Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Jim Bowie: The Worst Texan
Aired: 2020-05-28
Duration: 01:07:24


=== Guaranteed Human Podcast (02:28) ===

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[00:02:15]  This is the story of Jim Bowie of the Bowie Knife.
[00:02:19]  Part two behind the bastards is Robert Evans, the podcast of bad people.
[00:02:23]  Talk about him.
[00:02:24]  Co-host Billy Wayne Davis.
[00:02:26]  Hey, everybody.

=== The Sandbar Fight Story (14:48) ===

[00:02:29]  Billy, I have learned that you don't actually need to order words in any meaningful way.
[00:02:34]  If you just make sure all of the important words are kind of jumbled up into a salad, people tend to get what you're saying.
[00:02:40]  So you say them with the right emotion.
[00:02:41]  You're damn right.
[00:02:42]  Yep, yep, yep.
[00:02:44]  So why even have grammar?
[00:02:46]  That's the question.
[00:02:47]  And the answer is there's no reason to have grammar.
[00:02:50]  Yes, there is.
[00:02:51]  And it's cowardly.
[00:02:53]  I love grammar.
[00:02:54]  This is upsetting me.
[00:02:56]  So there are raisins.
[00:02:58]  No.
[00:03:00]  Yes, probably.
[00:03:01]  So in our last episode, we talked about the famous sandbar fight, which is really just a giant shit show and probably would have been pretty funny to watch.
[00:03:10]  It was hilarious to listen about.
[00:03:12]  Yeah, up until that guy got his gut spilled all over the sandbar.
[00:03:16]  It was pretty funny.
[00:03:17]  I still thought that was that part.
[00:03:19]  I mean, you know what you're getting into.
[00:03:21]  You know, in some fairness, Jim Bowie is a monster because of the slave stuff.
[00:03:25]  In that fight, he did say, don't shoot at me, you rascal.
[00:03:29]  Like, he gave him proper warning, and that guy kept shooting at him.
[00:03:34]  He did.
[00:03:37]  And that is the general rule.
[00:03:38]  If somebody has a giant knife and you're going to shoot at them, you best deal with them real fast with your gun.
[00:03:45]  Because if you don't, they've got a real big knife and they'll be angry at you.
[00:03:49]  That is, I had a, my middle school basketball coach told me he carried a 12 gauge in Vietnam because an M16 just pissed him off.
[00:03:57]  And I was like, okay, well, that's, we're a basketball practice, but that's good to know.
[00:04:03]  That's really not helpful in any part of my life right now.
[00:04:06]  But thank you for scaring a child.
[00:04:09]  Yeah.
[00:04:09]  And that information has always stuck with me.
[00:04:14]  Yeah, I mean, in the days before body armor was common in particular, stopping power was really.
[00:04:19]  Anyway, that's just neither here nor there.
[00:04:21]  He's not wrong.
[00:04:22]  He's not wrong.
[00:04:23]  If you want to stop a man, it doesn't get much better than a 12-gauge shotgun.
[00:04:28]  Unless you have a gigantic knife like Jim Bowie.
[00:04:32]  He may have had that too.
[00:04:33]  He probably did.
[00:04:35]  Now, when we left our friend Jim, he had just disemboweled a man during an argument and been shot several times.
[00:04:42]  And because the United States...
[00:04:44]  He's my friend.
[00:04:44]  He's not my friend.
[00:04:45]  No, he's not.
[00:04:46]  Because the United States has not changed at all since those days, this made him suddenly gigantically famous.
[00:04:52]  And he became a living legend of the Wild West, like Wyatt Earp or Davey Crockett, or I have to assume based on his name, Grizzly Adams.
[00:04:59]  And I refuse to look up who Grizzly Adams was, so don't tell me if I'm wrong.
[00:05:03]  He took pictures, I think.
[00:05:05]  I think he fought grizzly bears with his bare hands because he had to defend orphanages.
[00:05:10]  That's my head canon for Grizzly Adams.
[00:05:12]  His brother was good at taking pictures.
[00:05:14]  Probably.
[00:05:15]  Ansel.
[00:05:16]  Yep, Ansel and Grizzly.
[00:05:18]  So once he'd healed from the sandbar fight, Jim Bowie re-entered polite society as a celebrity.
[00:05:24]  The eyes of the nation followed him as he traveled through the old west and got into even more fights.
[00:05:29]  Now, most of the fighting credited to Jim Bowie never happened.
[00:05:32]  And it's very possible that he never killed another person with his knife again.
[00:05:35]  But there are, of course, numerous stories you can find about him getting into fights and killing two or three armed men with his gigantic knife.
[00:05:42]  And almost all of these are tall tales, you know?
[00:05:45]  Yeah, once you're famous for stabbing a guy to death, there's going to be a lot of other stories of you stabbing guys to death, even if you never stab another guy to death.
[00:05:52]  That's just America.
[00:05:53]  It's Keith Richards.
[00:05:55]  Yeah.
[00:05:56]  Yeah, he doesn't do as many drugs as you'd think, but he got the reputation and it's just stuck with him.
[00:06:02]  Well, that's what in his book he said, yeah, I just never corrected anyone.
[00:06:06]  No, and why would you?
[00:06:07]  Exactly.
[00:06:08]  Yeah.
