Most Dangerous Knife In America! Bowie Knife and Everything You Need To Know About It.

[Music] when you hear the words buoy knife chances are a Burly Frontiersman in Buckskin or a Rowdy Cowboy pops into your head carrying a knife similar to this or if you have your own knife collection maybe something a little more modern like these but what if I told you that James Bowie the man the knife is named after actually carried something a lot more similar to this [Music] much of what we think we know about the buoy knife is steeped in a lot of Tall Tales aged retellings historical Liberties and Hollywood Magic even in the early 19th century when these events were happening it's not hard to see why everyone was captivated by the Bowie knife it was a knife said to have been designed by Providence wielded by a near Immortal demigod who wouldn't want to have a piece of that hanging on their belt we're going to do our best to separate fact from fiction while still having some fun with the awesome unverifiable history of the Bowie knife the Bowie knife is uniquely American and more than once has rightfully been called the Excalibur of America in place of noble knights Wizards and women living in water the Bowie knife story was forged in brawls battlefields and Frontiers in the calloused hands of men bigger than life however don't be fooled by its rough American upbringing because the buoy knife was still very much a king maker and still very much wrapped in a thick layer of magic mysticism and folklore known as the knife that cuts twice due to its sharpened false Edge the buoy knife seems to hold a blessing and a curse for anybody who gets too Tangled Up in the history of the knife in an almost poetic historical cycle of live by the knife die by the knife and that entire history kicks off with a 90-second brawl almost 200 years ago in September of 1827 the infamous Sandbar fight took place on the Mississippi River just outside of Natchez the dueling parties had to show up for honor's sake and their duel ended without Bloodshed and a handshake however there were other motives from The Spectators of both parties and a life or death brawl broke out with our man James Bowie right in the middle of it there are multiple accounts of what happened that day with both sides claiming the bravest actions and the number of Fighters ranging from 16 to 40. from the haze that time has put over the actual events of The Sandbar fight we know three things for sure James Bowie was the target of the aggression he sustained multiple stab cut and gunshot wounds that would have easily killed a lesser man and he dispatched his foe Norris Wright with his yet to be famous buoy knife the duel and the brawl took place in the Antebellum South where such events really were not that uncommon maybe it was due to the fact that Bowie did Prevail over great odds with his knife or that he was able to survive some pretty serious injuries or it was just a slow news cycle but either way the SandBar fight made national news and became immortalized in the United States history it made every Regional paper and every National paper and it was a really short time until everybody was going to their local bladesmith or more likely their blacksmith and requesting a knife like buoys the only problem was nobody knew what Bowie's knife looked like to this day we still don't know what the SandBar knife actually looked like because there were no illustrations there was simply one descriptor that said it was a large butcher's knife this is an important place to have a quick chat about the position personal defense weapons had at this point in American history open carrying swords had fallen out of style due to the fact that the colonies and then the United States had had three major Wars take place on their Shores over the last 70 years the most of which was a full-blown Revolution while a lot of the United States at the time was still very wild the people seemed to have had their fill of open displays of violence and swords a real sign of Martial intent had fallen out of favor there were of course single shot pistols but these were notoriously unreliable as a daily defense weapon and even as successful were only good for one shot plenty of people were carrying concealed daggers as well as cane swords both proved to not be as utilitarian as circumstance required as well as having other drawbacks in short there was demand for a tough utilitarian personal defense tool that was easy to maintain easy to use and was still seen as socially accept even by the tamest accounts of Bowie's injuries it's pretty miraculous that he survived and most people at the time could see that since most people at the time had had experience with violence of some sort in their lifespan it was Jim Bowie's physical strength and the need for a better self-defense option that wrote the check for the Bowie knife's launch into the public imagination with the only description of the knife he used being vague at best and no real mass production of such knives the true form of the buoy knife as we know it today would be formed over the next decade through hundreds of makers and thousands of knives being sold carried and used imagine being a blacksmith and someone coming in saying that they want a knife like buoys you're going to take what you know in your craft what knives you've experienced with and whatever second hand accounts you've heard of and do your best and these early makers were the best America had to offer in that many of them were first or second generation immigrants from all over bringing their special sauce to the United States and to the creation of the perfect buoy knife America was hitting her stride as a frontier nation and just as other nations throughout history she needed a blade to accompany her Pioneers the idea of a stout simple and useful knife or short sword was definitely nothing new to history one only has to look at the sacks or the Bullock knife to see the original Bowie knife Design's DNA not to mention the Spanish bull knife and an assortment of daggers