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Bowie, A Perspective
"Bowie is debatably one of the most misunderstood of the Alamo defenders."
~J.R. Edmondson
This observation by Western historian and author J.R. Edmondson is not only perceptive but enlightening, and seems to hit the proverbial nail on the head: even if only indirectly, it invites thought from the Western history devotee and investigation by the historian.
Some have claimed Bowie was a rowdy trouble-maker, a sot, a swindler, had shady business dealings, and that he might have been among the least admirable of the Alamo defenders. Others say he had a noble character; that he developed a kind of cultivation that belied his modest beginnings; that he was kindly and pleasant with strangers who, having heard of him, approached him to make his acquaintance; that he was actually courtly with women; and that he had that elusive quality of charisma - impossible to define, difficult to explain, hopeless to imitate, but very easy to recognize.
Because he may have been far above us in some ways doesn't mean he had to be far above us in every aspect of general daily virtue. Like us, he had a full set of human weaknesses, and the personal frailties to which he was subject make him more, not less, of a human being. He may have been all of those things, and more - a colorful, multi-level nature precludes black & white judgements and two-dimensional descriptions. The preference, the very understandable human tendency in all of us, is to believe that his most positive attributes are what shaped the truest features of James Bowie's real nature.
As a boy, Freud's disciple Theodor Reik recalled having passed Johannes Brahms on a Vienna street. Composer Igor Stravinsky, also as a youth, remembered actually seeing Tchaikovsky at a concert. Both youngsters lived long lives respectively into the sixth and seventh decades of the twentieth century. Conceptually, there might now be some living centenarian whose grandfather could have known James Bowie, or at least been in his presence and spoken with him.
This very real possibility increases the size and strength of the links in the chain that binds us to the world's history generally, to American history specifically and to Texas history in particular, but the bottom line is that Bowie's era is beyond the recall of any person alive today. With total lack of proof in some matters and conflicting accounts in others, it's a given we'll never have definitive answers to many Alamo questions - and by extension, to the resolution of some Bowie particulars. (His marriage to Ursula Veramendi is documented but baptismal records for his "children" are elusive). Edmondson, a known authority on the subject of Bowie, wrote, "There are so many wonderful legends enshrouding him, but you almost have to take a Bowie knife to cut through the mythology to find the real man." We can be certain only of this: there are many things of which we just can't be sure.
In keeping with the nature of legends, contradictions about Bowie are legion. In dispute even now is whether the idea or design for the Bowie knife originated with James or his brother Rezin, and even the family name itself has two different pronounciations (BOO-ee and BOW-ee). It seems the former is the correct one, as indicated by the different phonetically written renderings of it by others in his era - before the age of mass media coverage and when standardized spelling wasn't yet the norm. The name is written in Mexican documents (wrongly spelled but phonetically right) variously as "buey" and "buy," and even as early as 1837 an Alabama law, rendered in English, regulated the sale and use of "booey" knives. Inquiries of ten different historians and scholars - in any field - can net twelve different findings, and the researcher is often handicapped by a rich assortment of obstacles.
The passage and changes of time yield transformations. The Vienna building where Brahms lived for his last 26 years was demolished ceremoniously on April 3, 1907, exactly ten years after he died there. According to old Alamo plans and maps, Bowie's quarters (in the Low Barracks, now long gone) were located near what is now part of the vest-pocket park on Alamo Plaza, at the right as one faces the front doors of the Chapel. Aside from a few artifacts, all that remains of the Veramendi Palace are an old photograph of it and the actual front doors (through which Bowie himself passed), exhibited today in the Alamo's Long Barracks Museum. Bowie himself could walk about with his sheathed blade on his belt, but today one should not do the same even in the most outlying areas of the American West.
When we're dealing with someone of historic tradition and folklore, it can be difficult going beyond simple documentation, even if it's abundant. Many Alamo questions are still unanswered and will forever so remain, but one that prompts contention among historians and scholars, and the academics, involves those whose claim of a historic Alamo connection has no documentation. The fact is that history isn't composed solely of official decisions and descriptive records, and that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Parenthetically, and by way of comparison: I knew Leonard Bernstein when I was a student - but that he might never have "documented" this by mentioning my name in his letters does not mean that I didn't know him.
There's also no historical documentation that James Bowie ever killed anyone fighting in a duel per se. This may initially seem at odds with legend but should also lay to rest some Bowie questions and sharpen the focus of historical perspective, even if only slightly.
Anyone can report facts and reveal a mere shadow rather than the substance of a subject - but piercing the armor and entering the sanctum of personality and character is another matter. Our personal reports, about others or about ourselves, are subjective almost by definition and certainly by nature. The ideal researcher's goal is to revise not history but only the perspective and perception of it.
THE BOWIE MYSTIQUE
Some people, like Melville, van Gogh, and Alamo commander William Barret Travis became legends posthumously. Others, like Beethoven, Brahms, and Bowie had already reached nearly iconic status even during their own lifetimes. Bowie lived so long ago that the distance of time renders the contradictions and confusion about him almost impenetrable, and his reputation, evidently even in his own day, precipitated the creation of a historical petri dish in which the culture of The Adventurer grew and flourished. He became a legend so early in American history that the records are congealed with invention, fiction and fantasy, creating nearly insurmountable obstacles to the human features behind the mystique, if not clogging access to the man altogether. The results of his existence have become so profound they're almost intangible, though today towns bearing his name exist in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland and Texas (which also has a Bowie County); San Antonio itself has its own Bowie Street, and there is Bowie Creek in Mississippi.