[00:06:09]  Yeah.
[00:06:12]  It's all about personal branding.
[00:06:13]  And Bowie knows how to brand himself well.
[00:06:16]  So, yeah, he didn't probably, it's probable that he never killed another human being with his knife, but he continued to kill the shitload of people.
[00:06:26]  Don't worry about that, Billy.
[00:06:28]  He kept killing people.
[00:06:30]  That did not stop.
[00:06:31]  His brother John later wrote that after recovering from the sandbar fight, quote, Jim felt as though he had not been well used or properly treated by some of his political friends.
[00:06:40]  And this, John Bowie says, is why Jim went to Texas.
[00:06:44]  Now, in writing this, he left out about a year or so worth of crimes that he and Jim both committed.
[00:06:49]  So like the kind of frontier story that his brother tells is that like Jim got betrayed by some of his political friends and so he went to Texas and he leaves out like what actually happened.
[00:07:00]  And what actually happened is that for the next year or so after the sandbar fight, he got back into conning people over land.
[00:07:08]  So basically he would travel all across the frontier, buy up tracts of land or purchase options to buy up tracts of land and then he would sell that land to the highest bidder, hopefully for a profit.
[00:07:20]  Now this is called land speculation and it's not illegal, but it was kind of slower than Jim Bowie was comfortable with.
[00:07:27]  So we started forging options and land deeds and selling those too.
[00:07:31]  Now this is outright theft because he was just lying about land that he had no claim to, selling it to people and pocketing the money.
[00:07:37]  But the internet didn't exist back then and people usually weren't fast enough to catch him.
[00:07:42]  Now Jim went towards quite a lot of effort to affect these forgeries, even hiring actors to pretend to be landowners so he could then convince buyers that he was this person's representative so he could sell them land that he had no right to.
[00:07:53]  So these were pretty elaborate cons.
[00:07:55]  Wow.
[00:07:56]  Yeah.
[00:07:57]  Well, he had to have gotten caught.
[00:07:59]  He got constantly, constantly.
[00:08:01]  He wasn't good at hiding it.
[00:08:02]  People were just dumber back then and there was no internet.
[00:08:05]  Yeah, and he was like, I'm going to need an accomplice.
[00:08:07]  Yeah, that's exactly.
[00:08:09]  And he did need an accomplice, and his accomplices were usually Congress.
[00:08:16]  Yeah.
[00:08:17]  So he had friends in Congress who would help him basically by like pushing the local banks and stuff to recognize these deeds and stuff that he was bringing forward.
[00:08:29]  And eventually he decided the best way for him to continue his scams and make a bunch of money was to run for a local congressional seat in Louisiana to basically get in power himself.
[00:08:39]  And he worked at a deal with one of his friends who was already in Congress to basically take up that guy's seat once his term ended and run in the next election.
[00:08:46]  But then his friend decided to run for re-election again, and Bowie got angry at him.
[00:08:50]  And this is what his brother referred to as him not being properly treated by political friends.
[00:08:56]  So the congressional election that year actually went against his buddy and probably would have gone against Bowie.
[00:09:02]  And he was left without any allies in Congress and without any way of easily continuing to swindle Rubes into buying land he didn't already own.
[00:09:09]  Over the course of 1828, all of Jim's many schemes collapsed, one after the other, leaving him at risk of becoming destitute, or at least if he'd actually bothered to pay any of the debts he'd accrued.
[00:09:20]  The book Three Roads to the Alamo gives a good summary of the actual scale of the con Bowie was trying to work, and it's enormous.
[00:09:27]  Quote, he had made a stunningly bold play at exploitation in all laying fraudulent claim to 80,000 acres in Arkansas and between 73,000 and 80,000 more in Louisiana.
[00:09:40]  Oh my God.
[00:09:41]  If he had succeeded, he would have been whole or part owner of 250 square miles of bayou and riverfront property and possibly another 200 square miles and 188 other Arkansas claims he had withdrawn, making him the largest landowner in the region and in his time, very possibly the largest private landholder in the United States.
[00:10:00]  So he would have been a millionaire if he'd succeeded in this, but he failed and now he was all but broke by the end of 1828.
[00:10:07]  So that's what leads him to Texas is he has failed in a series of incredibly ambitious land cons.
[00:10:15]  He winds up broke and Texas is the best shot he has at getting a bunch more free land.
[00:10:22]  Yeah.
[00:10:24]  Yeah.
[00:10:24]  I didn't think it was going to be a peer of heart thing.
[00:10:28]  No, no.
[00:10:29]  So, and this is another part that's interesting to me.
[00:10:32]  Mexico's government in my Texas history classes was always portrayed as cruel and oppressive at worst and kind of like absentee at best.
[00:10:41]  And I later learned that one of the many, one of the main reasons why white colonists hated the Mexican government was that slavery was illegal in Mexico.
[00:10:49]  This was a part of it, but also the Mexican government didn't really stop a lot of these white people from bringing in their slaves.
[00:10:56]  They wanted Americans to move in because they had a lot of empty land and they needed people to kind of like hold it down and cultivate it and provide a tax base and stuff.
[00:11:05]  So a lot of them looked the other way at forced human bondage.
[00:11:09]  But it was still more difficult to keep slaves there.
