Part Two: Jim Bowie: The Worst Texan

Robert is joined again by Billy Wayne Davis to continue discussing Jim Bowie.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M. Knivess. This is the story of Jim Bowie of
the Bowie Knight, Part two. Behind the Bastards is Robert Evans,
the podcast of Bad People Talk about him co host
Billy Wayne Diddy. Billy, I have learned that you don't
actually need to order words in any meaningful way if

(00:22):
you just make sure all of the important words are
kind of jumbled up into a salad. People tend to
get what you're saying. Are you saying with the right emotion?
Damn right, yep, yep, yep. So why even have grammar?
That's the question. And the answer is there's no reason
to have grammar, and it's it's cowardly. I love grammar

(00:42):
is up, so there are raisins. No, yes, probably so.
In our last episode we talked about the famous sandbar fight,
which it's really just a giant ship show. Uh and
probably would have been pretty funny to watch. It was
hilarious to listen about. Yeah, up until that guy got
his guts spelled all over the sand bar. It was

(01:04):
pretty funny. Um. Still, that was that part. I mean,
you know where you're getting into, you know, in some fairness,
Jim Booie's a monster because of the slaves stuff. In
that fight. He did say don't shoot at me, you rascal,
like he gave him proper warning, and that guy kept
shooting at him. He did, he did, And that is

(01:25):
the general rule. If somebody has a giant knife and
you're going to shoot at him, your best, your best
deal with them real fast with your gun, because if
you don't, they've got a real big knife and they'll
be angry at you. That is I had a My
middle school basketball coach told me he carried a twelve
gauge in Vietnam because an M six team just piste
him off. And I was like, okay, well that's we're

(01:47):
a basketball practice. But yeah, that's really not helpful in
any part of my life right now. But thank you
for scaring a child. Yeah, and that information has always
stuck with me. Yeah. I mean, in the days before
body armor was common in particular, stopping power was really
um anyway, let's just neither nor there wasn't not wrong.

(02:11):
If you want to stop a man, it doesn't get
much better than a twelve game shotgun unless you have
a gigantic knife like Jim Bowie have had that too.
He probably did. Now when we left our friend Jim.
He had just disemboweled a man during an argument and
been shot several times. And because the United States, he's

(02:32):
my friends, No he's not, because the United States has
not changed at all since those days. This made him
suddenly gigantically famous, and he became a living legend of
the Wild West, like Wyatt Earp or Davy Crockett or
I have to assume based on his name Grizzly Adams,
and I refused to look up who Grizzly Adams was,
so don't tell me if I'm wrong. I think he

(02:53):
I think he fought grizzly bears with his bare hands
because he had to defend orphanages. That's my head cannon
for Grizzly Adams. His brother was good at taking pictures,
probably Ansel yep Anzel and Grizzly. So once he'd healed
from the sandbar fight, Jim Bowie re entered polite society
as a celebrity. The eyes of the nation followed him

(03:14):
as he traveled through the Old West and gotten too
even more fights. Now, most of the fighting credited to
Jim Boweing never happened, and it's very possible that he
never killed another person with his knife again. But there,
of course numerous stories you can find about him getting
into fights and killing two or three armed men with
his gigantic knife. And almost all of these your tall tales,
you know. Um, yeah, once you're famous for stabbing a

(03:35):
guy to death, there's gonna be a lot of other
stories if you're stabbing guys to death, even if you
never stabbed another guy to death. That's just America. It's
Keith Richards. Yeah. Yeah, he doesn't do as many drugs
you'd as you'd think, but he got the reputation and
it's just stuck with him. Well, that's what in his
book he said, Yeah, I just never corrected anyonere No,
and why would you? Yeah, yeah, it's it's uh, it's

(04:00):
all about personal branding, and Bowie knows how to brand himself. Well,
so uh, yeah, he he didn't. Probably it's probable that
he never killed another human being with his knife. Um,
but he continued to kill his shipload of people. Don't
worry about that, billy, He kept yet he kept killing people.
That did not stop. Um. His brother John later wrote

(04:21):
that after recovering from the Sandbar fight quote, Jim felt
as though he had not been well used or properly
treated by some of his political friends, and this, John
Bowie says, is why Jim went to Texas. Now, in
writing this, he left out about a year or so
worth of crimes that he and Jim both committed. So
like the kind of frontier story that his brother tells us,

(04:42):
that like Jim got betrayed by some of his political friends,
and so he went to Texas, and he leaves out
like what actually happened, um, And what actually happened is
that for the next year or so after the Sandbar fight,
he got back into conning people over land. So basically
he would travel all across the frontier buy up tracts
of land, or purchase options to buy up tracts of land,

(05:04):
and then he would sell that land to the highest bidder,
hopefully for a profit. Now this is called land speculation
and it's not illegal, um, but it was kind of
slower than Jim Booie was comfortable with. So we started
forging options and land deeds and selling those two. Now
this is outright theft because he was just lying about
land that he had no claim to, selling it to
people and pocketing the money. But the Internet didn't exist

(05:27):
back then, and people usually weren't fast enough to catch him. Now,
Jim went towards quite a lot of effort to affect
these forgeries, even hiring actors to pretend to be landowners
so he could then convince buyers that he was this
person's representative, so he could sell them land that he
had no right to. So these were pretty elaborate cons Yeah,
well he had to have gotten caught. He got constantly, constantly.

(05:49):
He wasn't good at hiding it. People were just dumber
back then, and there was no Internet. Yeah, And I
was like, I'm gonna need an accomplice, yeah yeah, and
the accompany he didn't need an accomplice, and his accomplices
were usually congress Yeah. So he had friends in congress
um who would help him basically by like pushing you know,

(06:11):
the local banks and stuff to to to recognize these
deeds and stuff that he was he was bringing forward um.
And eventually he decided the best way for him to
continue his scams and make a bunch of money was
to run for a local congressional seat in Louisiana to
to basically get in power himself. And he worked at
a deal with one of his friends who was already
in Congress, to basically take up that guy's seat once

(06:32):
his term ended and run in the next election. But
then his friend decided to run for re election again,
and Bowie got angry at him, And this is what
his brother referred to as him not being properly treated
by political friends. So the congressional election that year actually
went against his buddy and probably would have gone against Bowie,
and he was left without any allies in Congress, and

