The Alamo—Then and Now

I have a Bowie knife I bought many years ago (see pic). It lives in my underwear drawer in my dresser, from which it has rarely emerged.

I think I bought it at the Sears store out at Chapel Hill Mall, not far from Kent, Ohio, where we were living in the early years of our marriage.

Why did I buy it? Because Joyce and I, freshly married, were going on a camping trip to Maine the first summer after we were married. It was the summer of 1970.

We headed to Baxter State Park, where we found a good camping spot on a lonely lake, where we heard loons in the evening.

I found no use for the Bowie knife. It went back to Ohio with us in pristine condition. I popped it in my drawer, and there it has lain for a half-century.

But why did I buy a Bowie knife in the first place?

Jim Bowie, of course. I had gotten hooked on the Alamo legends from early boyhood. It started with the book you see below.

And that merits a brief story all by its lonesome. In the early 1950s my mom was teaching English at Emerson Junior High in Enid, Oklahoma. Among her extra-curricular duties was to sponsor the Y-Teens, and one year she attended a conference of Y-Teen sponsors in Dallas, Texas. She took her three sons with her. I must have been about nine or so.

During some time off she took us to a bookstore, where I found this book prominently displayed. I’d never heard of Jim Bowie, and when I said, quite loudly, “Who is Jim Bowie?” the other patrons of that deep-in-the-heart-of-Texas bookstore whirled to look at me in alarm and disbelief—as if I’d asked something like “Does Jesus play for the New York Yankees?”

Mom bought me the book, and I read it, oh, fifty times or more. A true hero story, which, I learned later, was almost entirely fabricated. Bowie was a naughty man—slave-trader, swindler.

A year or so later, here came Walt Disney’s three-part TV series Davy Crockett. I got caught up in the frenzy of Crockett popularity like just about every other kid in that era.

Bowie appears only in the final episode, the Alamo one, in somewhat of a diminished role. He dies heroically, fighting, but in fact he fought not at all. According to the new book I’m reading, Forget the Alamo (2021), a richly researched historical revision of Disney, et al., Bowie was deathly ill (typhoid?) and was essentially executed without a struggle.

I was annoyed about the Disney version—after all, I’d read Jim Bowie: Boy with a Hunting Knife fifty times, and it claims Bowie killed nine Mexicans with his Bowie knife alone!

I was somewhat mollified when The Adventures of Jim Bowie ran on ABC-TV from 1956-58, my junior-high years.

To be continued.