Why bowie knives for fighting?

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gunfiter

gunfiter

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Question for those of you in the know. Why was the Bowie style blade so popular, still is in a lot of places I guess, as a fighting knife? Back some years ago, here in the US, most of the fighting knives you see were of that style. Was the blade a purpose built fighting design? Simple fashion? Was the utility of the blade just so handy it did many things well? I'm not a fan of the shape, but obviously a lot of people were, and are.

Thanks
 
Probably popular due to the utility, as well as possibly being a status symbol/valuable trade item in the Old West. Why are you not a fan of the shape? This is clearly unacceptable.:)
 
Tradition, I think. Bowies are a genuine bit of Americana, supposedly carried (and possibly designed) by an American legend, Jim Bowie.

As fighting knives go they are probably decent, and they are usually large enough to handle various camp chores as well.

I'm not a big fan of them either as I don't like upswept tips, but I can see their place in American history.
 
You might want to get a copy of the Bill Bagwell book: Bowies, Big Knives, and the Best of Battle Blades. He is a well known bowie maker, and Ontario put out a few production bowies of his design. I have one of each of them. The book is a collection of articles that Bagwell wrote for the magazine 'Soldier of Fortune', kind of a cheesy thing for wanna-be mercenaries. But he offers a lot about fighting knives, in particular fighting with a bowie. One thing that I really found interesting in the book was Mr. Bagwell's take on the bayonet issued with the Soviet AK47. Everything about the bayo made sense to me after reading his words.

I take it when you write of the 'bowie knife', you mean something big and heavy with a clip blade. Like the Western W49, or the Collins V44 machete. Read up on old, antique bowies, and you'll find alots of differently designed knives all carrying the 'bowie' name.

Bowie_book.JPG
 
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Why did they become popular as outdoor recreation knives when they were fighting knives? Becuase people thought Bowie was cool (think Rambo) and they wanted a knife that looked like his regardless of how it performed in the task they were going to use it for.
Many current "Bowies" like the big Beckers are really more "camp knives" than Bowies and are effective camp tools.
 
Even before Old West and Bowies, some fighting knives were of similar design- I would venture a guess that Bowies might've been in some degree inspired by traditional Spanish type of knives, so called Navaja...
 
The traditional Bowie knife has a guard, a large blade and a tip that does quite well in stabbing.
Some have even sharpened swedges. So it makes a decent CQ weapon.

The legend of Jim Bowie and movies like First Blood and Crocodile Dundee made it popular in our age again.
 
Just like a clip point blade, the upswept tip is good for penetrating flesh due to its small surface area. Plus it is big!
 
The large fighting or war knife is nothing google the term "sax" or "seax" to see ancient examples. The configuration of blade and guard may in some cases seem familiar.

I think the "Bowie" knife's popularity historically and currently is mostly romanticism. People wanted to / want to own a little piece of that Bowie cachet and history.
 
There's nothing complicated about why bowies are effective fighting knives, they're big and pointy basically. I expect they are/were popular because they also make useful utility knives, as opposed to some combat knives like daggers why aren't particularly useful outside of a combat role.
 
Here's a couple of pictures of a display inside a Hotel across from the Alamo in San Antonio. The plaque states "The bowie knife has as many styles as it does stories covering who made it and what a true Bowie Knife look

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gunfiter said:
Question for those of you in the know. Why was the Bowie style blade so popular, still is in a lot of places I guess, as a fighting knife? Back some years ago, here in the US, most of the fighting knives you see were of that style. Was the blade a purpose built fighting design? Simple fashion? Was the utility of the blade just so handy it did many things well? I'm not a fan of the shape, but obviously a lot of people were, and are.
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Yes, it was originally a purpose built fighting knife. The knife was designed by Resin Bowie in the early 1800's and was an adaptation of several different knife styles. Resin had cut himself skinning a rabbit and thus the idea for the guards which was atypical of western knives at the time. The earliest Bowie was made by Resin for his brother, Jim Bowie, and wasn't much more than a butcher knife with some alterations to make it more useful in a fight (guards, tip, etc.). It came into prominence when Bowie attended a pistol duel and a brawl broke out when both duelists missed and the duel ended in a draw [Edit: aka The Sandbar Fight]. He and another individual (whose name eludes me) got into a knife fight which Bowie won although he was seriously wounded in the fight as well.