and heavy knives that were in use at the time there was very little to anything original about the first big butcher knife Bowie's but this Frontier was a little bit different from others from the past because it had a more or less equal class of people free to earn and spend as they please as well as the best technology the world had to offer at the time to push designs and ideas forward there are a lot of knife makers that pop up at this time in U.S history that gained notoriety for making buoy knives and a lot of them actually claim to have created the first knife which isn't a claim that we can really substantiate however there is one knife maker that is tied directly in to that early magic of the Bowie knife story and his name's James Black now depending on accounts James Black either made the blade buoy had on him at The Sandbar fight perfected a subsequent design that Bowie came up with and then carried with him until his death at the Alamo or was just a really good bladesmith that many turned to to make them a buoy style blade for sure James Black is attributed to buoy number one which isn't necessarily the first buoy knife ever made but it's a historical buoy knife that we have today with the inscription buoy number one on it and he is the reason that the buoy knife is the official knife of Arkansas since he was based out of Washington Arkansas for years this wouldn't be an early buoy knife character worth mentioning if he was not also steeped in his own folklore I don't know this Mr Black if anyone can make me this knife it's you James Black's tempering and hardening techniques were kept top secret and each blade he made reportedly went through the Hickory test in which black would take a newly finished knife and Whittle on a seasoned Hickory block for an hour if once he was done the knife could not smoothly shave hair he would throw it out Governor Jones of Arkansas was convinced that black possessed the Damascus secret meaning he had rediscovered an ancient perfect form of tempering and hardening steel that had been lost to time when pressed black told Jones that no one had taught him this method but that it had come to him in a mysterious Manner and he couldn't explain it through A Series of Unfortunate Events and bad luck this prophet of Steel and Edge ended up blind penniless and homeless he was taken in by Governor Jones family and as payment for their generosity he offered to write down his 10 steps to the perfect steel tempering James Black was known to have a mind like a steel trap but when handed the pen and paper to share his mysterious Secrets it said that his mind went blank in the process and that the effort of remembering essentially drove him mad Governor Jones who we are getting all of this information from declared God gave him the secret for his own purpose but was unwilling for him to impart it to others now this is a first hand account from a United States governor and this is just the tip of the iceberg of mysterious stories and interesting stories that surround the creation and early days of the buoy knife putting aside the supernatural questions of are we alone in the universe or was the buoy knife a Divine gift to the American West we've got more practical questions like when did the buoy knife get its cross guards or its clip point blade or its sharpened false Edge and to answer those I think it's high time we bring in an expert my name is Mark zaleski I am the editor publisher of knife magazine I've been a knife collector most of my life I collect and deal in pocket knives military knives hunting knives custom knives but my favorite of everything is antique buoy knives pre-civil War American-made Bowie knives would be my specialty I have co-curated an exhibit on Bowie knives at historic Arkansas Museum and I co-wrote this book in association with the museum exhibit sure defense the Bowie knife in America that is a James Black knife right there or what we believe to be a James Black Knight there are ten of these in existence of this particular type we don't know that this is the first buoy knife for sure certainly there are some tales that that it could have been and possibly James Bowie had one of these do we have an idea of when we jumped from this buoy to this buoy the conclusion I came to for my research is we have maybe four different styles that originated very early on on and it's hard to put one in front of the other so if we're talking about the guardless coffins we're talking about you know the style that's originating from Arkansas but it wasn't the only early style you know we can't pinpoint and say this is what the first buoy knife look like the original coverage of the SandBar fight if we want to go back to 1827 all it said was a large butcher knife so if a fellow wanted a self-defense knife at that time and he went to the local Cutler and said hey uh this seems like a really good idea can you make me one there's no illustration all you have is a large butcher knife the maker would build it based upon their experiences if you're French if you're German if you were raised in Europe or you were raised here whatever you would have different influences and I think all these different knife makers like America is a Melting Pot and the buoy knives reflect that back onto the style that they are it sounds like what we have is we have a bunch of makers trying to almost capitalize in on this this new thing and they're all putting their own spin on it eventually one of those spins just happened to take more than the others and that's how we ended up with the version of the buoy we have today it's something that's so cool to me to see it just be so uniquely American right like and it is and then you take the English into it right so the English for really the knife Factory of the world back then in Sheffield you have a guy that all he did was Forge Bowie knife blades or grind Bowie knife that's all he did for his whole life you know is one specific task and they got really good at it the English saw what was happening in America took the knife and made