The Walkers and Wilkins knew they were accepting a large risk in buying James Bowie's land, and as a result parted with very little money in hand. From the first sale involving the shares in the Planters Association, Bowie probably was due no more than $4,000.00 after his mortgage. On the sale of the Lafourche plantation, James really owned none of the land, and only a portion of the slaves, and even then he may still have owed Stephen and Rezin considerable money for the plantations he bought from them in 1828 and 1829. His final share of the $90,000.00 sales price may have been as small as $16,000.00. As for that final omnibus sale of the remaining land from the Sutton report, his share of the $60,000.00 total was about $45,000.00. But for most of these sales Bowie only received notes from the buyers, due at various intervals (and which, of course, they could refuse to pay if they encountered trouble with titles). If he had any cash in hand after it was all over, it amounted to no more than $20,000.00, and may have been considerably less (Conveyance Record E, 1837, 205, Clerk of the Court, St. Mary Parish Courthouse, Franklin, La.; Deed Book R, 512, Book H, 205-7, Lafourche Parish Courthouse; Conveyance Book G, 38, Terrebonne Parish Courthouse; Conveyance Record G, 399-401, Ouachita Parish Courthouse; Notary Felix De Armas, “Hypothètique par James Bowie en favr de 1'Association Consolidé,” June 16, 1829, vol. 33, #751, New Orleans Notarial Archives).
James Bowie's share of these sales is almost impossible to calculate, since the brothers sold their property jointly, the transfers giving no hint as to how much each was to receive. The only hint lies in the Bowie Promissory Note of the Dowry, April 22, 1831, James Bowie Vertical File, UT. It lists two debts to him, one notes from the Walkers and Wilkins for $45,000.00, and the other due in notes from the same parties totaling $20,000. Bowie's largest part of the sales were his numerous Sutton report claims, which made up at least seventy percent of the total land being conveyed, and thus would suggest that of the $60,000.00 purchase price, this $45,000.00 could be his share. The other $20,000.00 on the dowry, then, could only be notes due for his Terrebonne property after his mortgage were satisfied, and his share of the proceeds from the Lafourche plantation. The dowry statement also lists $20,000.00 in cash left with Angus McNeil in Natchez. This might be cash realized as money down on these sales, but knowing Bowie, it is also possible that it was chimerical, as a subsequent analysis of the full dowry to follow will show to be quite possible.
9. Notary William Boswell, Rezin P. Bowie v. His Creditors, vol. 9, #505, statement of Duncan Walker, May 30, 1832, New Orleans Notarial Archives. Walker appealed to Jackson after he found that many of Bowie‘s spurious claims had been surveyed as public domain and would be sold at auction. Jackson refused to interfere, but only referred it to Graham's successor, who told the president that the respectability of the Walkers and Wilkins as the present owners of these claims “does not in the least affect their validity or clear them from the imputation of being base attempts to defraud the Government.” Ten years later Walker was still trying to sell the properties that everyone now knew as “Bowy claims,” and still running into an inability to secure clear title. The term crossed the river to Mississippi, too, for with the Terrebonne land from the Harper report, it was soon known that Robert Walker had gotten struck with what one of his friends in the state called “the famous Bowie claims.” Even the Lafourche plantation caused him problems. By 1834 Walker was calling it “Acadia,” But after he won a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1836 he started selling his property, and in 1840 disposed of Acadia for $220,000, only to have the buyer find that the title was unsound even there, though this time, for a change, it appears to have had nothing to do with James Bowie. The story persists that the Bowies themselves named the Lafourche plantation “Acadia” or “Arcadia,” or even “Sedalia.” It is possible that they did so, but the earliest recorded reference to the name comes three years after the sale, in Quitman's April 1834 letter. (Elijah Hayward to Jackson, January 16, 1832, Entry 404, James Whitcomb to John Henderson, January 22, 1841, Letters Sent, Volume 6, 293, Entry 200, Record Group 49, NA; Claiborne, Mississippi, 415n; Quitman to Eliza Quitman, April 19, 1834, Quitman Papers, SHC, UNC; Robert and Duncan Walker to William Givens, March 7, 1840, Conveyance Book R, 22, Lafourche Parish Courthouse).
