The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation by James Donovan Read Free Book Online Page B

into his free hand. Another found his breastbone, which bent the blade.
    Somehow Bowie found the strength to sit up and grab Wright’s cravat. Wright reared back, pulling Bowie to his feet. Bowie put all his remaining strength into one thrust with his big knife into Wright’s chest, then he twisted the blade. Wright collapsed, dying, onto Bowie, pinning him to the ground. Blanchard stabbed again at Bowie, but then Thomas Wells shot him in the arm, allowing Bowie to reach up and slice Blanchard in the side. Blanchard retreated, the melee ended, and the Sandbar Fight quickly passed into legend.
    Bowie, the recipient of several deep stab wounds, at least two lead balls, and one accurately hurled pistol to his head, was “not expected to recover,” claimed one newspaper. But it would take more than that to kill Jim Bowie.
    The Sandbar Fight was reported in newspapers across the country, including the young nation’s most widely read newsweekly, Niles’ Weekly Register, published in Washington, D.C. Bowie’s superhuman feats of personal combat in the free-for-all made his reputation as perhaps the most feared fighter in the South and on the frontier. Years later, he would tell a Presbyterian minister he happened to be traveling with of the fracas and of his encounter with Wright. “It did my very soul good,” he said, “to wrench it through his heart, and kill such a mean puppy, who would stab a man already down.” Courteous to strangers, loyal to friends, and chivalrous to women, James Bowie was unforgiving of any man who became an enemy.
    B OWIE WAS BORN IN 1796 in southern Kentucky, the son of Rezin Bowie, of Scottish descent, and the Welsh-blooded Elvira “Elve” Jones, an iron-willed young volunteer nurse during the Revolutionary War. She cared for Rezin after he sustained an injury while fighting the British with Colonel Francis Marion, married him soon after, and bore him several sons and daughters. In 1800, the family moved to Spanish-owned Missouri, on the Mississippi. When James was six, Rezin moved his family again, this time downriver to the bayou in Louisiana, some thirty miles west of Natchez. A few years later, in 1809, the Bowie patriarch pulled up stakes one more time, to another bayou eighty miles south, near Opelousas, where the family prospered in the timber-cutting business.
    By that time the Bowie children were reaching adulthood, or nearing it. James and his brother Rezin Jr., almost three years older, were inseparable: always outdoors, hunting, fishing, roaming the countryside, roping and capturing wild deer and horses, even riding alligators and catching bears, except when Elve Bowie—an “exceedingly pious woman,” according to the oldest Bowie brother, John—kept them inside to teach them the basics of the three Rs—“reading, writing, and ’rithmetic,” as they were colloquially referred to. Whenever possible she would bring a circuit rider in to preach to her brood. As an adult, James would fill out to a muscular 180 pounds and six feet, with chestnut brown hair and dark gray-blue eyes set deep in a fair-complected face that women found attractive. His eyes were calm and penetrating until he was angered—when, it was said, they resembled a tiger’s.
    In January 1815, with the British preparing an expedition against New Orleans, eighteen-year-old James and his brother Rezin mustered in Opelousas. Their military regiment marched toward the Crescent City, but the Battle of New Orleans concluded on January 8, before they arrived. In that clash, Andrew Jackson defeated the British, and peace between the two nations was made days later.
    Young James had little money and few belongings other than his wits and his brawn, but he and his brothers had been raised to be enterprising. Over the next few years, while working in the family timber-cutting business, he slowly acquired free open land or inexpensive tracts for little money down. By the time he was twenty-three, he owned several