(06:52):
without any way of easily continuing to swindle Rubes into
buying land he didn't already own. Over the course of
eighty eight, all of Jim's many schemes collapsed one after
the other, leaving him at risk of becoming destitute um
or at least if he'd actually bothered to pay any
of the debts he'd accrued. The book Three Roads to
the Alamo gives a good summary of the actual scale
of the con Bowie was trying to work, and it's

(07:14):
it's enormous quote. He had made a stunning lee, bold
play and exploitation and all laying fraudulent claim to eighty
thousand acres in Arkansas and between seventy three thousand and
eighty thousand more in Louisiana. Yeah, my god. If he
had succeeded, he would have been a Holer, part owner
of two hundred fifty square miles of bayou and riverfront property,

(07:35):
and possibly another two hundred square miles and a hundred
and eighty eight other Arkansas claims he had withdrawn, making
him the largest landowner in the reasons in the region
and in his time very possibly the largest private landholder
in the United States. So he would have been a
millionaire if he'd succeeded in this, but he failed, and
now he was all but broke by the end of
eighteen eight. So that's what leads him to Texas is

(07:59):
he has ailed in a series of incredibly ambitious land
cons he winds up broke, and Texas is the best
shot he has at getting a bunch more free land. Yeah. Yeah,
I didn't think it was gonna be a peer of
heart thing, No, no, so. And this is another part

(08:19):
that's interesting to me. Mexico's government in my Texas history
classes was always portrayed as cruel and oppressive um at
worst and kind of like absentee at best. And I
later learned that one of the many one of the
main reasons why white colonists hated the Mexican government was
that slavery was illegal in Mexico. Um. This was a
part of it, um. But also the Mexican government didn't

(08:41):
really stop a lot of these white people from bringing
in their slaves. They wanted Americans to move in because
they had a lot of empty land and they needed
people to kind of like hold it down and cultivate
it and provide a tax base and stuff, um. So
a lot of them looked the other way at forced
human bondage, um. But it was still more difficult to
uh to keep slaves there. But this was kind of

(09:02):
overwhelmed by the fact that Mexico wanted settlers badly enough.
They were willing to give huge amounts of land to
anyone who was willing to pretend to be Catholic and
agree to obey Mexican law. So for that small price,
if you became a non citizen settler in Texas, you
got a hundred and seventy seven acres to farm on
and a whole league four thousand, four hundred acres to graze.

(09:23):
Your Catalan even more land up to eleven leagues could
be purchased for the dirt for a dirt cheap price
if the buyer was willing to become a Mexican citizen.
So Jim Bowie, I would well, no, I wouldn't do
that for Texas land. I mean I know Texas too well,
Yeah exactly, Yeah, I do that for part of Mexico

(09:44):
for sure. Yeah. No, no, no, I do not want
to Texas. No, no, no, no no. So Bowie packed
up his unregional and reasonably large knife and he rolled
in Mexico. His brother John unceremoniously noted that he quote
disposed of his lands and negroes before set out, because
buying and selling people was again nothing at all to
the men of the Bowie family. So yeah, Jim was

(10:08):
thirty two years old when he finally made it to Mexico,
and the most entertaining description I've heard of him in
this period of time comes from historian J. Frank dbe Quote.
He found that reputation of his knife had preceded him.
He stood six ft tall and was all muscle. He
was pleasing and look speech men and manner to both
men and women. THO would have said that he seldom smiled.
Letters and other writing by him and Resent P. Bowie

(10:29):
are in clear, sinewy English. After he had been in
Texas a while, he spoke Spanish as well as French.
He was not a Ruffian, although he could be rough.
He comprehended the cutthroats and gamblers of Natchez. While he
dined in patrician houses on the hill or sang in
the theater. He was at home with bellowing alligators in
the marches, with mustangs and mustangers on the prairies, and
with lawyers who would circumvent God. In Texas, he fought

(10:49):
Indians and Mexicans and Texas. Yeah. This is Adobe's article
where he writes that is from nineteen fifty seven. And
you can tell that the attitudes on colonialism were a
lot different by the fact that he just dropped and
he fought Indians and Mexicans. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, this is

(11:11):
not inaccurate. Um, but it does leave out kind of
the brutality of what exactly Jim Bowie got up to. Um. Yeah.
So here's how Jim's brother John describes this massacre of
a bunch of Native Americans that Bowie commits not long
after getting to Texas. Quote. Uh, during the few years
he spent in Texas, he had many strange and hazardous adventures,

(11:33):
probably the most notable of which was the following He
and Resin Bowie with nine others went in search of
a silver mine about two hundred miles northwest of San Antonio.
While on this expedition, they were attacked by about a
hundred and fifty Comanche Indians. James, being well acquainted with
the habits and manners of these savages, soon perceived that
they were on trail of him and his little party
for the purpose of murdering or robbing them, So he
availed himself of the first suitable place for defense. Now,

(11:56):
John describes this as natives wanting to rob him, but
he and Jim, But the reality is that he and
like Jim and Rezin Bowie had moved into Native American
territory and we're trying to steal their ship, and they
were carrying weapons. Um. He also describes the natives as Comanche,
but they were Tawakoni, Waco and Catto um And by
any definition of the term I've ever heard during my

(12:17):
youth in Texas, these natives were acting in self defense because,
again Booie and his brothers were part of a posse
of large armed men who would come unto their land
to steal a bunch of silver. Yeah, we'll just judge
on their recent past history and I'm gonna like, I'm
gonna go with the natives on this one. Yeah yeah.
And what followed was probably might have been the bloodiest

(12:38):
single fight of the period between white settlers and natives
and at least in the history of Texas. Um. The natives,
you know, a large group of them surround the little
fort that they built in the rocks and opened fire.
They kill one of Bowie's men, uh booie. The Bowie
brothers and their other men fire back repeatedly, and this
continues for literally days, Like there's multiple days of gunfire,

(13:01):
and by the time it's all over, fifty to sixty
Natives are dead, along with a lot of their horses. Um.
And it's hard to say if the death counts in
this are anywhere near accurate um because like white settlers
would lie a lot about how many people they killed
in firefights, but also they had access to much better guns.
That said, given what happened at the Sandbar fight, I

(13:22):
don't know how much I trust the story of Jim
Booie about his accuracy in a gunfight. I don't know.
It's hard to say, but probably a lot of people
did die because they were in like a three day
gun battle. So whatever. Yeah, he murders a bunch of people. Well,
and he could have had like it could have been
like a like a regulator situation where he picks up

(13:43):
some people that are handy with the steel because he is.
He's not, and they're using rifles, you know, they're these
guys are like wielding like, you know, more accurate guns
in this the gunfight, they're using handguns and like in
this they're kind of shooting with like hunting rifles which
are more accurate and have rifled barrels and stuff. Most
people will say fifty to sixty dead in the total fight.