versions of it and then very quickly made simpler cheaper versions of it improved on the design it's kept selling them back to us with American slogans on them and so the American makers quickly sort of tapered off you know 1830s there were some and then there were less than there were less but they were still present but after the war the Bowie knife declined very rapidly as far as the need for one and we only had a few American manufacturers that really produced them in any quantity but by the time you get to 1891 you are already well into the the midst of the transition really from butcher knives into the sport hunting knife we went through a lot of history right we've talked about England we've talked about you know influence from other countries we've talked about all of these things right what's the definition of a Bowie knife that is a very difficult question a buoy knife is a knife made for purposes of self-defense inner for America between 1827 and roughly World War II then we can take the definition of Boeing I can say well it's a really big knife maybe with a clip point and uh heavy and suitable for fighting but you know that that's when there's a point right there at about 1950 where you can finally Define it by its stock truly the Bowie knife's popularity falls off after the Civil War and fixed place in the United States take a more Sportsman type approach for camping and hunting now of course Bowie knives don't Disappear Completely a lot of these Sportsman knives take on that buoy type shape and plenty of Bowie knives are still being made but its popularity is starting to go out just as quickly as it came in and this has to do for a few reasons we've got local laws that are actually against buoy knives in a lot of different places we've got multi-shot reliable firearms for personal defense and we're dealing with a war-torn country that's kind of had its fair share of violence it's really not until the 20th century with World War one and World War II that we see the Bowie knife's presence come back to the United States the buoys involvement in World War one was fairly ad hoc the Great War was one that took the World by storm and saw a lot of homemade brought from home knives used in trench warfare the Germans did have a standard issue knife that saw some play in the battlefield that was very buoy-esque and of course the Americans had the MK1 dagger but due to its expensive production cost and non-carry-friendly design an initial order of over 1 million MK ones was reduced to just over a hundred thousand most fighting knives of World War One were simply hunting knives many in the buoy shape repurposed for camp and self-protection duties it was World War II that really brought the Bowie knife into the modern era and back into the American story with K bars USMC now it should be noted that the company we know as kbar at the time was called Union Cutlery they had been business for over 50 years with their own series of ups and downs at the time of the war like all Cutlery manufacturers the current iteration of K bar called Union Cutlery started making knives for the war effort and got their version of knife 1219 C2 approved which we now know as the USMC fighting in utility knife what I mean by their version is that Union Cutlery was not the only company making the 1219 C2 but by all accounts they were making it best troops quickly learned that the k-bar stamped versions were superior to the others being made and started referring to the knife style regardless of maker as K bars because of this popularity Union Cutlery ended up changing their name after the war to kabar in 1952. so many kbar USMC knives were made during World War II that another one would not be made for issue until the 1970s even with all that success kabar felt the sting of the knife that cuts twice it was both a blessing and a curse to the company after the war there was a ton of brand recognition for the k-bar USMC but Americans had had enough of violence and they saw it strictly as a fighting knife from that time forward kbar ended up trading hands a bunch of times and really they're still living in the shadow of the USMC foreign there were also a bunch of hobby knife makers in the United States that would actually later go on to be important to Modern Life history that were contributing to the war effort in World War II from a bunch of different homemade operations around the country and one of those knife makers was a pastor from a small town in Idaho that was forging knives in the basement of his church his name was Hoyt buck and his 119 special is a big reason that we're still talking about Bowie knives today after World War II knife making starts to walk its way into a golden age of Custom Knife making by the late 1960s Custom Knife making was really beginning to transition from a side hustle hobby type business to a more practical full-time Endeavor Bob Loveless A.G Russell Jimmy Lyle Bo Randall and many others were turning out some of the best made and most beautiful knives the world had ever seen and you guessed it most of them were buoy shaped or buoyance fired American-made gold as a Young Man Hoyt Buck had apprenticed as a blacksmith in his home state of Kansas but it wasn't until World War II that he picked up those tools and skills again much like James Black Hoyt Buck had his own secret recipe for making knives and instead of whittling on a hickory stump for an hour to prove how strong and good his knives were early on the Bucks would actually baton through bolts showing how well made their knives were in 1946 Hoyt buck and his wife's Health were starting to fail so they moved in with their son Al in San Diego California and unlike James Black Hoyt had somebody to pass his legacy and knife making skill onto so even though Hoyt passed away in 1949 his son Al had learned everything that he needed to keep the buck name alive until they were able to incorporate 1961 keeping the world with a steady supply of great Bowie knives leading up to today the other thing the buck family was able to do was