[00:11:14]  But this was kind of overwhelmed by the fact that Mexico wanted settlers badly enough that they were willing to give huge amounts of land to anyone who was willing to pretend to be Catholic and agree to obey Mexican law.
[00:11:25]  So for that small price, if you became a non-citizen settler in Texas, you get 177 acres to farm on and a whole league, 4,428 acres to graze your cattle on.
[00:11:36]  Even more land, up to 11 leagues, could be purchased for a dirt cheap price if the buyer was willing to become a Mexican citizen.
[00:11:44]  So Jim Bowie, brother.
[00:11:45]  I would do that now.
[00:11:47]  Well, no, I wouldn't do that for Texas land.
[00:11:49]  I mean, I know Texas too well.
[00:11:51]  Yeah.
[00:11:52]  Exactly.
[00:11:53]  No, no, I'm talking about mescalate.
[00:11:55]  Yeah, I'd do that for part of Mexico for sure.
[00:11:57]  Yeah, no, no, fuck, no, I do not want to go live in Texas.
[00:12:00]  No, So, Bowie packed up his unreasonably large knife and he rolled to Mexico.
[00:12:06]  His brother John unceremoniously noted that he, quote, disposed of his lands and Negroes before he set out, because buying and selling people was, again, nothing at all to the men of the Bowie family.
[00:12:17]  So, yeah.
[00:12:19]  Jim was 32 years old when he finally made it to Mexico.
[00:12:23]  And the most entertaining description I've heard of him in this period of time comes from historian J. Frank Dobie.
[00:12:28]  Quote, he found that reputation of his knife had preceded him.
[00:12:31]  He stood six feet tall and was all muscle.
[00:12:33]  He was pleasing in look, speech, and manner to both men and women, though it is said that he seldom smiled.
[00:12:38]  Letters and other writing by him and Rezin P. Bowie are in clear, sinewy English.
[00:12:42]  After he had been in Texas a while, he spoke Spanish as well as French.
[00:12:45]  He was not a ruffian, although he could be rough.
[00:12:48]  He comprehended the cutthroats and gamblers of Natchez while he dined in patrician houses on the hill or sang in the theater.
[00:12:54]  He was at home with bellowing alligators in the marshes, with Mustangs and Mustangers on the prairies, and with lawyers who would circumvent God.
[00:13:00]  In Texas, he fought Indians and Mexicans.
[00:13:03]  And Texans.
[00:13:06]  Yeah.
[00:13:07]  This is Dobie's article where he writes that is from 1957.
[00:13:12]  And you can tell that the attitudes on colonialism were a lot different by the fact that he just dropped and he fought Indians and Mexicans.
[00:13:18]  Yeah.
[00:13:20]  Yeah.
[00:13:21]  He's a good dude.
[00:13:22]  This is not inaccurate, but it does leave out kind of the brutality of what exactly Jim Bowie got up to.
[00:13:31]  Yeah, so here's how Jim's brother John describes this massacre of a bunch of Native Americans that Bowie commits, not long after getting to Texas.
[00:13:39]  Quote, during the few years he spent in Texas, he had many strange and hazardous adventures, probably the most notable of which was the following.
[00:13:47]  He and Rezin Bowie, with nine others, went in search of a silver mine about 200 miles northwest of San Antonio.
[00:13:52]  While on this expedition, they were attacked by about 150 Comanche Indians.
[00:13:56]  James, being well acquainted with the habits and manners of these savages, soon perceived that they were on trail of him and his little party for the purpose of murdering or robbing them.
[00:14:03]  So he availed himself of the first suitable place for defense.
[00:14:07]  Now, John describes this as natives wanting to rob him, he and Jim, but the reality is that he and like Jim and Rezin Bowie had moved into Native American territory and were trying to steal their shit, and they were carrying weapons.
[00:14:21]  He also describes the natives as Comanche, but they were Tawakone, Waco, and Caddo.
[00:14:26]  And by any definition of the term I've ever heard during my youth in Texas, these natives were acting in self-defense.
[00:14:32]  Because again, Bowie and his brothers were part of a posse of large armed men who had come onto their land to steal a bunch of silver.
[00:14:39]  Yeah, we'll just judge on their recent past history and I'm like, I'm going to go with the natives on this one.
[00:14:45]  Yeah.
[00:14:46]  Yeah, and what followed was probably might have been the bloodiest single fight of the period between white settlers and natives, at least in the history of Texas.
[00:14:56]  Good war.
[00:14:57]  The natives, you know, a large group of them surround the little fort that they built in the rocks and open fire.
[00:15:02]  They kill one of Bowie's men.
[00:15:04]  Bowie, the Bowie brothers, and their other men fire back repeatedly.
[00:15:08]  And this continues for literally days.
[00:15:11]  Like there's multiple days of gunfire.
[00:15:13]  And by the time it's all over, 50 to 60 natives are dead along with a lot of their horses.
[00:15:20]  And it's hard to say if the death counts in this are anywhere near accurate because like white settlers would lie a lot about how many people they killed in firefights, but also they had access to much better guns.
[00:15:31]  That said, given what happened at the sandbar fight, I don't know how much I trust the story of Jim Bowie about his accuracy in a gunfight.
[00:15:39]  I don't know.
[00:15:40]  It's hard to say.