(14:04):
It's impossible to know for sure. But yeah, So after
the natives back off, Jim and his men flee back
to San Antonio, UH and he immediately petitions the local
government for petition to raise an expedition against the Tawakoni
tribe because you know, during this little invasion, he estimated
they had two thousand horses and he was basically like,

(14:26):
I just got into a gunfight with these guys, and
I think if you give me enough men, I can
steal all of their horses to sell them. So he's
a He's a good dude, That's what I'm saying. Yeah. So, um, yeah,
we don't actually know if this expedition ever happened. Um,
it may well have. Uh. And Bowie is noted as

(14:47):
having numerous other conflicts with Native Americans during this period,
all of which kind of involved around him rolling into
their houses and stealing shit. Um, But they're usually called
expeditions by like the historians, even in the twenty century.
A lot of historians will call it like he he
raised an expedition, and you're like, what was the expedition for? Well,
he wanted to steal things from these people, valuables. I'm

(15:11):
looking for valuables that It's like even you know, there's
at least with like the Lewis and Clark expedition, there's
like this they were making maps and ship right, Like,
there's criticisms to make of it, but they were they
did write some maps. Booie is just taking things. Yeah.

(15:31):
So Jim applied for and eventually received Mexican citizenship, which
allowed him to buy eleven leagues of land. He also
succeeded in convincing a number of Mexican citizens to sign
over their options for purchasing land to him as well,
and throughout this period, Jim Bowie continued to make the
bulk of his money through an even mix of legitimate
and fraudulent land sales. So again, at any given point

(15:53):
in time, if you're wondering how is Jim making a living,
He's he's pretending. He's he's selling fake land to people.
He's a and he's a real estate con artist. That
is Jim Booie's like secret to wealth. How very modern
of him. Yeah, he has a lot in common with
our president, aside from the fact that he was clearly
willing to get into a fight. Oh he'll get his

(16:15):
hands dirty for sure. Yeah, Yeah, he's He's definitely a
better person than the president. He's also very good at spin,
like calling stuff an expedition, where like, now, man, you're
raiding villages that you're you're just raiding people, you're stealing
their horses, not expedition. Although this this does make me

(16:37):
think if I could get fifty to a hundred people
together and robbed the Toyota dealership near me. We could
just call it an expedition to get free land cruisers.
That's actually not AIP. You can call it an expedition
to get expeditions. Yeah, yeah, but I feel like we'd
be doing four to favor by taking expeditions away. Someone

(17:01):
got him, someone came and took them. You guys know,
I I really want to get down to an expedition.
That's what we ought to do. Just just just rebrand
shoplifting as an expedition. So during this time, Jim Billie
became friends with the Mexican governor of Texas, a guy
named Veramindy, and he worked at a deal with Aramindy

(17:21):
by which he could marry the governor's daughter. So he
signed a dowry with a Veramindy family, promising to pay
his wife more than fifteen thousand dollars in money and
property that he absolutely did not have. He listed as
collateral the fraudulent properties in Louisiana and Arkansas that he'd
never actually owned in the first place. Um, but he
basically conned to this governor and let him marry his daughter.

(17:43):
And then he immediately borrows seven fifty dollars from his
new family in law to take his new wife on
a vacation to New Orleans. All right, I want to
give you some money. Yeah, I have some Can I
have some money and your daughter? I could so. Jim
and his new wife were married on April thirty one.

(18:04):
She was nineteen years old and he was thirty five
years old, although he listed his age is thirty on
the marriage certificate. Weird, very weird, just a little vain.
Just lie about your age on when it's technically legal.
I mean, that makes me think if he's lying about
his age, maybe she her age was not. Actually, I

(18:26):
don't know, this is a different time. It's entirely possible
he actually thought he was thirty. Again, not a lot
of official governments documents about when you came into the
world at this point. And he's taking several guns to
the head at this point. Yes, he's been hitting the
head a number of times. And remember his mom only

(18:48):
taught him the alphabet, so numbers probably not Jim Bowie
strong suit. So um. Yeah, And a big part of
why you got married seemed to be that getting hitched
h to a Mexican, or getting hitched to anyone at all,
entitled him to another four thousand acres from the government,
and since his wife was a rich girl, he was
also entitled now to live at the Veramindy House, which

(19:11):
was basically a palace because he's you know, he's the
governor of Texas. UM. Now, the sources I have read
all tend to agree that he like was legitimately in
love with his wife and that the Veramendy family treated
him as a son. I have found no evidence to
discount this, so I kind of have to assume that
this was in fact the case, even though given all

(19:31):
of the scams he got up to, in the fact
that he lied about the money he had to get
a dowry, I'm very hesitant to give Bowie credit for anything,
but I don't know. I I have no evidence that
he didn't truly care for this woman or for his
adopted family, so I gotta say that. Um. And there's
definitely evidence that the Veramendy family really cared about Jim Uh.

(19:53):
He was quote furnished with money and supplies without limit,
and was basically got to live as a rich boy
for a while. UM. Since he no longer needed to work,
he gave up his land conning and spent several bliss
for years, living in a palace and occasionally going out
on expeditions to steal gold and silver from Native people,
mainly just for fun. I was gonna say, that's just

(20:13):
like it sounds like he just likes to go Yeah,
just l Ron Hubbard's style gold hunting expeditions, but with
a higher body count. So that we know of, he
was on one of these trips getting into gunfights with
Native Americans when his wife, their two children, and his
father and mother in law all died horrifically during a

(20:35):
cholera outbreak. Um, so he's just like out camping and
his whole family is wiped out by cholera in the
space of a few days. Uh, which focks him up
right that that that's hard to deal with your whole
family dying at the same time, feel like most people
would would would have a little bit of trouble with that.
And a lot of sources will claim that this is

(20:55):
when Jim began to drink heavily. You know, he'd always
had a tendency to party a little hard sometimes, but
kind of after this point you see him increasingly sort
of sinking into straight up alcoholism. Changed the way, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that seems fair to say. If you want to protect
your family from cholera, the f d A guarantees that

(21:16):
all of these products and services will render them immune.
So you can drink any kind of ditch water you want.
Just get out there, buy some products and go suck
it up. Ditch water. Here's a product. We're back. I
hope you're all enjoying all this ditch water. It's good stuff.

