Hi

I wondered if anybody here has some knowledge about Bowie knife guards.
There are obviously a number of different styles of Bowie Guards, but how many exactly? And what are the advantages and disadvantages of certain types? Also it would be interesting to know at what time which type was the most prominent and why.... just fashion or something else?
I have done some superficial research myself, but couldn't find anything.
But the awesome folks on myArmoury never fail to share information that is hard to find elsewhere.

Thanks

Bowies had every kind of guard. in fact, some of the knives most closely associated with J. Bowie were guardless. that’s pretty common in the Antebellum period. in the early part of the Civil War, large knives with D guards became common. i’ve posted both kinds of projects here in the recent past. See Norm Flayderman’s book for the most detailed overview.

http://myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=380...ight=bowie

http://myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=384...mp;start=0

Agreed. I won't pretend to be an expert, but even at a glance, there is so much variety that documenting them all is probably impossible. After all, they've been made by countless smiths and cutlers in all shapes and sizes for closing on two centuries now... and that's not even touching on what counts as a Bowie. If you ask me to picture a Bowie, the knife that comes to my mind is something like this:
https://sheffield-trading.com/hunting-fixed-blade-knives/110-scale-tang-bowie-stag.html
Which arguably has as many features in common with a USMC Ka-Bar as with a Searles Bowie.

I would say, though, that you might be able to get a handle on the most common factory styles. The 19th-century Sheffield Bowies, for instance, had a wide variety of guards that could get very fancy. But most often they were simple, straight, two-branched, oval, sometimes with ball finials, or boat-shaped and crowned, and made of brass or nickel silver. These types have been extremely enduring. In the thread Sean linked to above, I used a boat-shaped, crowned nickel guard, similar to the one in the Sheffield Trading Company page.

Thank you for sharing that knowledge. My primary interest was to know if there were specific guard types that had certain advantages in Bowie Fencing....it would be for example pretty obvious to say that a D-Guard offers more protection than that Sheffield Bowie Knife with its simple straight guard.

But after thinking about this a bit, I figured that apart of the D-Guard and maybe the swept-hilt guard, the differences in actual performance between different guard types are too suddle to be relevant.
Also I thought that that the guards might have changed and developed over time, just like medival european sword guards did.
And this might be partly the case, because (as you've told me) a lot of Bowies that were produced before the Civil War rarely had a guard..... probably because the Bowie wasn't used in combat so much.
But then as the War arrised they needed a guard, because you now would use the knife mostly for combat, and you would encounter sabers and other Bowie knives.
And as soon as there was a guard, the evolution probably stopped (or at least it was now mostly for Looks, rather than functionality) simply because it doesn't make a hole lot of difference which guard you take (again, except for the D-Guard).

This is just my personal interpretation of the input you gave me, and some further thoughts of mine.
Please correct me if there is something very wrong with my theory.


Thank you!

Dear Markus,

I think you may be romanticizing the Bowie knife's role in the U.S. Civil War. They certainly must have been used overwhelmingly as camp and field knives, not as combat knives. I'm aware of (but regrettably don't have the reference to hand) military research that bears on this:

On Monday 26 November 2007, in private correspondence, Paul Kenworthy wrote:

[A]n article . . . appeared in an issue of the journal of the Military Services Institute during the debate in the 1880s in the US Army about whether or not swords and bayonets should be retained. It re-examines the hospital records from the Civil War and contends that the statistics on sword and bayonet use are misleading. The author said that surgeons only recorded a wound as a bayonet or sword wound if they were reasonably sure that it was caused by that weapon. If they weren't sure what weapon caused the wound it went into a category called "puncture, incised or contused" wounds. Bayonet and sword wounds accounted for 1/47 of the wounds recorded. However, if you include puncture, incised or contused wounds, they jump to 1/10 of recorded wounds. In other words, soldiers in the Civil War were busily stabbing and beating each other, the only question was with what.

However, it's clear that if one-tenth of wounds were identifiably not caused by bullets, then knife wounds must have caused far fewer than one in ten of all wounds--bayonet and sword wounds would have predominated (probably in that order), and more unusual causes (clubbing with muskets' butts, for example) would have had a share.