[00:15:41]  But probably a lot of people did die because they were in like a three-day gun battle.
[00:15:45]  So whatever.
[00:15:46]  Yeah.
[00:15:46]  He murders a bunch of people.
[00:15:48]  Well, and he could have had like, it could have been like a like a regulator situation where he picks up some people that are handy with the steel because he realizes he's not.
[00:15:59]  And they're using rifles.
[00:16:01]  You know, these guys are like wielding like, you know, more accurate guns in this.
[00:16:05]  The gunfight, they're using handguns.
[00:16:06]  And like in this, they're kind of shooting with like hunting rifles, which are more accurate and have rifled barrels and stuff.
[00:16:13]  Most people will say 50 to 60 dead in the total fight.
[00:16:16]  It's impossible to know for sure, but...
[00:16:18]  Yeah.
[00:16:18]  Yeah.
[00:16:19]  So after the natives back off, Jim and his men flee back to San Antonio.
[00:16:26]  And he immediately petitions the local government for petition to raise an expedition against the Tawakone tribe because, you know, during this little invasion, he estimated they had 2,000 horses.
[00:16:37]  And he was basically like, I just got into a gunfight with these guys.
[00:16:39]  And I think if you give me enough men, I can steal all of their horses to sell them.
[00:16:46]  So he's a good dude, is what I'm saying.
[00:16:49]  Yeah, he's a hard worker.
[00:16:52]  So, yeah, we don't actually know if this expedition ever happened.
[00:16:56]  It may well have.
[00:16:57]  And Bowie is noted as having numerous other conflicts with Native Americans during this period, all of which kind of evolved around him rolling into their houses and stealing shit.
[00:17:08]  But they're usually called expeditions by like the historians.
[00:17:11]  Even in the 20th century, a lot of historians will call it like he raised an expedition.
[00:17:15]  And you're like, what was the expedition for?

=== Cholera and Lost Expeditions (06:06) ===

[00:17:17]  Well, he wanted to steal things from these people.
[00:17:21]  Valuables.
[00:17:22]  That's my looking for valuables that people have.
[00:17:26]  It's like even, you know, there's at least with like the Lewis and Clark expedition, there's like this, they were making maps and shit, right?
[00:17:33]  Like there's criticisms to make of it, but they were, they did write some maps.
[00:17:38]  Bowie is just taking things.
[00:17:40]  Yes.
[00:17:41]  Yeah.
[00:17:42]  Yes.
[00:17:43]  So Jim applied for and eventually received Mexican citizenship, which allowed him to buy 11 leagues of land.
[00:17:50]  He also succeeded in convincing a number of Mexican citizens to sign over their options for purchasing land to him as well.
[00:17:56]  And throughout this period, Jim Bowie continued to make the bulk of his money through an even mix of legitimate and fraudulent land sales.
[00:18:03]  So again, at any given point in time, if you're wondering, how is Jim making a living?
[00:18:08]  He's pretending he's selling fake land to people.
[00:18:12]  He's a real estate con artist.
[00:18:14]  That is Jim Bowie's secret to wealth.
[00:18:17]  How very modern of him.
[00:18:19]  Yeah, he has a lot in common with our president, aside from the fact that he was clearly willing to get into a fight.
[00:18:26]  Oh, he'll get his hands dirty for sure.
[00:18:28]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:18:29]  He's definitely a better person than the president.
[00:18:31]  He's also very good at spin.
[00:18:34]  Like calling stuff an expedition where you're like, no, man, you're raiding villages.
[00:18:40]  That's what we're doing.
[00:18:40]  Yeah, you're just raiding people.
[00:18:42]  You're stealing their horses.
[00:18:44]  Not expedition.
[00:18:47]  Although, this does make me think if I could get 50 to 100 people together and rob the Toyota dealership near me, we could just call it an expedition to get free land cruisers.
[00:18:58]  Or a dealership.
[00:19:01]  You could call it an expedition to get expeditions.
[00:19:04]  Yeah, yeah, but I feel like we'd be doing Ford a favor by taking expeditions away.
[00:19:09]  I know, as I was saying, Ford would be like, someone got them.
[00:19:13]  Someone came and took them, you guys.
[00:19:15]  No, I really want to get down to an expedition.
[00:19:18]  That's what we ought to do.
[00:19:20]  Just rebrand shoplifting as an expedition.
[00:19:25]  So during this time, Jim Bowie became friends with the Mexican governor of Texas, a guy named Veramindi.
[00:19:31]  And he worked at a deal with Verramendi by which he could marry the governor's daughter.
[00:19:36]  So he signed a dowry with the Verramindi family, promising to pay his wife more than $15,000 in money and property that he absolutely did not have.
[00:19:45]  He listed as collateral the fraudulent properties in Louisiana and Arkansas that he'd never actually owned in the first place.
[00:19:52]  But he basically conned this governor into letting him marry his daughter, and then he immediately borrows $750 from his new family-in-law to take his new wife on a vacation to New Orleans.
[00:20:04]  All right, I'm going to give you some money.
[00:20:07]  Can I have some money?
[00:20:09]  And your daughter.
[00:20:12]  So Jim and his new wife were married on April 25th, 1831.
[00:20:16]  She was 19 years old, and he was 35 years old, although he listed his age as 30 on the marriage certificate.
