Authors: James Donovan
Tags: #History / Military - General, #History / United States - 19th Century
Now, under a bright sun, with the loud murmur of the river in the background, Bowie and the Wells faction stood less than a hundred yards from the field of honor, in a grove of willows above the beach. The Maddox party gathered a few hundred yards away at the opposite end of the sandbar.
Just after the appointed time of noon, the two duelists, Wells and Maddox, took their places eight paces apart in the sand, their pistols at their sides. On the count of three they raised their weapons and fired. Neither scored a hit. Another round was fired—the code duello required at least two exchanges of fire—and neither man’s aim was any better. Some of the onlookers, and certainly the two principals, breathed a sigh of relief, hoping for an amicable settlement. Neither Wells nor Maddox held any special animosity for the other, but had simply been caught up in the rigid code of honor peculiar to the American South. Now that honor had been upheld on each side, the two shook hands, and Maddox suggested they all celebrate with a glass of wine—his friends had brought some. They turned and walked across the sandbar in the direction of the Maddox party.
Had some blood been spilled, that might have been the end of it.
Both groups of observers emerged from the willows and made their way toward the principals. The Wells faction was much closer, and they hurried across the sand at an angle, arriving first to confront the duelists—that Wells and Maddox had settled did not mean everyone else had. One of Samuel Wells’s cousins, the volatile Samuel Cuny, confronted Colonel Robert Crain, of the Maddox party. “We might as well settle our troubles here and now,” he said, and began to draw his pistol. Trying to prevent bloodshed, Cuny’s brother stepped in front of him, and Wells grabbed his shoulders. Crain stepped back, but when James Bowie moved toward him, he let loose with one of his two pistols.
The ball missed Bowie, who fired a second later, yelling, “Crain, you have shot at me, and I will kill you.” Crain turned and retreated a few steps, jumping across some gullies in the sand. By this time Cuny had freed himself and moved toward Crain, who fired his other pistol at him, hitting him in the thigh. Cuny fell backward to the sand, blood pumping from his injury; the ball had severed his femoral artery. He would die from severe hemorrhage within minutes.
Bowie drew his knife and charged Crain, who turned and threw his spent pistol at Bowie, knocking him off his feet. As Bowie stood up, Maddox grabbed him, but Bowie threw him off. Norris Wright and two of his cohorts, the Blanchard brothers, ran up. Bowie veered off to a thick driftwood tree stump sticking six feet out of the ground and took cover behind it. Wright strode forward and drew his pistol.
“You damned rascal,” yelled Bowie. “Don’t you shoot.” Someone scampered over and handed him a pistol and Bowie and Wright fired at each other, both missing. Wright leveled another pistol at Bowie and pulled the trigger; the ball slammed into Bowie’s chest, traveled through his lung, and exited out his back. Bowie staggered, then plowed through the sand toward Wright before a shot from one of the Blanchard brothers passed through his thigh, and he finally fell to the ground.
Wright and one of the Blanchards unsheathed their sword canes and fell upon the downed Bowie. They stabbed him several times, but Bowie fended off some blows with his knife and free arm, though one stroke tore into his free hand. Another found his breastbone, which bent the blade.
Somehow Bowie found the strength to sit up and grab Wright’s cravat. Wright reared back, pulling Bowie to his feet. Bowie put all his remaining strength into one thrust with his big knife into Wright’s chest, then he twisted the blade. Wright collapsed, dying, onto Bowie, pinning him to the ground. Blanchard stabbed again at Bowie, but then Thomas Wells shot him in the arm, allowing Bowie to reach up and slice Blanchard in the side. Blanchard retreated, the melee ended, and the Sandbar Fight quickly passed into legend.
Bowie, the recipient of several deep stab wounds, at least two lead balls, and one accurately hurled pistol to his head, was “not expected to recover,” claimed one newspaper. But it would take more than that to kill Jim Bowie.
The Sandbar Fight was reported in newspapers across the country, including the young nation’s most widely read newsweekly,
Niles’ Weekly Register,
published in Washington, D.C. Bowie’s superhuman feats of personal combat in the free-for-all made his reputation as perhaps the most feared fighter in the South and on the frontier. Years later, he would tell a Presbyterian minister he happened to be traveling with of the fracas and of his encounter with Wright. “It did my very soul good,” he said, “to wrench it through his heart, and kill such a mean puppy, who would stab a man already down.” Courteous to strangers, loyal to friends, and chivalrous to women, James Bowie was unforgiving of any man who became an enemy.