(21:37):
Keep buying the products. I don't know. Sometimes this is
where we go. This, this is the joke that I made.
And now we're returned, and it's time to talk about
Jim Bowie some more. I'm so sorry. So it's debated
by historians just how much the depths of Jim's family
influenced his drinking. Um, and it's also debated how much

(21:58):
of a drunk he was. A lot of very pro
Texas types will argue that there's no real evidence that
he had a problematic history with alcohol. Um. I don't
think this is true. Uh, And it seems like most
of the good historians, even the ones who are kind
of see him as a little bit of a hero,
disagree with this. Historian William C. Davis notes that after

(22:18):
his family's death quote. For the first half of eighteen
thirty four, Bowie largely wandered and may have surrendered to
drink more than he should as he tried to regain
his personal and financial balance. His old temper flared again
and there were fights. After one supposed brawl in San Antonio,
he asked a friend why he had not come into
help in the scuffle. The man answered that, so far
as he could tell, Bowie had been in the wrong

(22:38):
in the encounter. Don't you suppose I know that as
well as you do, replied Bowie. That's just why I
needed a friend. If I had been in the right,
I would have had plenty of them. He's not wrong, No,
he's not. I love that though he's not right either.
That is some good frontier logic. Um. Yeah, So he

(23:00):
spent most of the next year engaged in a series
of land speculation schemes because again, like he's rich, a
rich boy for a while, but when his rich family dies,
he doesn't inherit their money, right because he's like the
son in law. So now he's back on his own again. Um.
And unfortunately for him, the Mexican government had grown increasingly
concerned about the fact that it had been giving away

(23:20):
huge chunks of Texas to Americans. Uh these men often
flouted the laws of Mexico by, for example, bringing in slaves,
and in general, it became very clear that they had
no real interest in being part of Mexico. So Mexico
began to crack down and restrict the kind of speculation
and sale of land that Bowie engaged in. Now Luckily
for Jim, right at about this period of time, a

(23:41):
fella named Santa Anna succeeded in becoming the dictator of
Mexico in all but name, and like any good authoritarian,
he's set right to work clamping down on opposition to
his regime, largely by shutting down local militias and ordering
them to send him their guns. Zec Tecas, which was
one of the states in Mexico, rebelled and it was
brutally crushed. The whole situation resulted in a huge amount

(24:02):
of unrest in other Mexican states, and we're not gonna
be able to detail all of it here. The short
of it is that the capital of the Mexican state
that Texas was in, a city called mont Clova, decided
that they needed to raise money to get up militia
in their own defense from Santa Anna, and they did
this by opening up a huge amount of land for purchase.
Since Bowie had been the governor's son in law, he

(24:23):
was given the job of disbursing and selling all of
this land. And since he was corrupt as all hell,
he basically took a bunch of bribes for this, and
he also got a huge chunk of that land himself.
And by the time all of the chips had landed
and all the land was so sold, he owned more
than a million acres. Now, this is a lot of land,
so much even in Texas. Yeah, And basically, once Santa

(24:49):
Anna heard that like the capital of one of his
own states had given away this land, much land to
a bunch of white people to raise a militia to
defend themselves from him, he was like, fuck this ship. Uh.
He declared the whole sale null and void, which effectively
wiped out Jim's entire fortune. Um. So, Santa Anna sent
an army up to Mount Clovi to crack down on
all of this blatantly criminal land speculation, and Jim Bowie

(25:12):
and his friends like showed up to like protest and
They were immediately arrested and jailed, but they succeeded in
escaping and fleeing back to Texas. Booie made his way
to Nacodoches and became one of the loudest voices in
the War Party, the men who increasingly advocated the taking
up of arms against Santa Anna's government. Well, I mean
that that the War Party is pretty clear. Yeah, yeah,

(25:33):
I think we should have one of those now where
we know what you guys want. They're not framing themselves
as Texas independence advocates at this point. They're framing themselves
as against Santa Anna's dictatorship. Like they're saying they want
to return to the original Mexican constitution before Santa Anna
took power. Like that's kind of where they are right now. Uh.
And a lot of people for because like there's a

(25:54):
lot of Mexicans and white people who are like kind
of all on the same side of this, and it's
because a lot of those Mexicans like don't like Santa Anna. Um.
And then there's folks like Booie who kind of he
doesn't really care politically about what's happened. He cares that
Santa Anna's screwed him out of his chance at becoming
a millionaire. Um. So yeah, on July five hundred citizens

(26:16):
of Nakodocha has declared themselves a militia and they vote
Jim Bowie to be their colonel. Um. Now, he immediately
his first act as colonel is to rob a Mexican
government storehouse of muskets uh and the government considered this
to be him inciting violence, which is pretty fair way.
That's a good that's a good way to call it. Yeah,
it's very different from me stealing, for example, Toyota land cruisers.

(26:39):
That's an expedition. You know, that's not inciting violence. So
Booie had to flee to the United States to raise
money and men uh to to you know, continue to
make this revolution possible. And he returned to Texas just
in time for the first shots of the Texas Revolution
to be fired on October two, eighteen thirty five. Um. Now,

(27:00):
there are a lot of other guys involved, and I'm
not going to like for one thing, Texas revolutionary history
is and my favorite kind of history, so I'm not
going to go into wild detail about this. But yeah,
there's a bunch of people and at the beginning, they
just kind of want to go back to the way
things were before Santa Ana. And it gradually evolves into
an independence movement for Texas to become an independent nation, right,

(27:21):
but it doesn't really start that way. Um. And it's
a very democratic sort of movement that that that's that
spot like pops up. So these guys are all voting,
like it's all guys. Women can't vote, obviously, neither can
enslaved people. Um. But these the men, all the white men,
all vote for their leaders. And a guy named Stephen F.
Austin is elected the commander of the Texas New Army. Um. So,

