Jim Bowie was one of the nicest of fighters, a sort of Robin Hood of the western wilds. In 1832, he was on the steamer Orleans from Vicksburg to Natchez when he stopped a young man from throwing himself overboard in despair. The silly fellow, with his new wife, had been carrying over sixty thousand dollars entrusted to him by his fellow planters and managed to lose the lot to three professional gamblers plying their trade on board. Bowie turned the poor man over to his wife, told her everything would be all right, and went to join the card game. When he caught the dealer slipping a card to one of his friends, he grabbed him with one hand and whipped out his knife with the other. A witness tells the tale:
”The baffled gambler, livid with rage and disappointment, swore that the stranger should fight him, demanding, with an oath, to know who he was anyway. Quietly, as if in the presence of ladies, the stranger answered ‘James Bowie.’ At the sound of that name two of the gamblers quailed, for they knew that the man who bore the name was a terror to even the bravest; but the third, who had never heard of ‘James Bowie,’ demanded a duel at once. This was acceded to at once by Bowie, with a smile; pistols – derringers – were the weapons selected, the hurricane-roof the place, and the time at once… Ascending to the hurricane-roof, the principals were placed one upon the top of each wheel-house. This brought them about twelve yards apart, and each was exposed to the other from the knee up. The pistols were handed to them and the gambler’s second gave the word, ‘One, two, three, fire, stop,’ uttered at intervals of one second each, and they were allowed to fire at any time between the utterance of the words one and stop. As ‘one’ rang out in the clear morning air both raised their weapons, as ‘three’ was heard the gambler’s pistol rang out and before the sound had ceased and while the word ‘fire’ was being uttered, Bowie’s pistol sounded, and simultaneous with this sound the gambler fell, and giving a convulsive struggle rolled off the wheel-house into the river.”
Bowie blew the smoke out of his pistol and went below to reassure the newlyweds and divide up the pot. They were so grateful that Bowie, embarrassed, had to get off the boat at Rodney, while they “clung to him as though he was a father leaving them.”
Source:
Holland, Barbara. “X. Hill Country.” Gentlemen’s Blood: A History of Dueling From Swords at Dawn to Pistols at Dusk. Bloomsbury, 2004. 193-94. Print.
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...