B
OWIE WAS BORN IN
1796 in southern Kentucky, the son of Rezin Bowie, of Scottish descent, and the Welsh-blooded Elvira “Elve” Jones, an iron-willed young volunteer nurse during the Revolutionary War. She cared for Rezin after he sustained an injury while fighting the British with Colonel Francis Marion, married him soon after, and bore him several sons and daughters. In 1800, the family moved to Spanish-owned Missouri, on the Mississippi. When James was six, Rezin moved his family again, this time downriver to the bayou in Louisiana, some thirty miles west of Natchez. A few years later, in 1809, the Bowie patriarch pulled up stakes one more time, to another bayou eighty miles south, near Opelousas, where the family prospered in the timber-cutting business.
By that time the Bowie children were reaching adulthood, or nearing it. James and his brother Rezin Jr., almost three years older, were inseparable: always outdoors, hunting, fishing, roaming the countryside, roping and capturing wild deer and horses, even riding alligators and catching bears, except when Elve Bowie—an “exceedingly pious woman,” according to the oldest Bowie brother, John—kept them inside to teach them the basics of the three Rs—“reading, writing, and ’rithmetic,” as they were colloquially referred to. Whenever possible she would bring a circuit rider in to preach to her brood. As an adult, James would fill out to a muscular 180 pounds and six feet, with chestnut brown hair and dark gray-blue eyes set deep in a fair-complected face that women found attractive. His eyes were calm and penetrating until he was angered—when, it was said, they resembled a tiger’s.
In January 1815, with the British preparing an expedition against New Orleans, eighteen-year-old James and his brother Rezin mustered in Opelousas. Their military regiment marched toward the Crescent City, but the Battle of New Orleans concluded on January 8, before they arrived. In that clash, Andrew Jackson defeated the British, and peace between the two nations was made days later.
Young James had little money and few belongings other than his wits and his brawn, but he and his brothers had been raised to be enterprising. Over the next few years, while working in the family timber-cutting business, he slowly acquired free open land or inexpensive tracts for little money down. By the time he was twenty-three, he owned several slaves and a good bit of land. He was also gaining a reputation as a fearless backwoodsman, one whom few men dared to insult. When that happened, the Bowie blood came up, and he would often take matters into his own hands—literally. “It was his habit to settle all difficulties without regard to time or place,” remembered one friend, “and it was the same whether he met one or many.”
Bowie and his brothers moved into a more profitable business in 1819. The African slave trade had been abolished nine years earlier, but the burgeoning plantation culture in the Deep South and west of the Mississippi created a lucrative market for smuggled slaves. Those captured by the authorities were sold at auction. Like a few other states, Louisiana gave half the auction proceeds to the parties who turned in the slaves or provided information leading to their seizure.
The resourceful Bowie brothers—they all stuck close together, particularly James and Rezin—quickly learned the ropes. They did much business with the man who dominated slave smuggling in the area, Jean Laffite—who, along with Andrew Jackson, was credited with saving New Orleans from the British. The Bowies added a brilliant twist to the scam: after they turned in the “found” slaves to the authorities, they would outbid other buyers at auction. Pocketing their reward of half the proceeds, they would in effect pay only half the final price and receive clear title to their chattels to boot.
Two years of this netted the brothers Bowie a small fortune, but their scheme was a delicate one, with a finite profit potential, and they got out before officials became too suspicious of the brothers’ knack for finding their source of bounty. Next up for the Bowies was an even more lucrative business: land speculation on a grand scale.
In itself, the buying of uninhabited land, sometimes on credit or on easy terms, reselling it at a higher price, and then paying off the original note—thus making a tidy profit with little capital ventured—was not illegal. Many men were involved in similar schemes in the young country’s new territories, and Arkansas and Louisiana were rife with opportunity: they had changed hands more than once, and the confusing lack of clear title and multiple sovereignties created a muddled and wide-open market for fraud and forgery. Over the next decade, the Bowies jumped in feetfirst, none more enthusiastically than the brother some now referred to as Big Jim Bowie. Before the end of the decade, he engineered more than one hundred forged land claims and titles comprising eighty thousand acres in Arkansas and almost as many in Louisiana—enough to make him the largest landowner in the region if and when the claims were patented and thus legitimized.