(27:45):
by the time Booie got back into Texas from his
little sojourn in the United States, that army was about
five men in size. Uh. It continued to grow over
the course of days, and Bowie was named a colonel
once again and given command of a column of about
ninety men. Uh. And he was a pretty good military leader,
which you might guess from the fact that he was
just generally good at shooting people, well killing people that

(28:06):
I was gonna say, he knew how to kill animals
and people. And like a lot of killing animals is
the same it's the same. I started really reading a
lot of military strategy. I was like, this is this
is what this is. Yeah, and especially like these are
not gigantic Napoleonic battles like again the armies like five

(28:27):
hundred dudes. Like these are often confrontations between a few
dozen people in the middle of nowhere, Texas who like
shoot at each other and like twenty people die and
one side backs off first, and it's a great victory,
you know. Yeah, yeah, so and Bolli was a pretty
good military commander. Several weeks later, he led his men
into battle against a Mexican army force at a place

(28:48):
called Conception, Uh. And the force that he winds up
fighting is like double the size of his own army.
But he and his men win, and this is like
the first great rebel victory of the war. UM. Now, Unfortunately,
Steve N. F. Austin was not a very good commander,
and the Army of Texas was not a particularly orderly army,
and a series of organizational and leadership failures stopped them
from taking advantage of Bowie's victory. UH. And soon enough

(29:11):
they wound up in a kind of clusterfux situation. UM.
So what's important to understand is that men kept deserting
and kept stepping down, and eventually the army found itself
having to hold another election to determine its commander. There
are so many fucking votes with the Texas uh like
Revolutionary Army over like who should be in charge? Like
they hold them all of the goddamn time. Every time
something goes wrong, they're like, all right, who do we

(29:32):
want to be in charge now? Um? Yeah, But I
think they got the Libertarian Party. There's a big aspect
of that to this, and like the Libertarians, they can't
make up their mind about a goddamn thing. That's what
it sounds like. That's that's the exact metaphor I was used.
It was like, it just sounds like it's just like
the Libertarian Party. We're like, hey, I don't like, hey,
he's doing stuff changing. So Bowie campaigns hard to be

(29:56):
the commander of this army, and they hold a vote
and he receives five votes. Um. And this is generally
because people didn't really like him. He was considered to
be like a pretty good combat commander, so individual people
willing to follow him in the bat follow him in
the battle. But he was also like known to be
he was a guy with like a gigantic temper who
was drunk a lot of the time, tough hang. So

(30:20):
he gets angry that he loses this vote, and he
resigns his commission and like announces that he's becoming a
private again as kind of a fuck you to Stephen F. Austin,
and then he just leaves the army entirely and he
travels to San Felipe, where he meets with Sam Houston.
Now another election had been held recently in human Houston
had been made the major general in charge of all

(30:40):
of texas Is armed forces, so Austin was reassigned and
the army now had no actual field commander, so it
had Houston in charge of it, but like nobody had
been voted actually lead it into battle. Um and Booie
like basically tries to ingratiate himself into Houston's that he
can hopefully get appointed to be in charge of the army,
but he can't really get a handle on his drinking,

(31:02):
and by the time he and Houston actually meet for
the first time in sam Pelipe, he is, in the
words of one attendee, dead drunk. Um and Houston is
kind of like carefully, like, well, I'm not gonna just
a point you in charge of the army. Why don't
you go back and the whole army will hold another vote,
and now that Austin's out, I'm sure they will elect
you to be in charge of the army. So still wasted,

(31:23):
Jimbowie drunkenly rides back to the army and he keeps
right on drinking throughout the election. He actually gets blackout
hammered on the night of the vote. Um, and for
some reason his fellow soldiers decided to give the job
to another guy. Reading historians talk about this, it's really

(31:43):
funny because they'll often be like, it's peculiar that they
didn't vote for Bowie despite his good combat performance. And
I was like, well, because they saw he was wasted
every time he wasn't in a gunfight. I mean, you
gotta be a pretty bad drunk for other people, for
other soldiers to be like, yeah, yeah, these guys are

(32:04):
like patient zero for libertarianism. There's literally no law because
they're revolting against legal authority, and they all have guns
in the middle of nowhere, and they're like, this guy
is too much of a drunken ruin for us. Yeah,
it's pretty cool. So uh yeah, he just he didn't

(32:24):
doesn't do well in elections. So he is, however, given
command of another unit of several dozen men, and they
perform well in a number of skirmishes against the Mexican Army.
And again, as a rule, when he actually gets into combat,
Jim Bowie does a really good job. He's good at
leading men in battle. You gotta give him credit for
that he does. Yeah, if you want someone to help

(32:44):
other people kill a group of strangers, Jim Booie is
your fucking man. He's a good stranger killer. Any anything
other than that, he's gonna be drunk. Yeah, he's He's
not even good at land speculation. He just does it
all the time. Yeah. Yeah, And I don't think he
knows he's doing. We think he had the blackout the hole.

(33:05):
He's just wasted the whole time. Yeah. So, at one
point during the war, along the San Antonio River, Bowie
and his men heard a rumor that the general of
the Mexican Army was grazing his horses nearby. And this
wasn't Santa Ana yet, This is like the Mexican army
before Santa Anna comes up. So they set out to
like figure out where these horses are so they can
either steal the horses or disperse the horde because you

(33:27):
know that the herd, because that would do a lot
of damage to the army get rid of all of
their horses. So while they're scouting around to try to
find these horses, Bowie and his men capture a random
Mexican dude who claims to know the guy who was
tending the herd, and he told Bowie that if they
found that guy, they would be able to find the horses.
But Bowie isn't willing to listen to this. He thinks
this guy is lying and knows where the horses are,

(33:48):
so he arrests the man instead. And I'm gonna quote
from William C. Davis here he writes quote. One of
the volunteers, Placido Benavidez, suggested that they tie them in,
put a rope around his neck and raised him by
a tree branch, strangling him until he agreed to talk.
There was nothing surprising in that for Benavidez. He was
one of the ricos, the wealthy landed local aristocracy like

(34:08):
the Vara Mendez, the family that Buoy married into, who
felt an ancestral cultural contempt or at best disdain for
the pabres the poor. Thus, for Benavidez, there was no
dishonor in torturing a peon for information, especially if he
was working for the enemy. Bowie, who came from an
entirely different culture that generally frowned upon such brutality, agreed
to the suggestion perhaps his marriage into the Vara Mendes

