The First Bowie Knife

Nobody has settled who made the first Bowie knife. Rezin Bowie gave the main account two years after his brother James died. Rezin's granddaughter wrote to LSU in 1885 that her mother watched a smith named Jesse Clifft make it, John Bowie named a smith called Snowden, and an Arkansas blacksmith, James Black, is credited with a knife made for James in 1830. The Sandbar Fight of September 19, 1827, the only documented fight with this design, took place on the Mississippi between Natchez and Vidalia; the Avoyelles claim rests on Rezin.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Avoyelles Parish Courthouse: Solomon Northup Marker — steps away
  The Marksville courthouse where Solomon Northup was freed in January 1853, with a marker and a 2026 bronze that shows him rising from the mud.
• Tunica-Biloxi Museum — 1.1 mi
  The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana's own museum at Marksville, built around the Tunica Treasure that the tribe won back in court.
• Epps House: Solomon Northup's Gateway to Freedom — 21 mi
  The Creole cottage Solomon Northup helped build for the man who enslaved him, moved twice and now a small museum on the LSU Alexandria campus.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 26 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.

More markers nearby

• Fort De Russy — steps away
• Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin — steps away
• Solomon Northup, "Twelve Years a Slave" — steps away
• Founding Of Marksville — steps away