[00:20:24]  Weird.
[00:20:25]  Very weird.
[00:20:26]  Just a little vain.
[00:20:28]  He's just a little vain.
[00:20:28]  He's trying to lie about your age on one that's technically legal.
[00:20:33]  I mean, that makes me think if he's lying about his age, maybe her age was not actually 19.
[00:20:38]  I don't know.
[00:20:38]  Fucking her age wasn't actually.
[00:20:40]  I don't know.
[00:20:40]  This is a different time.
[00:20:42]  It's entirely possible he actually thought he was 30.
[00:20:45]  Again, not a lot of official government documents about when you came into the world at this point.
[00:20:51]  And he's taken several guns to the head at this point, too.
[00:20:55]  Yes, he's been hit in the head a number of times.
[00:20:58]  And remember, his mom only taught him the alphabet.
[00:21:01]  So numbers, probably not Jim Bowie's strong suit.
[00:21:04]  No.
[00:21:07]  So, yeah, and a big part of why he got married seemed to be that getting hitched to a Mexican or getting hitched to anyone at all entitled him to another 4,000 acres from the government.
[00:21:18]  And since his wife was a rich girl, he was also entitled now to live at the Veramendi house, which was basically a palace because he's the governor of Texas.
[00:21:28]  Now, the sources I have read all tend to agree that he was legitimately in love with his wife and that the Veramendi family treated him as a son.
[00:21:37]  I have found no evidence to discount this, so I kind of have to assume that this was in fact the case, even though given all of the scams he got up to and the fact that he lied about the money he had to get a dowry, I'm very hesitant to give Bowie credit for anything, but I don't know.
[00:21:52]  I have no evidence that he didn't truly care for this woman or for his adopted family.
[00:21:57]  So I got to say that.
[00:22:00]  And there's definitely evidence that the Veramendi family really cared about Jim.
[00:22:05]  He was, quote, furnished with money and supplies without limit and was basically got to live as a rich boy for a while.
[00:22:11]  Since he no longer needed to work, he gave up his land conning and spent several blissful years living in a palace and occasionally going out on expeditions to steal gold and silver from Native people, mainly just for fun.
[00:22:24]  I was going to say, that's just like, it sounds like he just likes to go L. Ron Hubbard style gold hunting expeditions, but with a higher body count.
[00:22:36]  That we know of.
[00:22:37]  That we know of.
[00:22:38]  He was on one of these trips getting into gunfights with Native Americans when his wife, their two children, and his father and mother-in-law all died horrifically during a cholera outbreak.
[00:22:49]  So he's just like out camping and his whole family is wiped out by cholera in the space of a few days.
[00:22:55]  Which fucks him up, right?
[00:22:57]  That's hard to deal with.
[00:22:59]  Your whole family dying at the same time.
[00:23:01]  I feel like most people would have a little bit of trouble with that.
[00:23:05]  And a lot of sources will claim that this is when Jim began to drink heavily.
[00:23:09]  You know, he'd always had a tendency to party a little hard sometimes, but kind of after this point, you see him increasingly sort of sinking into straight-up alcoholism.
[00:23:18]  Probably change the way he drank.
[00:23:20]  Yeah.
[00:23:21]  Yeah, yeah, that seems fair to say.

=== From Addiction to Acceleration (04:45) ===

[00:23:24]  If you want to protect your family from cholera, the FDA guarantees that all of these products and services will render them immune.
[00:23:31]  So you can drink any kind of ditchwater you want.
[00:23:33]  Just get out there, buy some products, and go suck it up ditchwater.
[00:23:37]  Here's a product.
[00:23:43]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:23:47]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:23:51]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:23:53]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:23:57]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:24:01]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:24:02]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:24:05]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:24:07]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:24:11]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:24:13]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:24:15]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:24:17]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:24:20]  They said, oh, hell no.
[00:24:22]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:24:24]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:24:29]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:24:30]  Trust me, babe.
[00:24:31]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:24:41]  I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:24:47]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:24:54]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:25:00]  From power to parenthood.
[00:25:02]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:25:06]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:25:08]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:25:10]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:25:15]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:25:21]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:25:24]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:25:30]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:25:32]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:25:35]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:25:43]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:25:49]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:25:54]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:25:59]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:26:09]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:26:14]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:26:17]  He related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:26:20]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:26:22]  That's so funny.
[00:26:23]  Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:26:32]  Say you love me.
[00:26:35]  You know I.
[00:26:36]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:26:43]  What's up, everyone?
[00:26:44]  I'm Ago Mode.
[00:26:45]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:26:53]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:26:56]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:27:00]  I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:27:05]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:27:07]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:27:11]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:27:16]  Yeah.
[00:27:17]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:27:20]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:27:21]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:27:29]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:27:32]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:27:39]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:27:41]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:27:42]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:27:44]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:27:53]  We're back.
[00:27:54]  I hope you're all enjoying all this ditch water.
[00:27:58]  It's good stuff.
[00:27:59]  Keep buying the products.
[00:28:02]  I don't know.
[00:28:02]  Sometimes this is where we go.
[00:28:06]  This is the joke that I made.
[00:28:07]  And now we're returned.

=== Bowie's Clusterfuck Situation (15:01) ===

[00:28:09]  And it's time to talk about Jim Bowie some more.