Bowie's impact corresponds to the then-new and unprecedented early 19th-century views characterized by the Romantic era's perceptions of historic greatness. It could apply to almost every significant person who attained fame in life or after, but it seems to apply especially to Bowie as an American legend. He foreshadowed by decades the wild west and its own individual and collective legends, still in our consciousness today as the subject of countless books, and with the western film having been a Hollywood staple for decades. (It was precursored as early as 1903 by the 10-minute-long film, "The Great Train Robbery," made not in Wyoming but in New Jersey, and the plot of which was suggested by an actual train holdup - in Wyoming - on August 29, 1900, in which members of Butch Cassidy's group were involved).
Romantic notions of history evolved during Bowie's era; the image of the independent and self-sufficient man was then respected and in some cases even enhaloed, with The Adventurer and the aura that surrounded him an object of reverence, and his persona being seen by some as something bordering on divinity. (It's even more profound in the case of the composers, whose handwritten manuscripts, inert but still very much alive, can now bring a veritable fortune at auction). This was the Romantic view - "romanticized" now but quite real then. James Bowie was one of those responsible for the fostering and impetus of the 19th-century Romantic sentiment in the United States.
We tend to admire those we can't emulate but would like to. We also tend to invest martyrs with heroism and heroes with martyrdom. Those who left life prematurely, at whatever age, prompt the most intriguing conjectures. Bowie's adventurous life and martyr's death at the Alamo exemplify this. As the knife bearing his name has become emblematic of him, his name and the very concept of the Alamo have become indelibly linked, if not altogether fused. His 40-year existence contributed as much to 19th-century legend as to the depiction or representation of historical fact. Like most in his era, locale and circumstances, Bowie was a man of action more than of words, yet whatever written records he left reveal if not literary gems then certainly an enviable degree of awareness, observation, and clarity of mind.
We live in an era where some amazing things are often taken for granted. The Whitehead Memorial Museum in Del Rio, Texas, displays an unusual and very telling artifact: a large, sealed jar of earth from the Alamo grounds in San Antonio. That the soil was rescued and preserved soon after the final siege in 1836 bespeaks a revealing degree of reverence for what occurred at dawn on that Sunday, March 6th, and is a clear indication of the momentous significance with which the event was seen even then, certainly by the unnamed person who salvaged and saved that soil.
The sense of the Alamo's historical standing was perceived also by another, not so anonymous man. ".. . If they overpower us, we fall a sacrifice at the shrine of our country, and we hope posterity and our country will do our memory justice.. ." Thus wrote William Barret Travis from the Alamo itself on February 25, 1836, when the siege had already been underway for two days. That he used the word "shrine" in his dispatch, long before the Alamo became so known as a national symbol, seems very noteworthy - the more so, as his letter predates the realization that the defenders were to fight literally a losing battle. Indeed, "Remember the Alamo!" became a rallying cry even at San Jacinto, a mere six weeks after the Alamo fell.
One man who paradoxically did not grasp the Alamo's importance to posterity was none other than Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna y Peréz de Lebrón. In his memoirs, written late in his life, he made only passing reference to that Bexar incident - but even a comment he made soon after the siege was very revealing: "It was but a small affair" ( to which one of his officers responded, "Another such 'victory' and we are ruined"). Santa Anna's statement not only shows us his own view but reminds us of a similar situation in antiquity: the paucity of information in ancient Egyptian writings about the Israelites leads scholars in that field to deduce that the Exodus was then perceived by the Egyptians merely as a nuisance border incident. The historical consequences of what happened there thirty three centuries ago, and more recently in Texas, are now matters of historical record.
Had photography appeared only twenty years earlier, we might have had a photographic image of Beethoven. Though we do have one Bowie portrait that was painted from life (by George Peter Alexander Healy) and which gives him a rather fierce look, had the camera been around even ten years sooner, we might have an actual photo of the already-famous Bowie or even of former congressman Crockett. Most of us are just passing through history. James Bowie and the knife that bears his name ARE history.
What's most obvious, by its nature, often escapes our attention, so it may be worth noting that James Bowie and the other Alamo defenders were as alive then as we are today.
JEFFREY DANE is a historian, researcher and essayist whose writing on various subjects appears in the USA and abroad in several languages, and in both print and online publications. He's a contributor to several volumes by various authors. He's seen by some as being overly confrontational and therefore a real idealist, and by others as being insufficiently engaged and thusly an ideal realist. Both views have merit. He favors those who can see something for its own intrinsic worth and gauge it on its own merits, viewing it (and hopefully accepting it) for what it is. He dislikes those of the "know-it-all" mentality, whose personal dissatisfaction and venting masquerades as "constructive criticism." As a historian, if he had a choice of experiencing any single event in the recent history of the world, it would be the siege and fall of the Alamo ( but, he freely acknowledges, "Only as an observer, not as a participant").
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