10. Conveyance Book 7, 232, Orleans Parish Courthouse; Deed Book H, 237-38, Lafourche Parish Courthouse.
11. Bowie to the President and Directors of the Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana, February 25, 1831, J. Fair Hardin Collection, LSU.
12. Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, June 8, 1830.
13. Ibid., September 8, 1830; Bowie, The Bowies, 264. This second wife of John J. Bowie's was not discovered by Walter Bowie in The Bowies, and apparently was completely unknown to John's children by his third wife, Americus Watkins Kirkland. At least, Martha Bowie Burns makes no mention of her in her article on “Eventful Lives of the Bowies” in the James Bowie Biographical File, DRT.
14. James Whitcomb to William Wright, May 9, 1838, vol. 4, 227, Entry 200, Record Group 49, NA. This New Madrid business is uncertain, speaking only of the “representatives” of Rezin Bowie, which could be any one, or a combination, of James, John, Rezin, or Stephen, and their sister Martha Sterrett. They do not appear to have gotten the property.
15. Elve Soniat to M. S. Bowie, October, 19, 1896, July 26, 1897, Lucy Bowie Papers, DRT; Deed Book G, 242, 245, Lafourche Parish Courthouse; W. L. Martin to Barnes F. Lathrop, June 19, 1958, citing a November 30, 1830, bond seen in the Lafourche Parish Courthouse but not there now, Barnes F. Lathrop Papers, UT; Conveyance Record Book 7, Old Series, 207-208, St. Landry Parish Courthouse; Conveyance Book E, 407, Avoyelles Parish Courthouse. The statement about Stephen Bowie losing money while sheriff is in the two Elve Soniat letters, the amount stated being $20,000. This sounds like an exaggeration, and she is probably confusing the bonds posted by Stephen's brothers for money they actually had to pay out.
16. Conveyance Book F, 228-29, Terrebonne Parish Courthouse; Stephen Bowie, Oath of Insolvency, September 26, 1831, Harries & Marsh v.S. Bowie, Box 7, Adams County Circuit Court Records, Historic Natchez Foundation, Natchez, Mississippi; Arrest order for Stephen Bowie, May 14, 1831, Case #3040, Cushing and Ames v. Rezin P. and Stephen Bowie, General Case Files, Entry 21, Record Group 21, National Archives—Southwest Region.
17. Conveyance Book 21, 59-60, Natchitoches Parish Courthouse.
18. Conveyance Book F, 135, Terrebonne parish Courthouse.
19. Deed Book F, 396, Lafourche Parish Courthouse; Conveyance Record 18, 40, Natchitoches Parish Courthouse; Conveyance Book F, 179, H, 424-45, Terrebonne parish Courthouse.
20. Smithwick, Evolution, 137-38. Smithwick's recollections are muddled here, for he says that James and Rezin Bowie had just won a famous case over their Louisiana claims “and had a fortune,” and that it was his share of this money that Bowie lost. Smithwick's memory has confused the 1827 court confirmation of the Arkansas claims, in which Rezin had no part, with the large sale of the Louisiana lands to the Walkers and Wilkins. Nevertheless this appears to be a genuine recollection of Smithwick's, and not one of the fabrications included in his memoir by his daughter who edited the book.
21. San Antonio Light, May 4, 1917; “James Bowie,” undated manuscript in James Bowie Biographical File, DRT.
22. Henry Bry to Johnston, December 24, 1830, Johnston Papers, HSP.
23. Stephen Bowie, Oath of Insolvency, September 20, 1831, Box 7, Adams County Circuit Court Records, Historic Natchez Foundation.