But the Bowies’ massive land schemes caught the attention of the U.S. attorney general, who instigated a thorough investigation that canceled almost all the fraudulent transactions—the audacity, method, and scale of which led these and similar claims to be known as Bowie claims. The attorney general also threatened legal action and possible criminal charges. Though neither of the brothers would ever be officially charged, and though the widespread knowledge of the scams did not prevent the election of Rezin Bowie to the Louisiana legislature three times, brother James had worn out his welcome.
But Big Jim had already set his sights westward, on an area even more wide open and promising: Texas, whose abundant land and rumored silver deposits seemed ripe for the Bowie touch.
He had made his first trip to the Mexican province in 1828, riding first to Stephen F. Austin’s San Felipe, where he talked of building a much-needed cotton mill, then westward 150 miles to San Antonio de Béxar. There he introduced himself to the town’s leading citizen, Don Juan Martín de Veramendi, soon to be vice governor of Texas—and his lovely daughter, sixteen-year-old Ursula. He made a few more trips over the next few years, and became much better acquainted with Texas and Ursula. By early 1831, he moved there for good. He became a Mexican citizen, fluent in Spanish, and the tentative owner of almost a million acres of land, largely through the engineered—but legal—purchase of more than a dozen eleven-league grant leases, available only to Mexican citizens.
That was also the year Bowie engineered another advantageous acquisition. In April, he married Ursula Veramendi in Béxar’s Church of San Fernando. The groom was thirty-five, his bride nineteen, but it appeared to be a love match for both. Bowie was now related to one of the most powerful families in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas.
After living in a few different rented houses, in early 1832 the couple moved into the modest Veramendi mansion in town. Over the next few years Bowie spent more time on the road than he did at home, working in various mercantile activities and nursing his land grants along toward confirmation, always after a bigger score. He had heard stories of the fabled silver mines in the San Saba hills to the northwest, and in November 1831, accompanied by his brother Rezin and nine other men, traveled one hundred miles to the area of the mines. He took with him a thirteen-year-old boy named Carlos Espalier, a mulatto orphan that he and Ursula had informally adopted into their home.
Six weeks after leaving, the party was attacked by a band of 124 Indians. Over the course of ten hours, besieged in a grove of trees behind a makeshift breastwork of saddles, packs, and rocks, the men withstood a furious series of assaults. When the Indians finally left the area, one of Bowie’s men lay dead and three others were wounded. They estimated thirty Indians killed and forty injured, and even if these numbers were exaggerated, the losses Bowie’s men inflicted were impressive. A small band of Texians in a crude fort had withstood odds better than ten to one.
As word spread of the battle, James Bowie’s reputation as a fighter and a leader of men increased. He was a man to be reckoned with, one who could impose his will on a situation, no matter how dire. If the Sandbar Fight had made him famous, this clash made him a Texian to whom others looked for direction and leadership.
O
VER THE NEXT FEW YEARS
, Bowie seemed always to be on the move. His peregrinations encompassed business dealings in Saltillo, the state capital; far-ranging expeditions into the wilderness in search of hostile Indians—and gold and silver; and on to San Felipe, Brazoria, and other points farther east, such as New Orleans. And of course, he made trips back to his kin in Louisiana, where he found most of his holdings gone. In addition, an 1833 U.S. Supreme Court ruling would negate the Bowie claims in Arkansas, further depleting his assets.
As events in his new country edged it closer toward outright rebellion, Bowie followed suit. After the Travis-instigated takeover at Anahuac in the spring of 1832, similar disturbances erupted at Nacogdoches and the port city of Matamoros. In July, when Stephen Austin needed a man he could count on, he asked Bowie to ride with all due haste to Nacogdoches to defuse a volatile situation involving, again, a confrontation between a fed-up citizenry and a Mexican garrison: the military commander there had demanded that the locals surrender their arms. Their refusal to do so was predictable and justified, since they would have been left with no defense against Indians. Bowie arrived in town one day too late to prevent a skirmish between the two hundred soldiers and three hundred Texians, but when the Mexicans evacuated that night, Bowie took control. He chose twenty men to accompany him in pursuit of the garrison troops. After some clever tactical maneuvering, he returned the next day with two hundred prisoners, who were escorted to Béxar and eventually returned to Mexico.