[00:28:11]  I'm so sorry.
[00:28:12]  So, it's debated by historians just how much the deaths of Jim's family influenced his drinking.
[00:28:19]  And it's also debated how much of a drunk he was.
[00:28:21]  A lot of very pro-Texas types will argue that there's no real evidence that he had a problematic history with alcohol.
[00:28:28]  I don't think this is true.
[00:28:30]  And it seems like most of the good historians, even the ones who are going to see him as a little bit of a hero, disagree with this.
[00:28:38]  Historian William C. Davis notes that after his family's death, quote, for the first half of 1834, Bowie largely wandered and may have surrendered to drink more than he should as he tried to regain his personal and financial balance.
[00:28:49]  His old temper flared again and there were fights.
[00:28:52]  After one supposed brawl in San Antonio, he asked a friend why he had not come in to help in the scuffle.
[00:28:57]  The man answered that, so far as he could tell, Bowie had been in the wrong in the encounter.
[00:29:01]  Don't you suppose I know that as well as you do, replied Bowie.
[00:29:05]  That's just why I needed a friend.
[00:29:06]  If I had been in the right, I would have had plenty of them.
[00:29:11]  He's not wrong.
[00:29:13]  No, he's not.
[00:29:13]  I love that, though.
[00:29:15]  He's not right either.
[00:29:16]  That is some good frontier logic.
[00:29:20]  Yeah.
[00:29:21]  So he spent most of the next year engaged in a series of land speculation schemes because again, like he's a rich boy for a while, but when his rich family dies, he doesn't inherit their money, right?
[00:29:31]  Because he's like the son-in-law.
[00:29:33]  So now he's back on his own again.
[00:29:36]  And unfortunately for him, the Mexican government had grown increasingly concerned about the fact that it had been giving away huge chunks of Texas to Americans.
[00:29:44]  These men often flouted the laws of Mexico by, for example, bringing in slaves.
[00:29:48]  And in general, it became very clear that they had no real interest in being part of Mexico.
[00:29:53]  So Mexico began to crack down and restrict the kind of speculation and sale of land that Bowie engaged in.
[00:29:59]  Now, luckily for Jim, right at about this period of time, a fellow named Santa Ana succeeded in becoming the dictator of Mexico in all but name.
[00:30:08]  And like any good authoritarian, he set right to work clamping down on opposition to his regime, largely by shutting down local militias and ordering them to send him their guns.
[00:30:18]  Zacatecas, which is one of the states in Mexico, rebelled and it was brutally crushed.
[00:30:22]  The whole situation resulted in a huge amount of unrest in other Mexican states, and we're not going to be able to detail all of it here.
[00:30:28]  The short of it is that the capital of the Mexican state that Texas was in, a city called Montclova, decided that they needed to raise money to get a militia in their own defense from Santa Ana, and they did this by opening up a huge amount of land for purchase.
[00:30:43]  Since Bowie had been the governor's son-in-law, he was given the job of disbursing and selling all of this land.
[00:30:48]  And since he was corrupt as all hell, he basically took a bunch of bribes for this.
[00:30:52]  And he also got a huge chunk of that land himself.
[00:30:55]  And by the time all of the chips had landed and all the land was sold, he owned more than a million acres.
[00:31:01]  Now, this is a lot of land.
[00:31:04]  That's sick.
[00:31:06]  Much.
[00:31:07]  Even in Texas, that's a lot of fun.
[00:31:09]  Yeah.
[00:31:10]  And basically, once Santa Ana heard that like the capital of one of his own states had given away this much land to a bunch of white people to raise a militia to defend themselves from him, he was like, fuck this shit.
[00:31:21]  And he declared the whole sale null and void, which effectively wiped out Jim's entire fortune.
[00:31:28]  So Santa Ana sent an army up to Montclova to crack down on all of this blatantly criminal land speculation.
[00:31:33]  And Jim Bowie and his friends like showed up to like protest, and they were immediately arrested and jailed, but they succeeded in escaping and fleeing back to Texas.
[00:31:42]  Bowie made his way to Nacogdochez and became one of the loudest voices in the war party, the men who increasingly advocated the taking up of arms against Santa Ana's government.
[00:31:51]  I mean, the war party's pretty clear.
[00:31:54]  Yeah.
[00:31:55]  Yeah.
[00:31:55]  I think we should have one of those now where we know what you guys want.
[00:31:59]  They're not framing themselves as Texas independence advocates at this point.
[00:32:04]  They're framing themselves as against Santa Ana's dictatorship.
[00:32:06]  Like they're saying they want to return to the original Mexican Constitution before Santa Ana took power.
[00:32:11]  Like that's kind of where they are right now.
[00:32:14]  And a lot of people, because like there's a lot of Mexicans and white people who are like kind of all on the same side of this, and it's because a lot of those Mexicans like don't like Santa Ana.
[00:32:24]  And then there's folks like Bowie who kind of doesn't really care politically about what's happened.
[00:32:29]  He cares that Santa Ana screwed him out of his chance at becoming a millionaire.
[00:32:34]  So yeah, on July 13th, 1835, 100 citizens of Nacogdoches declared themselves a militia and they vote Jim Bowie to be their colonel.
[00:32:42]  Now he immediately, his first act as colonel is to rob a Mexican government storehouse of muskets.
