James Black: Arkansas creator of the Bowie knife
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – With Sunday as National Inventor’s Day, it’s a good time to bring up a classic Arkansas inventor who put the Natural State on the innovation map early on.
As the legend has it, James Black (1800–1872) was responsible for crafting the first Bowie knife at his blacksmith shop in Washington, in Hempstead County in 1831. The knife was made popular by legendary frontiersman Jim Bowie (1796–1836) who later died at the Alamo.
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According to the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encylopedia of Arkansas, Black had perfected the necessary multi-step process used to forge the knife. This led to him having a reputation as a quality knife maker, which Bowie sought out.
A Bowie knife is known for its trademark curve near the point and a handguard to keep the user’s grip from slipping.
According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a Washington, Arkansas, newspaper article in 1841 credited Black with forging the first Bowie knife for Jim Bowie. This is important, as others have taken credit for the knife’s design and initial forging, including Bowie’s brother Rezin who said Jesse Clifft made the first knife out of a file at his shop in Louisiana.
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Black had been born in New Jersey before first traveling to Louisiana, then Arkansas. He married a woman from Hempstead County and they had five children. Sadly, his later life had a series of downturns, including the death of his wife after eight years of marriage, and then losing custody of his children, along with the loss of his property to his father-in-law, also a blacksmith and former business partner. Black’s vision also began to fail.
Worse, late-life dementia left Black unable to recall all the steps involved in forging the knife, which had made his knife-making skills so in demand.
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A trip to the Historic Washington State Park blacksmith shop is an opportunity to see what the Black’s work life must have been like, as well as learn more about the man’s role in Arkansas history.
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