Jim Bradshaw: The mystery of Jim Bowie's knife

By JIM BRADSHAW
Campbell’s Ferry isn’t much more than a memory now but, if local legend is to be believed, the river crossing in Vermilion Parish could have been the real birthplace of Jim Bowie’s famous knife.
The ferry, named for Allen “Buck” Campbell who lived nearby, operated from about 1825 until about 1925. It was a small, rope-drawn affair connecting Live Oak Plantation on the east bank of the Vermilion River to a crooked little road on the river’s west bank that followed Little Bayou to Esther and beyond.
The Bowie knife and Campbell’s ferry were linked in a newspaper debate in 1850. Most authorities say the Bowie knife was sometimes called “the Arkansas toothpick” because the first one was made about 1825 in Washington, Arkansas, by a blacksmith named James Black. Bowie is said to have picked Black to make the knife because Black knew how to temper the steel to keep the edge razor sharp.
But in 1850, when a Texas newspaper claimed the knife was made along Bayou Teche in Louisiana, it drew a fiery letter to the editor from a reader named Ambroise LaCour Sr.
He claimed that the newspaper account was so much malarkey and that the knife was made at a blacksmith shop below Campbell’s Ferry, where Bowie was said to have lived at some time before 1834.
Bowie was only 37 when he died at the Alamo in March 1836, but apparently was well traveled by then, and lived for a time in Louisiana. The Bowie Oak, near the courthouse in Opelousas, is named for him, and some of the old Vermilion Parish maps mark out a place below Little Bayou called Bowie Island, where Jim Bowie’s brother, Rezin, apparently held 60 or 70 arpents of land.
Another story says that Jim Bowie lived for a while at Isle de Grand Bois, as the Big Woods area of Vermilion Parish was first known. That story says that one day Jim Bowie rode to Abbeville and forced the release of a man who was being held on suspicion of murder.
It was shortly after that, according to the story, that Bowie left for Texas, perhaps not of his own accord. No matter why he went, it was a fateful trip. He was drawn into the cause of Texas independence, and to the Alamo.
Several accounts claim that he didn’t go to Texas alone. Isaac (Ike) Ryan, who was born in the Vermilion Parish community of Perry, was one of the few Louisianians to die at the Alamo. Some stories say that young Ryan met Bowie in Vermilion Parish and traveled with him to San Antonio.
That’s unlikely, since the Ryan family had moved to Calcasieu Parish by the time of the Texas Revolution.
An account from a Ryan family descendant claims that Ike went from Calcasieu Parish to Galveston aboard one of his father’s lumber schooners in late 1835 or early 1836 and was recruited there by Col. William Travis to go to the Alamo.
That is also unlikely. For starters, Ike’s father was a stock raiser not a lumberman, but more importantly, Galveston was only a tent city, not a commercial port, at the time.
It is more probable that Ryan was in New Orleans in October 1835 after helping to drive cattle to market there, and was talked into enlisting in the New Orleans Greys.
The Greys were made up of two companies of volunteers, about 120 men in all,  formed specifically to fight in the Texas War of Independence. Their name came from the grey uniforms they wore.
The companies were organized at a meeting in the coffee room of Banks’s Arcade in New Orleans on the evening of Oct. 13, 1835.
The owner, Thomas Banks, was a supporter of Texas independence, and his red-brick, three-story building on Magazine Street was often used for meetings to promote the cause.
The Greys, and presumably Ryan, fought in several battles before his final fight at the Alamo.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.