(34:30):
had brought him not just family affluence, but also family attitudes.
The brutality, once commenced, almost got out of hand, almost
got out of hand. Bowie ordered a fire started near
the tree, and then some of his men hauled the
unfortunate man up over at adding the double torture of burning,
or at least extremely uncomfortable proximity to the blaze, to
the strangulation that's almost out of hand. It was almost

(34:56):
this is almost too much. Yeah. At the same time,
eight of his company stood with cocked rifles besides the fire,
pointing them at the poor man. When the victims stopped
kicking and appeared near unconsciousness, they let him down and
threatened to shoot him. He refused to talk. And the
whole business was repeated twice more, even though one of
Bowie's men rebelled at the cruelty and refused to participate further.
After the third time, the Mexican revealed the whereabouts of

(35:19):
a herd of horses, although Booie's one rebel suspected they
may have belonged to the man himself instead of the
enemy army, and he gave them up simply to save
his life. Even then, it seems Booie was not done,
announcing that he intended to continue the torture the next morning,
although what there was left to gain as a mystery. Now.
Thankfully he doesn't go through with continuing the torture this
poor son of a bitch. But he doesn't make the

(35:40):
guy who'd refused to torture the prisoner guard him that night.
This is like a punishment because he's a dick. Yeah,
almost out of hand, Billy, Almost almost out of hand.
Do you think like some of his friends like the
next day, See, dude, this is what we're talking about.
This is why we can't let you. This is you

(36:02):
keep doing this ship Jim. Nobody wants this guy in charge. Like,
we're all pretty racist, but come on, man, come on.
So the Texas Revolution had, as I said, started at
against the revolution against Santa Anna, and a number of
the early revolutionaries were in fact loyal to the Mexican Constitution.
Bowie himself professed a loyalty to it initially, but as

(36:24):
the fighting went on, the cause of total independence took
off primarily among the white residents of the area, and
Bowie got on board with this train. William see Davis
clearly believes that he did so out of a mix
of patriotism and a healthy desire to get back all
the land he'd stolen and then had stolen back from him.
Um I personally see Jim and his bartaceous participation is
an even mix of land grab and an addiction to violence.

(36:45):
But whatever honest men can disagree. In any case, Boway's
passed through the war eventually led him to the Alamo
and modern day San Antonio now the town around it
was then called Beijar, and the fourth of the Alamo
contained a large number of field guns, which is actually
the vast bulk of the artillery available to the Texan rebels.
As Santa Anna marched Fourth because the army he had

(37:06):
first sent in they do eventually beat that army, so
Santa Ana has to march up with a larger Mexican army,
thousands and thousands of soldiers. And at first they think
he's just going to send a few men to attack
the Alamo, and they have plenty of guns to hold it.
But then he sends like the bulk of his army
there um and they don't abandon it because all of
the guns that has means that it's kind of critical
to the war effort. And to make a long and
pretty boring story short, eventually Santa Anna's whole big gass

(37:29):
army winds up marching on the Alamo, and the two
men in charge of its defense where a guy named
Colonel William Travis and Jim Booie. By the way, Austin
is in Travis County. Like I was, I was gonna say,
I know how all that comes together? Yet Yeah, so joke,
I usually do what I'm in Austin. It's like it's
just two of the widest names you've ever heard of,
Just like it's just somebody from around rock yelling at

(37:52):
their kids. Austen, Travis, Gideon here Travis, Jim Bowie, you
get in here, now Gideon here, Yeah, get you all
on in there. Yeah, it's it's it's good old home
state of Texas. So Bowie's went rank of colonel had
never really been real. He'd been elected by militia and

(38:13):
then sort of voted into or appointed into a couple
of different command positions. But his troops were like irregulars.
They were what was called volunteers, while Colonel Travis was
a man with an actual military experience and his troops
were like regular trained troops with like like they couldn't
just leave if they wanted to. Like Bowie's men were
kind of there as volunteers, they could funk off at

(38:33):
any point. Travis's troops were like normal soldiers. So yeah,
once they arrive, you've got the military at the Alamo
divided into like regular soldiers under Travis and irregulars under Bowie.
And Travis is ostensibly supposed to be in charge of
the whole operation. But Bowie's men aren't willing to listen
to this guy. They trust the dude that they've been

(38:55):
fighting with more than some like fancy colonel with a
fucking army degree. So the whole army holds yet another
fucking election and the two. The result of it leaves
the two men sharing power. Bowie stays in charge of
the volunteers and Travis is in charge of the regular army.
And this is not a good state of affairs, having
the army divided into two chunks who don't listen to

(39:16):
each other or each other's commander. Turns out that's actually
not like an ideal way to army. No, no, yeah,
as Davis writes, quote, no one was completely in charge.
Bowie would not obey Travis, and Travis certainly would not
yield a Bowie, so that garrison divided into somewhat unfriendly camps.
On February twelfth, Adjutant J. J. Boss saw that Bowie,

(39:37):
availing himself of his popularity among the volunteers, seemed anxious
to arrogate to himself the entire control. So he's trying
to like he wants to take control. But the next
day the situation become intolerable, precipitated mainly by Bowie unfortunately
choosing his election as an event worth celebrating with a
two day drunk. So they have this vote that splits
them into and Bowie just spent the next couple of
days wrecked out of his fucking head, Robert. What else

(40:00):
celebrates a two day drunk me? Yeah? Who else? Yeah?
That's I mean Quip the toothbrush people probably probably probably,
That's why I like them so much, and also the
other products and services that support this podcast all big
fans of being drunk for two straight days, we're back.

(40:26):
Oh what a day, What a day it is? Yeah, So,
Jim Bowie, they've just held this election, they've split the
control of the army into and Jim Bowie is just
fucking celebrates this by getting ship house wasted. Like he's
never succeeded in being elected to command of the army,
but he's gotten elected to command of half of an army,
and that's that's worth celebrating. So drunk Bowie pretty much

(40:47):
immediately let this new state of as little be happy
about it, yet might as well be for a good reason. So, uh,
he's wasted in celebrating his control of half of an
army when he sees a group of local bahernos like
citizens of the nearby town trying to flee the town
with their property to avoid the fact that a battle
is about to happen, and he arrests these people for

(41:09):
no real reason. Now, at the same time, he also
started randomly de arresting people that the local judge had
already sentenced for crimes. There seems to have been no
real rhyme or reason for any of this, because he
actually sat on like the judge panel that had convicted
some of these friends these men when he was sober,
and then just decided to free them from jail at random. Uh.

