U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- Some outdoor items are legendary, aren’t they? For instance the 30-30. Even though it is probably the worst deer hunting round in the world second only to the .30 cal. M1 Carbine who in their right mind is going to publicly diss the 30-30? Not me! It’s kinda the same with the Bowie knife. So the other day when Puma sent me their Puma SGB Bowie Commando Stag knife to check out I suddenly remembered that I’d never written an article on the Bowie knife.
Puma SGB Bowie Commando Stag Handled Knife
In case you are historically illiterate and don’t know the history of the Bowie knife I’m going to cover it. Who hasn’t heard of Jim Bowie? He was one of the great frontiersmen. Bowie, Davie Crockett, Travis all fought in the Alamo.
In case you’ve been raised in the modern educational climate which teaches that Hillary is a true blue American and Obama is a Patriot and they never mentioned Bowie, here’s the skinny. A small band of frontiersmen intermingled with a few freedom-loving Mexicans and soldiers were holed up in an old mission called the Alamo. About 183 of them. The Mexican general Santa Anna had surrounded the Alamo and told them to come out and surrender.
The Texans inside the fort were debating what to do. Travis drew a line in the sand with his sword and said whoever wants to fight cross this line. Everyone set there pondering for a moment on what to do. Bowie was bad sick and on a cot. He barked out for a couple of guys to carry his cot across the line. Everyone followed suit other than a couple of the Mexican women (cooks) and a Mexican guy named Rose.
As legend has it, after the battle, 27 dead Mexican were found around Travis’s bed with him in the middle. Since that was in the black powder days I’m sure that more than a few died by his famous Bowie knife.
Fast forward. The state of Mississippi flew me down to get them some publicity a few years ago. I met up with the Quapaw Canoe Co. and we canoed the Mighty Mississippi. Great time. What I didn’t know was that the Bowie knife had become famous in Natchez, Miss., which is the town we ported in. So I learned a lot of the early history of the Bowie knife on that trip.
That’s where Bowie became famous for his knife fighting skills. A duel on the Vidalia sandbar soon turned into a melee. Bowie himself shot and stabbed, killed the sheriff and one more man and was immediately etched into the history books. Legend has it that in his duels he’d chain himself and his opponent to a log and both would have a knife. Bloody way to fight.
Who knows the real specs on the Bowie knife but it was a somewhat hybrid from the conventional Spanish, English and Persian designs. It had an upswept clip point and it is rumored that the first ¼ of the tip was sharpened on top of the spine so it could cut with a back swept swing. Does our modern Bowie knife even faintly resemble the modern Bowie knife? I don’t know.
The Puma SGB Bowie Commando Stag knife design is what I’ve been raised to envision the Bowie design to be. The Puma Bowie knife has a 6 ½-inch blade but up to 8-inches is acceptable in my book.
STAG HANDLE MATERIAL
To add a little classy twist to the Puma SGB Bowie Commando Stag knife is the imitation stag handle. Due to the trend of using antlers for dog chewie’s (of which my wife heavily invests in for our dogs) the price of stag horns has risen. Due to the increase in his stag material, Bob Carpenter, the owner of Puma SGB begin researching ways to make a synthetic stag handle. In his search he decided on Polyoxymethylene (POM) which is also know as Delrin. POM has been around for over 50 yrs.
He didn’t want to make a phony looking handle so by chance things clicked one day while he was looking at the sheds of a big bull that his hunting partner found while they were elk hunting in the Commando Basin in Colorado. Hence the name Commando slipped into the nomenclature. The Commando Stag knife handle material is used exclusively on Puma SGB and High Country Knives
So in case you have an upcoming duel scheduled or better yet, you just want to put a Bowie knife on display in your man cave, check out the Puma SGB Bowie Commando Stag knife. It’s a nice-looking knife.
About Tom Claycomb
Tom Claycomb has been an avid hunter/fisherman throughout his life as well as an outdoors writer with outdoor columns in the magazine Hunt Alaska, Bass Pro Shops, Bowhunter.net and freelances for numerous magazines and newspapers. “To properly skin your animal you will need a sharp knife. I have an e-article on Amazon Kindle titled Knife Sharpening for $.99 if you’re having trouble”
Is there going to be a second part to this article that contains the actual review after the above well presented history lesson?
Wasted my time reading a non review of the knife.
I have an original I bought in southern California in 1969, best knife ever and it is NFS at any price.