
Speaker 1: loaded gun, but he has an empty gun and it
Speaker 1: weighs like ten pounds because guns are big back then.
Speaker 1: So he throws it at Bowie's Bowie's charging and he
Speaker 1: hits him in the head and like seriously injures him
Speaker 1: because it's again a heavy piece of metal that he's
Speaker 1: hitting this guy in the face with. This is if
Speaker 1: we wrote this kick us out of the network, get
Speaker 1: out here. This is famous for being one of the
Speaker 1: most badass fights of the Old West. And it reads
Speaker 1: like a fucking Binnie Hill skin. So he probably gives
Speaker 1: Bowie a concussion from this, Like nobody concussions weren't the
Speaker 1: thing back then. But he like he just based on
Speaker 1: the reports he would like this fox Bowie up getting
Speaker 1: hit in the head with this gun like really hurts. Him. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So he falls down to his knees as a result
Speaker 1: of getting hit in the face with this gun. And
Speaker 1: then Maddox, one of the duellists, the doctor who by
Speaker 1: some accounts had accidentally started the fight by accidentally shooting Bowie,
Speaker 1: but who knows. Dr Maddox charges Bowie like just to
Speaker 1: like fist fight him, and Bowie throws him away like
Speaker 1: just because tosses him and so then Crane and their
Speaker 1: other friend, Norris Wright, who is the guy who had
Speaker 1: had a gunfight with Bowie months ago, charge in to
Speaker 1: try to deal with Bowie, and Right draws another pistol
Speaker 1: and aims at at Bowie, who yells back at him,
Speaker 1: you damned rascal. Don't you shoot. Don't you dare shoot me,
Speaker 1: you rascal, You damned rascal. Yeah, he swore. Norris Wright
Speaker 1: like stands there with a gun pointed at Bowie and
Speaker 1: the two shout at each other for a while until
Speaker 1: one of Bowie's friends runs up and hands Jim a gun,
Speaker 1: and both men fire at each other at point blank range,
Speaker 1: and of course both miss. Again. Yeah, that's so bad
Speaker 1: at shooting each other. So Right pulls his second pistol
Speaker 1: and Bowie yells at him to shoot and be damned,
Speaker 1: and Right shoots again, and of course he misses a
Speaker 1: second time. Now at this point, one of the few
Speaker 1: not dangerously unhinged men present, a guy named Denny, runs
Speaker 1: up in between Bowie and Wright and pleads with Bowie,
Speaker 1: this must be stopped, sir, this must be stopped. He's
Speaker 1: just like, please, for the love of God, stop fighting.
Speaker 1: And he puts a hand on Bowie's chest just as
Speaker 1: Right draws a third pistol and fires again and hits.
Speaker 1: So he finally did hit somebody. Um So the ball
Speaker 1: passes through directly through Denny's hand in it into Jim
Speaker 1: Bowie's lung, and with a concussion and a bullet in
Speaker 1: their lung, most men probably would have stopped fighting. But
Speaker 1: as one of Jim Bowie's friends later noted, if there
Speaker 1: ever lived a man who never felt the sensation of fear,
Speaker 1: it was James Bowie. It was his habit to settle
Speaker 1: all difficulties without regard to time or place, and this
Speaker 1: it was the same whether he met one or many enemies.
Speaker 1: So Jim Bowie, bullet and his lung and a fucking
Speaker 1: concussion charges Norris Right, waving a gigantic knife. He got
Speaker 1: about fifteen feet when two of Wright's friends arrived with
Speaker 1: fresh guns and opened fire. One bullet hit Jim Bowie
Speaker 1: in the thigh and took him down again. Now Right
Speaker 1: had been running away from the madman with the sword,
Speaker 1: but as soon as Bowie dropped Norris Wright whipped out
Speaker 1: a sword cane and charged him again. Now the guy
Speaker 1: who shot Bowie in the thigh also pulled out a
Speaker 1: sword cane, and the two just start stabbing Jim Bowie
Speaker 1: to death a bunch. So the next moment in this
Speaker 1: fight is the one that would earn the name Bowie
Speaker 1: Knife a proud place in the long history of human
Speaker 1: fighting implements. Shot through the lung and the thigh, probably
Speaker 1: can coast and repeatedly stabbed with sword canes canes, Bowie
Speaker 1: draws his giant knife again and fights off both men's
Speaker 1: sword canes, parrying their jabs with his mighty dagger. He
Speaker 1: gashed both of them repeatedly on the hands in the arms.
Speaker 1: In response, they stab him through the hands and the wrist.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote now from William C. David, his book
Speaker 1: on how the fight ended. Quote Bowie got himself up
Speaker 1: to a sitting position. Then in one lunge, he reached
Speaker 1: up to grab Norris Right by the collar and his
Speaker 1: right tried to straighten himself, he inadvertently helped raise Bowie
Speaker 1: to a near standing position. As Bowie later told the
Speaker 1: story to Reson in Their Friend, he said in Wright's ear, now, Major,
Speaker 1: you die with a single savage thrust. He drove the
Speaker 1: knife through Right's chest, boasting afterwards that he twisted it
Speaker 1: to cut his heart strings. Ah, well he's not, he's not.