(41:31):
When the judge complained about this, Bowie had his volunteers
marched through the main square of the town of Behard
to intimidate him. Unfortunately, Bowie and all of his men
were wasted, as one volunteer. One volunteer described the marching
and quote a tumultuously and disorder and disorderly manner. Bowie
himself and many of his men being drunk, which has
been the case ever since he has been in command.
So like he randomly decides to free a bunch of prisoners,

(41:53):
the judge complains, and he has a drunken mob gather
in the middle of town to yell at the judge.
All this sounds like a right fun Bowie. Now, yeah,
I do think, yeah, he's got all his killing done.
He's like let's just mix it up a little bit.
Let's just get wasted, buddy. So next Bowie de arrested
a private in the regular Army, a man that Colonel
Travis had convicted of mutiny for. Again no real reasonable man. Yeah,

(42:18):
this pissed Travis off. Anyway, he wound up writing a
letter to their governor, and Davy Crockett also wrote a
letter because Davy Crockett was there at this point, and
he's really pissed a Jim Bowie's bullshit now. In his
lever letter, Travis complained that the situation was quote truly
awkward and delicate due to the fact that his co
commander had been roaring drunk all the time and was

(42:40):
turning everything topsy turvy. He ended the letter by stating
he would remain at the album over the sake of honor,
but quote I am unwilling to be responsible for the
drunken irregularities of any man. I mean, that's gonna cost
him his life. That's what's going to happen. They're all
gonna die. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's so. The situation continued

(43:04):
to deteriorate, and Bowie's drunkenness grew even more extreme. His
volunteer army turned into a multi day long keg party,
and some of his men actually sold their rifles to
buy liquor. Yeah, I'm not gonna need this this fucking thing,
so one observer at the time reported most of the

(43:26):
garrison was drunk. Travis kept on complaining about this, and
the fights between the two men soon degenerated into an
utterly untenable situation. Travis eventually had to leave the Alamo
with his regular soldiers because he was afraid the two
groups would start shooting at each other if they stayed
together any longer. But then on Valentine's Day, Jim Bowie
sobered up. And we don't really know why. He might

(43:47):
have come to his senses, or he might have just
trade out of ran out of liquor and guns to
trade for liquor. But as Davis writes, as quickly as
it arose, the problem seemed to evaporate, and that was
probably due to Bowie. It is well known that he
sometimes drank too much, recalled William W. Fontaine, who was
one of the little children at Montville with Charles Travis,
but it is not so generally known how quickly he
hastened to make the amends honorably, so that he soon

(44:09):
came under the influence of as soon as he came
out from under the influence of liquor on February fourteenth,
but he sobered and apparently went on to see Travis
and gave an apology for Immediately, Travis and his command
returned to San Antonio, and all signs of friction between
the two disappeared for good. Wow. Yeah, he's a charming guy,
I guess. I mean that's real charming when you have

(44:30):
to move an army because you're so drunk and then
you go tonight. Hey, Hey, hey, s got wild, didn't it.
I apologize for diet. Are you star in retrospect? I
was drunker than you should be while commanding an army.
I see that now, I see that as clear to me. Now. Also,

(44:51):
can I borrow some money? We need to get our
guns back. Yeah. Now. Other sources I've read suggests that
the reason Bowie chilled out maybe the he got sick
with yellow fever right around this time. He definitely got
sick with yellow fever. It's just kind of as a
debate what that had an impact on, and his illness
was probably due to a combination of poor sanitary conditions
at the Alamo and the fact that he'd been on

(45:13):
a multi week alcohol bender, which is bad for your
immune system. Whatever the truth, by the time the Battle
of the Alamos started on February twenty third, Colonel Travis
was back in the fort and Jim Bowie was confined
to a sick bed, unable to command or fight. Uh
And I'm not going to detail out the battle for
the Alamo. Everyone listening this knows the broad strokes the
Texans got wiped out. They killed a lot of the

(45:34):
besieging Mexican army, and that provided the Texan revolutionaries with
a powerful rally and cry, YadA YadA, remember the Alamo.
All that bullshit. The actual reality of the battle is
less glorious than what I was raised to believe in school.
You know, we were told that thousands upon thousands of
Mexicans had been killed by the defenders. That's almost certainly bullshit.
It is probably to say that they on balance fought

(45:55):
competently and acquitted for themselves pretty well. But there it
was never a close fight. You know, they were horribly
outnumbered and outclassed. Uh. Now, for some amount of time
it was de rigor for Patrick patriotic retellings of the
story of the battle to invent a heroic end for
all of like the main figures you've got, You've got
William Travis, You've got Bowie, Crockett, you've got Jim Bowie.

(46:16):
All these famous guys are at this fight, and they
all have to die heroic deaths if you're doing like
the the propaganda retelling of this right, yeah, the myths.
The most famous painting of Jim Bowie at all is
him at the Alamo leaping out of his sick bed
and shooting a pair of Mexican soldiers with a brace
of pistols that he's concealed under his bed um. And

(46:37):
that's kind of the like the picture that a lot
of people like to portray him, like how he went
out as I found a passage from nineteen fifty seven's
Jim Booie James Bowie Big Dealer, which is an article
about the man's life that kind of gives you an
idea of how his last days are portrayed by the
the pro Booie crowd. For Bowie not to have his
knife at the end would be unthinkable. David Crockett had

(46:59):
arrived before Bowie became critically ill, and Colonel Crockett's Exploits
and Adventures in Texas a farrago of undetermined authorship that
rings true to Crockett only in spots. Is this passage.
I found Colonel Bowie and the Fortress, a man celebrated
for having been in a more desperate personal conflicts than
any other in the country. He gave me a friendly
welcome and appeared to be mightily pleased that I had
arrived safe. While we were conversing, he had occasion to

(47:21):
draw his famous knife to cut a strap, and I
wish I may be shot at the bare side of it.
Wasn't enough to give a man of squeamish stomach the colic,
especially before breakfast. He saw I was admiring it and said, Colonel,
you might tickle a fellow's ribs a long time with
this little instrument before you'd make him laugh. Now this
story never happened. David Crockett never wrote this. Uh. Crockett

(47:42):
actually probably hated Bowie because we know he wrote a
letter complaining about his behavior. Um and the book that
this is being quoted from was written by somebody else,
just in Crockett's name to capitalize on his legend, and
there is no evidence whatsoever that his famous knife was
ever used even as like a camp tool in the battle,
especially since Bowie was too sick to get out of bed.