The fame for the original Bowie grew from that incident and the knife changed in many ways over the years with different makers putting different twists on their version of the knife, but retaining the name "Bowie Knife" for its prominence and saleability. There were even schools that arose, primarily in the Southwest, that taught students how to properly fight with a Bowie knife.

So, it started out life as a fighting knife and as Jim Bowie gained fame and notoriety as a knife fighter, so grew the fame of the Bowie knife. [Edit: the original hit movie, "The Alamo" starring Richard Widmark as Jim Bowie and the depiction of the Bowie knife therein did quite a lot to enhance the modern impression of the Bowie Knife and bring it back into the attention of the public]

All that said, historians differ in opinion about almost every aspect of the knife from who actually designed the first version to whether the knife Jim used in the post-duel brawl was an actual Bowie knife. So the opinion of others may well differ and "facts" are hard to come by. But I think that the fact that the Bowie was originally designed specifically for fighting and not for hunting/skinning is in little doubt.
 
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It was never a user. It was always a fighter. That was one of the original observations of Horace Kephart, who noted that the Bowie pattern became popular due to advertisements and folklore as a user, but it was completely impractical as a knife for anything but fighting.

And why? Because back then, America was a different place. Dueling was widely accepted, and knife duels were common ways to settle things. It was a different time. There was a "code of honor" almost like Bushido back then. Probably a very scary place for the modern man.

Believe it or not, there are places in the world that are still like that. I took the below picture on the Tibetan plateau in Sichuan Province, China. The nomads there still settle arguments with swords.


HYwFE5x.jpg
 
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Magnaminous_G said:
And why? Because back then, America was a different place. Dueling was widely accepted, and knife duels were common ways to settle things. It was a different time. There was a "code of honor" almost like Bushido back then. Probably a very scary place for the modern man.
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My suspicion is that bowie knives were used far less often in "formal" duels to defend honor than they were in self-defense, armed robbery, or outright murder. The American frontier was a tough place. Bowies were the poor man's equivalent of a pistol or sword, and like a pistol or sword had uses both good and bad. Bowie knives were not particularly concealable, and you don't pick a fight with someone you know to be armed unless you are prepared to be injured or killed.

Our 7th President, Andrew Jackson, was famous (or infamous) for fighting three duels with pistols, being wounded near his heart in his third duel. His opponent died a few hours later. Jackson carried the bullet (which narrowly missed his heart) in his chest for the rest of his life.

Had Jackson, another famous Tennessean, used a large fighting knife we'd no doubt be calling them Jackson knives. ;)
 
Are you asking about the popularity of the bowie knife in recent times (post WW II on), or in Bowie's day?

In Jim Bowie's time, knives were much more in use for fighting than they would be by the end of the Civil War.

Think about it: in the 1830s most pistols were single shot. A smart traveler carried a fighting knife as well and knew how to use it. After that first shot was gone it was your primary, not secondary weapon.

Also, the most common fighting knife was a dagger, something like an Arkansas toothpick.

The Bowie knife was big, had a good point for percing, and was an excellent slicer as well. Plus a guard. If you sharpened the top edge you had an excellent fighting knife.

By the 1850s, sales of revolvers were blooming, and after the Civil War there were a lot of cheap, surplus guns available.




Going to the modern era, in the 1950s Westerns were one of the dominant entertainment formats, in both movies and on that new gadget, television. At one point almost all of the top ten shows were westerns. (I forget exact figures).

Folks here cited the Alamo, but there were few, in any scenes with "the" knife in that. Think instead of the film, The Iron Mistress, a bio pic of Jim Bowie with Alan Ladd and some extensive knife fighting scenes.

Also, there was a tv show, The Adventures of Jim Bowie (1956-1958) which had a fabulous opening, and a few of us old times loved when we were kids.
 
I think that people like them because it's big, and people who don't know any better generally think that bigger is better (.45, V8, Bowie, etc.).
 
MatthewSB said:
I think that people like them because it's big, and people who don't know any better generally think that bigger is better (.45, V8, Bowie, etc.).
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That's probably true. Far more people are killed in Texas with box cutters, kitchen cutlery, and carpet knives than with purpose-designed fighting knives.
 
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