Bowie Knife - Rugged Outdoor Knives

Bowie Knife – Rugged Outdoor Knives

A traditional Bowie knife has a long fixed blade with a full tang, with a clip point blade, sharp blade on the front with a shorter blade on the back of the knife. Learn about antique Bowie knives and new Bowie hunting knives online.

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Originally popularized in the early 1800s, the Bowie knife has remained a popular style of outdoor knife for many reasons. Its heavy blade can be used to chop wood and foliage like a machete or hatchet, without being so cumbersome. It is also a good hunting knife, because it is manipulated easily and sharp enough for more delicate tasks, such as cleaning and gutting fish and animals.

There are several variations on the Bowie knife available today, such as the six and a quarter inch Puma Bowie knife Hunter II, which retains the clip point blade for easier cutting, but omits the early Bowie knife's guard for hand-to-hand combat. There are also much shorter styles, like the four inch Benchmade Rant Bowie, or longer ones like the ten inch Fallkniven Thor Bowie.

Size is a big difference between today's Bowie knives and the Bowie knife used before and during the Civil War. An antique Bowie knife can have a blade between ten and 14 inches, sometimes even longer. In those days, frontiersmen used Bowie knives for everything from shaving to knife fighting, so the knife had to be long and extremely sharp.
The Bowie knife came to prominence when the frontiersman Jim Bowie used the knife made for him by an Arkansas blacksmith named James Black to fight off and kill three men who were hired to assassinate him. When the story went around that Bowie successfully fended off his attackers without a scratch, Black was flooded with orders from men who wanted a "Jim Bowie knife," and the most famous American knife was born.

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