[00:32:48]  And the government considered this to be him inciting violence, which is pretty fair way to be.
[00:32:54]  That's a good, that's a good way to call it.
[00:32:57]  Yeah, it's very different from me stealing, for example, Toyota land cruisers.
[00:33:01]  That's an expedition.
[00:33:02]  You know, that's not inciting violence.
[00:33:04]  Yes.
[00:33:05]  So Bowie had to flee to the United States to raise money and men to continue to make this revolution possible.
[00:33:13]  And he returned to Texas just in time for the first shots of the Texas Revolution to be fired on October 2nd, 1835.
[00:33:21]  Now, there were a lot of other guys involved, and I'm not going to, like, for one thing, Texas Revolutionary history isn't my favorite kind of history, so I'm not going to go into wild detail about this.
[00:33:31]  But yeah, there's a bunch of people, and at the beginning, they just kind of want to go back to the way things were before Santa Ana, and it gradually evolves into an independence movement for Texas to become an independent nation, right?
[00:33:43]  But it doesn't really start that way.
[00:33:45]  And it's a very democratic sort of movement that pops up.
[00:33:51]  So these guys are all voting.
[00:33:52]  Like, it's all guys.
[00:33:53]  Women can't vote, obviously.
[00:33:55]  Neither can enslaved people.
[00:33:57]  But the men, all the white men, all vote for their leaders.
[00:34:01]  And a guy named Stephen F. Austin is elected the commander of Texas's new army.
[00:34:07]  So by the time Bowie got back into Texas from his little sojourn in the United States, that army was about 500 men in size.
[00:34:14]  It continued to grow over the course of days, and Bowie was named a colonel once again and given command of a column of about 90 men.
[00:34:21]  And he was a pretty good military leader, which you might guess from the fact that he was just generally good at shooting people.
[00:34:27]  Well, killing people.
[00:34:28]  Well, that's what I was going to say.
[00:34:29]  He knew how to kill animals and people.
[00:34:33]  And like a lot of killing animals is the same.
[00:34:36]  It's the fucking sane.
[00:34:38]  When I started reading a lot of military strategy, I was like, this is unthinkable.
[00:34:42]  This is what this is.
[00:34:44]  Yeah.
[00:34:44]  And especially, like, these are not gigantic Napoleonic battles.
[00:34:48]  Like, again, the army's like 500 dudes.
[00:34:50]  Like, these are often confrontations between a few dozen people in the middle of nowhere, Texas, who like shoot at each other and like 20 people die and one side backs off first and it's a great victory.
[00:35:01]  You know, yeah, so and Bowie was a pretty good military commander.
[00:35:06]  Several weeks later, he led his men into battle against a Mexican army force at a place called Concepcion.
[00:35:12]  And the force that he winds up fighting is like double the size of his own army.
[00:35:15]  But he and his men win.
[00:35:16]  And this is like the first great rebel victory of the war.
[00:35:20]  Now, unfortunately, Stephen F. Austin was not a very good commander.
[00:35:23]  And the Army of Texas was not a particularly orderly army.
[00:35:27]  And a series of organizational and leadership failures stopped them from taking advantage of Bowie's victory.
[00:35:32]  And soon enough, they wound up in a kind of clusterfuck situation.
[00:35:37]  So what's important to understand is that men kept deserting and kept stepping down.
[00:35:40]  And eventually the army found itself having to hold another election to determine its commander.
[00:35:45]  There are so many fucking votes with the Texas Revolutionary Army over who should be in charge.
[00:35:51]  They hold them all of the goddamn time.
[00:35:52]  Every time something goes wrong, they're like, all right, who do we want to be in charge now?
[00:35:57]  Yeah, but I think they begot the Libertarian Party.
[00:36:00]  There's a big aspect of that to this.
[00:36:02]  And like the Libertarians, they can't make up their mind about a goddamn thing.
[00:36:06]  That's what it sounds like.
[00:36:08]  That's the exact metaphor I was using.
[00:36:10]  I was like, it just sounds like it's like the Libertarian Party.
[00:36:12]  We're like, hey, I don't like how you're doing stuff.
[00:36:15]  Change it.
[00:36:16]  So Bowie campaigns hard to be the commander of this army, and they hold a vote and he receives five votes.
[00:36:24]  And this is generally because people didn't really like him.
[00:36:27]  He was considered to be like a pretty good combat commander.
[00:36:29]  So individual people were willing to follow him in the battle.
[00:36:33]  But he was also like known to be, he was a guy with like a gigantic temper who was drunk a lot of the time.
[00:36:39]  He's a tough hang.
[00:36:40]  Tough hang.
[00:36:41]  Tough hang.
[00:36:42]  So he gets angry that he loses this vote and he resigns his commission and like announces that he's becoming a private again as kind of a fuck you to Stephen F. Austin.
[00:36:51]  And then he just leaves the army entirely and he travels to San Felipe where he meets with Sam Houston.
[00:36:56]  Now another election had been held recently and Houston had been made the major general in charge of all of Texas's armed forces.
[00:37:04]  So Austin was reassigned and the army now had no actual field commander.
[00:37:09]  So it had Houston in charge of it, but like nobody had been voted to actually lead it into battle.
