Fighting Blades of the Frontier

“They say my bowie knife is keen to sliver into halves The carcass of my enemy, as butchers slay their calves.” These two bloodthirsty lines satirized American society in the “American Ballads” section that introduced the 1845 British Book of Ballads. Nine rhymes in this section mentioned the Yankee fondness for the bowie knife, then considered a necessary part of dress in America’s early 19th-century frontier. James Bowie’s famed fighting knife, the origin of which remains s