Soldiers' expectations may well have been that they'd fight with their knives, but it can't actually have been common. Even if soldiers didn't discard their big knives in order to lighten their kits, guards prevent users' hands from slipping onto blades during heavy work, and D-guards still appear on machetes because of their usefulness in protecting users' hands when cutting brush.

I hope that this proves helpful.

Best,

Mark Millman

I wouldn't say that the evolution stopped entirely. I'm relying on Google-fu here, but I've never seen a guard like this dated to the 19th century:
http://www.cuttingedge.com/knife/klc08252_small_bowie
It's superficially similar to the crowned guards of earlier knives, but has a smooth concave slope instead of an angle. As far as I can tell, that stylistic detail on simple factory-made Bowie guards didn't come about until the 20th century.

Dear Markus,

On Monday 22 February 2021, you wrote:

[T]he evolution . . . continued in a fashion/style oriented evolution (thats at least my theorie).

If you can say this about post-Civil War developments in Bowie knife design, why don't you accept it about pre-Civil War developments? One could equally well postulate, for example, that with the advancement of industrial processes knife manufacturers found that when they added guards to their knives they could raise their asking prices by more than the cost of the guard, and thereby increase their profit margins. When enough manufacturers had done so, then guards on Bowie knives became part of the expected design, and knives without them no longer looked right.

It's dangerous to assume that what seems obvious to us today corresponds to the way that people thought in the past. Fashion, for one, is at least as strong a driver of personal-weapon design as function. In an industrialized capitalist society, profit is an equally strong motivator; and manufacturers can create demand to generate profit, rather than merely responding to customers' pre-existing desires.

Best,

Mark Millman

As far as I'm aware the guards on 'bowie knives' and indeed most knives designed and carried primarily as weapons (rather than tools) were put in place to stop the hand of the person holding it from sliding down onto the blade. These short guards were not generally intended as defensive additions to block the opponent's knife. Trying to do so using a guard measuring usually under an inch in length would I suspect be rather ill advised. Whether people really 'fenced' with knives in the sense of a controlled back and forth style like one sees in televised sword play or in boxing etc I'm really not sure - it seems to me that knives are too quick and unpredictable for such behaviour. They are fast, nasty last resorts if not mean looking deterrents. Where running towards a gun or longer weapon might sometimes make sense, running away from a knife is almost always the safest course of action. They're exceedingly dangerous in just about anyone's hands.

One exception to the above that I am aware of is in the knife fighting which apparently took place in certain parts of south America in days gone by and still perhaps today in some rural communities. In those cases, as far as I understand it, where duels of honour and other fights were settled with knives, the defensive element was typically a heavy cloak or piece of cloth wrapped around the left / non knife holding forearm which could be used to parry and ensnare the opponent's blade to allow for a counter attack with one's own.

D guard bowie knives seem a bit of an anomaly to me and seem almost closer to small swords than to knives in many respects. One other set of knives which often show a D guard are WW1 trench knives however the D guards on these are as often as not knuckle dusters as guards per se.

For reference I've added a picture of several antique 'fighting / self defence' knives from the period of roughly 1850 - 1900 which all display guards. Note that all of these are relatively short (perhaps for looks and convenience - one wouldn't want the guards snagging on clothing etc especially if worn concealed) and I can't imagine them being particularly useful to intentionally block an incoming blade with, not unless one was wearing some sort of armoured glove as well.

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Dear Markus,

Let me applaud you on your writing. It's vivid! I greatly enjoyed your fairy-tale.

But please consider these points:

Bowie knives were far more popular among Confederate troops than Federal ones. That's clearly related to cultural differences between the northern and southern states of the U.S. The D-guard Bowie in particular is acknowledged to be a southern phenomenon; very few northerners would have had them, except perhaps ones taken as trophies. My understanding--which may be inaccurate--is that D-guard bowies were popular from the war's initial days, when the Confederate forces were in the ascendant.