Speaker 1: That's not how that works. But yeah, he guts him
Speaker 1: is how most people related. Is he just he pulls
Speaker 1: this guy down while being stabbed and just opens his
Speaker 1: belly with his gigantic sword knife, and yeah, it kills
Speaker 1: the ship out of him. Yeah. So Jim Bowie passes
Speaker 1: out immediately after stabbing Norris Right to death, and the
Speaker 1: attending physician who observed him after this found a gash
Speaker 1: on his forehead, seven stab wounds, and two bullet wounds.
Speaker 1: They all kind of assumed he was going to die
Speaker 1: of his injuries, but he didn't, and over the next
Speaker 1: two months, Jimbowie gradually recovered from his many injuries. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the story of how he stabbed a dude to death
Speaker 1: became national news. So most duels were all like regional stories, um,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't a common people to die in them.
Speaker 1: But the Sandbar fight became legend for one reason. Jim
Speaker 1: Bowie Davis writes that in typical frontier fights quote, the
Speaker 1: real fighters risked themselves only when they seem to have
Speaker 1: the advantage and happily ran to cover otherwise. But Booie,
Speaker 1: impelled by the rage that blinded him to fear or
Speaker 1: self protection, stood his ground and simply kept fighting. That
Speaker 1: was the sort of thing that turned brutal, pointless brawling
Speaker 1: into legend. Yeah he does, because yeah, you're not human anymore. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's totally human to like stand in front of another
Speaker 1: guy and you both shoot at each other and one
Speaker 1: of you dies, and when he doesn't what Bowie does, Like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he because he's like a fucking superhero, because he does
Speaker 1: he survives this, and because he goes so fucking far
Speaker 1: beyond what any rational person would do in the era.
Speaker 1: So yeah, there's also probably he's not the guy that
Speaker 1: like afterwards, while he's like healing, he's also enough the
Speaker 1: kind of guy I was, like, I got carried away. No, No,
Speaker 1: he was just like, yeah, come at me again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you out. And that's exactly what happens. So newspapers write
Speaker 1: huge spreads about the Sandbar Fight, and of course they
Speaker 1: exaggerate everything that happens in it, and people are in
Speaker 1: Americas start talking about Jim Booie, and Booie's canny enough
Speaker 1: to lean into the legend. So he spent weeks bedridden
Speaker 1: like from gunshot wounds, but he would invite reporters and
Speaker 1: to talk to him, and he would tell all of
Speaker 1: them the story of the fight. And he would always
Speaker 1: have his knife strapped to his chest while he was
Speaker 1: in his sick bed so he could show it off
Speaker 1: to reporters and the steady stream of well wishers who
Speaker 1: came by to talk to him. Um. So the bowie
Speaker 1: knife becomes incredibly famous as a result of this, and
Speaker 1: suddenly like every guy who feels who wants to feel
Speaker 1: like a badass, has to have a bowie knife. Um.
Speaker 1: And I found a fun right up on sort of
Speaker 1: the spread of the Booeye knife in the wake of this,
Speaker 1: by a site called the History Bandits, and it is
Speaker 1: a pretty good job of tracing how Jim and all
Speaker 1: of his brothers capitalized on the fame of the family
Speaker 1: knife quote. The Bowie family quickly made efforts to actively
Speaker 1: link the Bowie name with the famous knife's design and quality.
Speaker 1: Bowie's older brother, Resin, who would have allegedly given Jim
Speaker 1: his blade before the Sandbar incident, began promoting similar knives,
Speaker 1: which he advertised more trustworthy in the hands of a
Speaker 1: strong man than a pistol, which, given the fact that
Speaker 1: everyone missed at the duel, is not necessarily inaccurate at
Speaker 1: the time of it. Yeah Yeah. Within months of the incident,
Speaker 1: the name of Bowie was forever linked with the large,
Speaker 1: hilted knives of the southern back country. As the story
Speaker 1: of Jim Bowie's feats with his knife spread, blacksmiths across
Speaker 1: the country began to receive requests from customers to make
Speaker 1: them a knife like Bowie's. As far afield as England,
Speaker 1: the Bowie knife became a novelty in knife shops, and
Speaker 1: easterners of the United States purchase Booie knives is a
Speaker 1: symbol of the frontier. Even backwoodsman who were used to
Speaker 1: such knives adopted the new terminology of the eighteen thirties
Speaker 1: and requested buoy knives. It's by name, It's Smithy's from St.
Speaker 1: Louis to the Mexican border. The Red Rible, The Red
Speaker 1: River Herald of Necatochez, Louisiana, claimed that, with hyperbole, that
Speaker 1: all the steel in the country, it seemed, had immediately
Speaker 1: been converted into Booie knives. By eighteen thirty, the Booie
Speaker 1: knife became a staple at forgeries across the American continent.