(48:02):
Um Yeah and it. The task of trying to unravel
exactly how Bowie died is difficult, both because of the
hero worship around him and because of the network of
grifters that arose around the Battle of Alamo. The most
famous of them was mad Madame Candelaria, a woman who
in her old age claimed to have been Bowie's nurse
during the battle. She made a sizeable living and secured

(48:25):
a pension from the state of Texas by providing patriotic
Texans with heroic stories about how Travis, Bowie, and Crockett
all died because she claimed she'd been there. There's no
evidence that this is true, and her stories about what
happened at the Alamo changed repeatedly over the years of
her life. Um I found a good article though, in
True West magazine that's you Know, attempted to co collate
all the different rumors of of Bowie's end quote. According

(48:49):
to story spread after the battle, Bowie died either as
a murder victim, a suicide, a battle casualty, or a
victim of sadistic torture. He may have died fighting from
his sick bed, helplessly in a sick bed, or of
an illness before sickon soldiers did the job. He may
have been killed by swords, bayonets, gunfire, or fire. He
may have died heroically or as a coward. One of
the first reports to Sam Houston after the battle reported

(49:09):
that Bowie was killed while lying sick in bed. Houston
others passed on this information, interpreting it to mean he
had been murdered while sick in bed. However, Houston changed
the story two days later, writing, our friend Bowie, as
now was understood, unable to get out of bed, shot
himself as the soldiers approached it. And unidentified Mexican soldier
expressed a different opinion in the April fift eighteen thirty
six edition of El Mosquito Mexicano uh he stated the

(49:34):
perverse in Braggert Santiago, Bowie died like a woman almost
hidden under a mattress. Alamos survivor Susannah Dickinson Hannig waited
on the subject thirty eight years later, she stated that
Bowie was sick in bed, and when Mexican soldiers entered
his room, he killed two of them with his pistols
before they pierced him with their sabers. Nothing in Hannig's
statement indicates she actually witnessed this. Perhaps the most horrifying

(49:54):
Taylor Bowie's death came in eighteen eighty two when William P. Zuber,
who popularized the Alamo's famous line in the Sands Story,
told the tale of a young Mexican fifer at Polinaro
Salda Naga Poland Zuber claims witnessed Bowie brought out alive
on a cot and placed before at a Mexican captain.
Bowie delivered a short patriotic speech to the captain, who
became so outraged that he ordered his soldiers to cut

(50:14):
Bowie's tongue out and hurl the still living man onto
the Texas uh Texan dead's burning funeral pyre. So these
are the different stories. We will never know which of
these is true. Um we do know pretty well that
he had yellow fever. So one thing we can all
safely assume is that, however, James Bowie went out He
died with the symptoms of advanced yellow fever, which are

(50:37):
uncontrollable diarrhea and vomiting. So that's that's that's the story. Wow,
fitting into a frontier hero. I mean, I just I mean,
I'm not super shocked because I assume everyone starting about
a hundred and fifty years ago back just had constant diarrhea. Yeah, yeah,

(51:00):
it was he was sick and yeah yeah, yeah, but
he was consistent that he wasn't bad like both definitely
in bed. Seemed to say he was in bed. Some
say like he's being real pussy about it on other side,
but no, he kind of thought that he wasn't laying down. Yeah,
it would have been hard for him to um have

(51:21):
done much fighting with the yellow fever. It's pretty crippling.
So yeah, that's the story of old Jim Booie. That's
I mean, I'll be honest, I never thought if you
if you have a weapon named after you, your life
was probably rough. Yeah yeah, not a lot of not

(51:42):
a lot of peaceful lives wind up with weapons named
after them. He was just a great diplomat, huh. Yeah,
he didn't want to argue, Yeah, we probably should have
a weapon named after Henry Kissinger. But I don't think
there's any in system that's killed as many people as
Henry Kissinger. So yeah, I guess so war crimes, isn't

(52:05):
that what it is? Yeah? Yeah, we could just name
the concept of bombing people the Kissinger. Yeah yeah, so
that is the motherfucking story of James Bowie. How are
you feeling about old Jimbo? There was there was more
Louisiana then than I had anticipated. A lot of that,

(52:30):
which makes more sense about like who and how he
gets that name? I mean, but I like, I think
my favorite part is just how everyone in his family
capitalize on his fame. Yeah. Yeah, they would continue doing
that well after his death because it was easy and
made him a lot of money. Such an American thing too.

(52:53):
Yeah yeah, they're the first Duck dynasty. Is the Buoy family? Well,
and I can't I keep thinking of I've been to
Buffalo Bill's grave site in several different locations, so I
keep thinking of that kind of stuff too, where it's like,
oh it is it's like Jesse James hit out and
never made you mean a wild Bill Hickock. Yeah yeah, okay, yeah,

(53:14):
you gotcha. Yeah, No, not Buffalo did I say the
guy like, yeah, yeah, while Bill sorry, but yeah, I've
been to his several of his uh graves, which always
makes me laugh. That's like that kind of meat those
that happens. Yeah, that's kind of what you get. So

(53:34):
this has been the episode Billy you got any plug
doubles you wanna wanna throw down? I just find me
on Twitter at Billy Wayne Davis or on Instagram at
Billy wyn Davis. Uh. And I have a podcast out
called Growing Local that is about the people in the
communities that make up just who where your cannabis comes from,

(53:56):
and the first season is about Eugene or again. Check
out Billy Wayne's Cannabis podcast, pick Up a Bowie Knife,
um and uh follow us on behind the Bastard's dot
com and at Bastard's pot on Twitter and Instagram, and
check out my new podcast, The Women's War, which is
about people who aren't a piece of ships like James

(54:18):
Bowie uh and are cool. So that's the episode Motherfucker's
Wash your hands Goodbye. Yeah h