seemingly break the curse of the buoy knife and I think that they did this by transitioning the Bowie knife from primarily a kind of scary fighting knife that could do camp and Hunt tasks well to camp and Hunt knives that could handle itself if it needed to not only is the buck 120 one of my favorite knives of all time but the 120 the 119 and even the 124 are some of the greatest production fixed blades of all time the post-world War II era saw a huge Resurgence of interest in the old west and westerns at that time were like the Marvel Universe today all of Hollywood and television were saturated with Cowboys and Indians for most of this era Buck was a small player and names like case and trade ruled the popular market and while pop culture had its moment with the West you can be guaranteed that the buoy knife was not left behind a book called The Iron mistress was released lease that was specifically about Jim Bowie and his knife not long after that it was turned into one of the most popular movies of the time there were a handful of movies about the Alamo all making sure to pay homage in some way to Jim Bowie and his legendary knife there was even a short-lived TV show called The Adventures of Jim Bowie interestingly the lead actor at the TV show blamed its lack of success on the fact that they would not let him use his knife Davy Crockett and all the other frontiersmen Cowboys on TV could shoot whoever they wanted but the knife was seen as too violent all of these stories worked in their own little bit of folklore like the original knife being made from a meteorite or designed for throwing just as much as for fighting or that James Bowie was a Boy Scout vigilante who had never done anything wrong most interestingly they all chose to show the buoy knife as we came to know it and not as it actually existed at the time most of these Productions were informed in some way by a book titled Bowie knife by Raymond Thorpe while a good portion of what Thorpe broke has been called into question by more modern Scholars it was considered gospel at the time and it went a long way in building the buoy myth the book's actually available for free online and I put a link down in the description I highly recommend checking it out not for historical reasons but for some pretty awesome Fantastical tales about the Bowie knife custom makers Hollywood and buck did the most to keep the Bowie knife alive and as mentioned earlier that survival was predicated on the fact that the buoy knife was no longer a weapon first but an effective tool for many uses unlike the sword and Dagger before it the buoy knife with slight variations in design proved itself to be a near perfect blade that was useful for anything you'd want to use an edge tool for from this crowning milestone in the Bowie's history it pops up from time to time in its more pure form recapturing all of our imaginations in the 1980s we have Rambo and Crocodile Dundee Bill bagwell's battle blades articles and cold Steel's introduction of pure to form warm fighting buoys with the Laredo and nachos these all help to kick off the tactical knife craze that shaped much of the modern pocket knife and produced tons of variations on the buoy pattern in more recent history even Spyderco has done a ton with the buoy name and shape integrating it into a handful of folders and even creating their own true to form fighting buoy just a few years ago thanks to shows like forged and fire and access to social media and YouTube there are countless custom makers out there building big buoy inspired blades I think Peter Kohler a dark Timber knives is leading the pack making knives that Jim Bowie Davy Crockett and any other Frontiersman or Cowboy would have traded their left arm for on top of craftsmanship and execution I think Peter has some of that early James Black Magic that he's instilling in his knives when you handle one you really get the sense that there's something more to the knife than just what you can see in the production world of course we still have Buck pumping out the unbeatable tried and true Classics when we look at the Spirit of the buoy knife as a purpose built fighter that could handle just about anything else you throw at it I think tops knives are carrying the torch through pretty much their entire catalog look at this mpap for example it was designed by Seth Brown who works with fighter jet aircrews its spy line is kill and survive and it is purpose-built to do everything you need it to do while being attached to your combat best and out of the way when you don't need it almost 200 years from when the first modern looking buoys were carried and you can't deny its fingerprints here on a knife designed to be used in fighter jets the buoy has even transcended into the world of high art Tashi bharucha and a group called the unnamed Society have just put together the most amazing Bowie knife project of all time using a design that Tashi came up with they have contracted the best knife makers in the world to create 50 buoy knives in Toshi's pattern but gave them full freedom on every other aspect of the knife this project is incredible in scope and in Bowie knife history each knife could be used for any task you could imagine but each is also a single regular piece of art honoring one of the most infamous knives in history the staying power of the buoy knife is equal parts practical and romantic forged in the hands of leaders pioneers and rough men in some of the most wild wilderness the world has ever known it's no surprise that it came out the other end a near perfect Implement for what humans have been questing for since the Stone Age a claw and a Fang to help feed and protect themselves it's been a blast putting all of this history together I hope you guys have enjoyed it please share your epic Bowie knife stories down below because there are so many great stories about the Bowie knife we'll catch you on the next one

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Length: 23min 33sec (1413 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 17 2022