Speaker 1: So that's cool. Yeah, it's just it's yeah, it's reassuring
Speaker 1: that America has always kind of been like this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fun. The right up I found on this actually
Speaker 1: compares the Booie Brothers in particular to Bear Grills Um,
Speaker 1: because Bear Girls has like an incredibly popular series of
Speaker 1: knives UM made just based off the fact that he's
Speaker 1: good at being in the woods and has been on
Speaker 1: camera like using you know, camping knives and stuff. So
Speaker 1: like the knife companies like Gerber like, hey, what if
Speaker 1: we made a knife and stick your name on it,
Speaker 1: And sure enough, now they're incredibly pop You can find
Speaker 1: them in any outdoorsman story and they're not bad knives. Um.
Speaker 1: I don't like the hill very much, but whatever, Uh,
Speaker 1: so in the Booie Like, what I find interesting about
Speaker 1: this right up is that they kind of say make
Speaker 1: the point that, like the Bowie family is the first,
Speaker 1: the first in that line. Like they do basically what
Speaker 1: Bear Gruels has done. They create a brand with their
Speaker 1: family name for giant fuck off knives. That's kind of
Speaker 1: neat the duck dudes too, Yeah, like Duck dynasty. This
Speaker 1: is like the very first time that happened in American history, right,
Speaker 1: The Bowie family definitely has some powerful Duck dynasty energy
Speaker 1: to it. Well, it's the same area, yeah, and it
Speaker 1: is the same area. They might in fact be related. Well, yes,
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of people down there because they
Speaker 1: get killing each other. Yeah. So yeah, Jim Bowie, slave trader,
Speaker 1: land con artist, and guy who stabbed a person to
Speaker 1: death becomes a celebrity mainly for stabbing a person to death.
Speaker 1: And uh yeah, we'll talk about what comes next and
Speaker 1: how he gets to the Alamo in part two. But
Speaker 1: right now, Billy, it's time for you to celebrate your
Speaker 1: own knife. What would a Billy knife be, Billy, it
Speaker 1: would probably just be like a form of the kukrie.
Speaker 1: You would want it to be a cookery kind of
Speaker 1: like that. I really I'm enjoying the cookery. I like
Speaker 1: it a lot. Yeah, cookeries are nice. I enjoy the uh.
Speaker 1: I enjoy the the feel of a kukery. If I
Speaker 1: was going to have a Robert knife, I would want
Speaker 1: it to be I wanted to be a knife that's
Speaker 1: too large to be wielded. I would like it to
Speaker 1: be like a hunting knife, but one that has to
Speaker 1: actually be mounted to the bed of a truck. Like
Speaker 1: you know how they have technicals in the Middle East
Speaker 1: with machine guns in the back. I want that, but
Speaker 1: with a knife that you have to like drive at
Speaker 1: a target you want to stab it. You just want
Speaker 1: a bayonet for a Humby, Yeah, I want a bayonet
Speaker 1: for I'm more like a bayonet for an eighteen wheeler.
Speaker 1: That's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, that would be. I would
Speaker 1: like a Robert knife to be a knife that requires
Speaker 1: as much steel as a small skyscraper. That would be.
Speaker 1: That would be the legacy I'd like to have. If
Speaker 1: they ever give us the TV show, we could make
Speaker 1: that happen. We could make that happen. All right, Well, um,
Speaker 1: if you want me to uh get my own branded knife,
Speaker 1: uh find bear girls on Twitter and send him pictures,
Speaker 1: send him your favorite Simpsons screen grab. Let's make it
Speaker 1: confusing for old bear. Um. And if you want to
Speaker 1: find us on the internet, you can find us at
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards dot com. Uh, you can find t
Speaker 1: shirts on t public. And I have a podcast called
Speaker 1: The Women's War that is about Rojava and uh does
Speaker 1: include a little bit about knives. So there we go.
Speaker 1: It's an optimistic podcast. It is optimistic. Also optimistic is
Speaker 1: my co host today, Mr Billy Wayne Davis. Billy, you
Speaker 1: want to tell the people where they can find you? Yes,
Speaker 1: I at Billy Wayne Davis on Twitter and Instagraham. If
Speaker 1: I ever start touring again, we're allowed to bet bd
Speaker 1: tour dot com. And then I have a podcast about
Speaker 1: the people that make up cannabis communities and it's called
Speaker 1: Grown Local. In season one is based in Eugene, or
Speaker 1: speaking of both the marijuana industry and Eugene, Oregon. A
Speaker 1: lot of people getting stabbed to death with large knives.
Speaker 1: Definitely lots of that, not in your podcast, necessarily, just
Speaker 1: in the industry and in Eugene, Oregon. Yeah, and probably
Speaker 1: not even related, no no, no, I mean yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: Episode done