24. McWhiney, Cracker Culture, 189-90.
25. Richardson, “Teche Country,” 595.
26. There are at least three variant accounts of Bowie defending a minister during a service. The earliest is William H. Sparks's unlocated 1879-80 newspaper narrative later quoted in Ellis, Crockett, 229-30, in which he recounts a story told him “some years ago” by a Methodist preacher, and substantially this account has been used in the text. The San Francisco Chronicle of February 28, 1881, repeats Sparks almost verbatim,
and John Henry Brown repeats this last version in August 1881, though misquoting the date of the article as February 22, and includes it in Speer and Brown, Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 438. Thorp, Bowie Knife, 131-32, concludes that the unnamed minister was Charles Wesley Smith. Some years later, and certainly after 1901, a clipping from an unidentified issue of the Washington Herald, in the James Bowie Biographical File, DRT, says the event happened in Mississippi, again with a Methodist, and that Bowie, a “small man,” threatened to cut the throats of any who disturbed the service. Finally, A. J. Sowell, in the San Antonio Light, May 4, 1917, tells the story, placing it in Nacogdoches, but this time the minister is the early Baptist missionary Z. N. Morrell, and when the rowdies start Bowie makes a speech, threatening them to “be quiet, leave the room or fight me.”
None of the sources date the occurrence. If it had happened on Bowie's 1830 trip, Caiaphas Ham would probably have noted it. Thus it would have to be on one of Bowie's 1831-32 passages from Louisiana through Nacogdoches, and this trip is as likely as any other, and he is known to have had another road companion on this journey, Martin Parmer. Quite possibly all these stories are apocryphal, however, and the later ones may well be derivative from the earliest Sparks account. As usual Thorp is completely off base, for Charles W. Smith was not even born until 1855, nineteen years after Bowie's death! Morrell, of course, did not set foot in Texas until December 1835, at which time Bowie was more than two hundred miles away from Nacogdoches at San Antonio, San Felipe, and Goliad, deeply engaged in the preliminaries that led him to the Alamo. If the event took place at all, it more likely involved the Methodist Henry Stephenson in 1834, but this is pure conjecture. Significantly, it should also be noted that there is at least one similar story about Travis defending a Texas minister from rowdies, suggesting that this kind of heroic defense of the faith may have been simply an idiom of frontier myth applied to several heroes.
27. Johnson, Texas, vol. 1, 163.
28. José Navarro to Williams, April 14, 1831, Williams Papers, Rosenberg Library, Galveston, Tex.
29. “A List of Titles made under the Contract with the State of Coahuila & Texas for settling 500 Families By Stephen F. Austin 1827-1833,” 35, Benjamin C. Franklin Papers, UT.
30. James Bowie Dowry Obligation, April 22, 1831, copy and translation in Fontaine Papers; Promissory Note of the Dowery, April 22, 1831, James Bowie Vertical File, UT. Two sources of the contract are cited because the translations differ, and each should be used to draw the full sense of the document.
31. There have been several analyses of the Bowie dowry contract, all of them deeply flawed either by blind acceptance of every statement as fact, or by quite defective background research on the part of its critics. Of the falsity of the claimed land in Arkansas and Louisiana there is no doubt. The $32,800 mentioned is not stated to be the de la Français claim, but that is the only known claim that Bowie ever filed with the United States government, and at 10 percent simple interest per annum, the original $11,850 claim would have grown to $32,060 by August 1828, when Bowie returned from his first trip to San Antonio, at which time he dropped further pursuit of the claim and, presumably, stopped bothering to keep up to date with interest calculations he was unlikely to collect anyhow. The remaining question on the dowry lies only in the notes due from the Walkers and Wilkins, and the supposed $20,000 left with McNeil. As will be seen, the Walkers and Wilkins in 1832 will cease payments on these notes when their titles are rejected. As for the money supposedly left with McNeil, the fact that almost everything else in the document is a lie or a half truth does not argue in its favor.
32. James Bowie Marriage Record, April 25, 1831, San Fernando parish Church, San Antonio. Elve Soniat to Lucy Bowie, n.d. but in the 1890s, states that James gave Ursula a set of emeralds as a wedding gift. This is of course possible, but since in his 1833 will, made out in Natchez, he mentions his wife's jewelry, then in the hands of his sister Martha Sterrett, it is more likely that James bought her the jewelry during his 1833 visit to Louisiana, as he would hardly take jewelry she already owned with him on a journey to Louisiana to leave with his sister.