The Confederate armies were notoriously short of funds and materiel. Bowie knives would have been used frequently in place of shovels--which, please note, is a thrusting motion, often against heavy resistance, that would benefit from having a guard to protect the user's hand.

Photographs of soldiers joining the war effort on both sides are well known to show their subjects absolutely loaded with pistols and knives in addition to their issued equipment. The photographers are equally well known to have kept pistols and knives as props to lend the photos' subjects a fiercer and more martial appearance--but those props stayed with the photographers.

As for the fairy-tale elements of your story, as an active Civil War re-enactor who drills weekly--much less frequently than the soldiers did, although I admit that I've now done it for far longer than the war's duration--I can tell you from experience that it takes less than two seconds to fix a bayonet on the type of rifled musket that overwhelmingly dominated the equipment of soldiers on both sides; that contemporary military doctrine instructed soldiers in skirmishing situations to use their bayonets first and to hold their fire in reserve because strategists and tacticians were aware of the limitations of single-shot muzzle-loading long arms; and that the bayonet-combat drills the soldiers practiced include guard postures for defense against saber cuts delivered by cavalry.

No doubt it's amply clear that I think it unlikely that the addition of guards to Bowie knives is a change that was driven by function, although it does seem to be coincident with the war or the immediate pre-war period. But In order really to answer the question, in-depth research on the knives' production and sale, with specific dating of examples, will certainly be necessary. While that's likely to be straightforward for mass-produced knives (for example, those from Birmingham, Sheffield, and Solingen), it will probably be quite difficult for ones produced locally by small-scale makers.

I suppose my central point is this: Modern people looking at questions such as this are overwhelmingly inclined to ascribe changes in the form and technology of weapons and armor to functional improvements, but this turns out to be much too narrow a focus. Economics, including large-scale systems of trade and production, and particularly fashion are at least as important as function in the development over time of weapons and armor. I recommend that you seek out posts here by Jean-Henri Chandler, Dan Howard, and Matthew Amt, who have written particularly clearly and thoroughly on this topic.

Best,

Mark

The very large D-guard knives were mainly in the deep south, ranging from Texas to Georgia. There is a plausible theory that these are related to the Mexican Espada Ancha, and moved from west to east as states of the new Confederacy sought to arm troops quickly in the absence of sufficient firearms and swords. Some of these knives (and pikes!) were made on state contracts for this reason. That's why you might see more of these knives in early-war images. It's true that photographers kept prop weapons, but scholars have noted that there is no evidence of a single knife appearing in more than one surviving image.

The large CSA knives were certainly assumed to be used in combat. "To the knife!" apparently was a CSA boast about the degree to which troops would fight. That supposed brutality was used for propaganda purposes in Federal media. Personally, I'd much rather face a knife than a .58 projectile or canister shot, but it's a moot point. The CSA wanted all the modern military firearms and artillery they could get.

The D-guard is so closely identified with the CSA during the war because it scarcely existed before or after. As impractical as it was for military service, it was ridiculous for civilian use.

BTW, it's not that most Antebellum knives were guardless–there are examples of every kind of guard from that period and much earlier. It's just that many knives used on the frontier were, like J. Bowie's sandbar knife, utilitarian hunting/butcher knives. As the legend of Bowie grew, men with no great need for such a knife adopted fancy versions, especially the imported Sheffield knives. There are gorgeous American knives all through the 19th c., though.

I highly recommend the Flayderman book and this one: https://www.amazon.com/Confederate-Bowie-Knives-Jack-Melton/dp/1931464529/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=confederate+bowie&qid=1614188267&sr=8-3

To add to my previous post - I have noticed that many modern made "bowies' are often on the larger, heavier end of the spectrum, possibly to satisfy a modern desire to hold the larger than life, legendary weapon of an imagined frontier world. Or perhaps it's thanks to Crocodile Dundee and Rambo. In any case, most of the 19th Century bowies I've seen and handled are impressive looking weapons but are relatively small, light and compact. They are however almost always made from good thick steel which is the one area where modern replicas often seem to be under built!