33. Testimony of Menchaca, 126, Veramendi v. Hutchins, Documents Pertaining to James Bowie, UT.
34. Ham, “Recollections,” UT; Edward Rohrbaugh, “James Bowie and the Bowie Knife in Fact and in Fancy” (master's thesis, University of Texas, Austin, 1938), 31.
35. Juana Navarro Alsbury Account, ca. 1880, in John Ford Papers, UT.
36. Testimony of Menchaca, 127, Veramendi v. Hutchins, Documents Pertaining to James Bowie, UT.
37. James Bowie passport, June 23, 1831, Petition to sell goods, June 22, 1831, Béxar Archives, UT.
38. James Bowie statements of testimony, July 27, 31, 1831, UT. Bowie identified McCaslan as “the foreman of my mechanics” in his December 10, 1831, statement on his fight on the San Saba expedition, Nacogdoches Archives, TXSL.
39. John Warren Hunter, Rise and Fall of the San Saba Mission (Bandera, Tex., 1905), 53-56, repeats an old myth that James had befriended a Lipan chief named Xolic, and through him was adopted into the Lipan tribe, and that he learned the location of the San Saba mine from them. This account states that he lived with them for eleven months, despite the fact that there is no such period for which Bowie cannot be shown to be elsewhere. The narrative also places the November-December 1831 expedition sometime in 1834. Moreover, it is evident from James's report that he was looking for the mine, not going after a location he already knew. Mims, Trail, 51ff., adopts this myth and, of course, so does Hopewell, Bowie, 72-73. The earliest source for this story is unknown, but it probably does not predate the 1880s.
40. Martha Bowie Burns article, James Bowie Biographical File, DRT.
41. Menchaca testimony, 127, Veramendi v. Hutchins, Documents Pertaining to James Bowie, UT.
42. Rezin's passport to visit Texas has not been examined, but was given to the Alamo in 1889 by his grandson John S. Moore, and supposedly carries the date 1831. Certainly he arrived no later than December. San Antonio Daily Express, October 11, 1889.
43. Arrest order, September 8, 1831, Stephen Duncan v. Stephen Bowie, September 8, 1831, Arrest order September 10, 1831, William Harris and Marsh v. Stephen Bowie, September 20, 1831, Summons, November 8, 1831, Duncan v. Rezin Bowie, Box 7, Adams County Circuit Court Records, Historic Natchez Foundation. The date of Stephen Bowie's death is currently unknown. Until now it has been assumed to have been sometime in 1830 (Bowie, The Bowies, 278), but the Natchez records clearly have him living as of late September 1831. He was dead when James Bowie made out his will on October 31, 1833. He may have died in late 1831, from the fact that on September 8, 1831, Stephen Duncan was claiming a debt against Stephen and Rezin combined, but that on November 8 the debt only mentioned Rezin. This could mean simply that Stephen was no longer party to the debt in Natchez because of his insolvency, or it could mean that he was no longer living and action could only be sought against Rezin. Only Ham, “Recollections,” UT, has him alive past this time, in December 1831, and this could be in error. Further research, hardly germane to this narrative, could probably pinpoint Stephen Bowie's death with much greater accuracy.
44. Order November 3, 1831, Court Record Relating to Arkansas Land Claims, 1824-1832, Entry 214, Record Group 49, NA; Bernardo Sampeyrac and JosephStewart v. the United States, Richard Peters, cop., Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States. January Term 1833 (Philadelphia, 1833), 223-25. There has not, to date, been an adequate study of the Bowie Arkansas case. Frederick Cron's brief essay in the James Bowie Vertical File, UT, is little more than an outline. Sears, “Low Down,” 175-91, provides perhaps the fullest examination in print, but like the rest of his article, it is snide, sophomoric, and packed with misinformation, including the ridiculous assumption that Bowie invented the name Sampeyrac really intending it to represent the French sans payer rien, which would then translate to “Bernardo who pays nothing.” Though unusual, the surname was genuine e
nough. Senator Johnston did frequent business with a Natchitoches merchant named Ambroise Sampeyrac. Sears's chronology of Bowie's life is topsy-turvy; Sears says that Angus McNeil was probably a fictitious person, that it took months for letters to go from New Orleans to Little Rock instead of barely more than a week by steamboat, and so on, and so on.
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