[00:37:14]  And Bowie like basically tries to ingratiate himself into Houston so that he can hopefully get appointed to be in charge of the army.
[00:37:21]  But he can't really get a handle on his drinking.
[00:37:24]  And by the time he and Houston actually meet for the first time in San Felipe, he is, in the words of one attendee, dead drunk.
[00:37:31]  And Houston is kind of like carefully like, well, I'm not going to just appoint you in charge of the army.
[00:37:37]  Why don't you go back and the whole army will hold another vote?
[00:37:39]  And now that Austin's out, I'm sure they will elect you to be in charge of the army.
[00:37:44]  So still wasted, Jim Bowie drunkenly rides back to the army.
[00:37:48]  And he keeps right on drinking throughout the election.
[00:37:51]  He actually gets blackout hammered on the night of the vote.
[00:37:55]  And for some reason, his fellow soldiers decide to give the job to another guy.
[00:38:00]  I want to die.
[00:38:03]  Reading historians talk about this, it's really funny because they'll often be like, it's peculiar that they didn't vote for Bowie despite his good combat performance.
[00:38:10]  And I was like, well, because they saw he was wasted every time he wasn't in a gunfight.
[00:38:16]  And that's, I mean, you got to be a pretty bad drunk for other people, for other soldiers to be like, ah, that guy.
[00:38:23]  Yeah.
[00:38:23]  He drinks a lot.
[00:38:25]  Yeah, these guys are like patient zero for libertarianism.
[00:38:28]  There's literally no law because they're revolting against legal authority and they all have guns in the middle of nowhere.
[00:38:34]  And they're like, this guy is too much of a drunken ruin for us.
[00:38:41]  Yeah.
[00:38:42]  It's pretty cool.
[00:38:44]  So, yeah, he just doesn't do well in elections.
[00:38:48]  So he is, however, given command of another unit of several dozen men, and they perform well in a number of skirmishes against the Mexican army.
[00:38:55]  And again, as a rule, when he actually gets into combat, Jim Bowie does a really good job.
[00:38:59]  He's good at leading men in battle.
[00:39:00]  You got to give him credit for that.
[00:39:01]  That's his wheelhouse.
[00:39:03]  He does.
[00:39:03]  Yeah, that's how he grew up.
[00:39:05]  Yeah, if you want someone to help other people kill a group of strangers, Jim Bowie is your fucking man.
[00:39:10]  Yeah.
[00:39:11]  He's a good stranger killer.
[00:39:13]  Anything other than that, he's going to be drunk.
[00:39:16]  Yeah, he's not even good at land speculation.
[00:39:20]  He just does it all the time.
[00:39:22]  Yeah.
[00:39:23]  And I don't think he knows he's doing it.
[00:39:25]  We think he's in the blackout the whole time.
[00:39:27]  He's just wasted the whole time.
[00:39:29]  Yeah.
[00:39:30]  So at one point during the war along the San Antonio River, Bowie and his men heard a rumor that the general of the Mexican army was grazing his horses nearby.
[00:39:39]  And this wasn't Santa Ana yet.
[00:39:40]  This was like the Mexican army before Santa Ana comes up.
[00:39:43]  So they set out to like figure out where these horses are so they can either steal the horses or disperse the horde.
[00:39:49]  Because, you know, the herd, because that would do a lot of damage to the army.
[00:39:51]  You get rid of all their horses.
[00:39:53]  So while they're scouting around to try to find these horses, Bowie and his men capture a random Mexican dude who claims to know the guy who was tending the herd.
[00:40:02]  And he told Bowie that if they found that guy, they would be able to find the horses.
[00:40:06]  But Bowie isn't willing to listen to this.
[00:40:07]  He thinks this guy is lying and knows where the horses are, so he arrests the man instead.
[00:40:12]  And I'm going to quote from William C. Davis here.
[00:40:15]  He writes, quote, One of the volunteers, Placido Benavidez, suggested that they tie the man, put a rope around his neck, and raise him by a tree branch, strangling him until he agreed to talk.
[00:40:25]  There was nothing surprising in that for Benavidez.
[00:40:27]  He was one of the Ricos, the wealthy landed local aristocracy, like the Veramendes, the family that Bowie married into, who felt an ancestral cultural contempt, or at best disdain, for the Pabres, the poor.
[00:40:38]  Thus, for Benavidez, there was no dishonor in torturing a peon for information, especially if he was working for the enemy.
[00:40:44]  Bowie, who came from an entirely different culture that generally frowned upon such brutality, agreed to the suggestion.
[00:40:50]  Perhaps his marriage into the Veramendis had brought him not just family affluence, but also family attitudes.
[00:40:55]  The brutality, once commenced, almost got out of hand.
[00:40:59]  Almost got out of hand.
[00:41:00]  Bowie ordered a fire started near the tree, and then some of his men hauled the unfortunate man up over it, adding the double torture of burning, or at least extremely uncomfortable proximity to the blaze, to the strangulation.
[00:41:13]  That's almost out of hand.
[00:41:17]  It was almost this is almost too much.
[00:41:20]  Yeah.
[00:41:20]  At the same time, eight of his company stood with cocked rifles besides the fire, pointing them at the poor man.
[00:41:26]  When the victim stopped kicking and appeared near unconsciousness, they let him down and threatened to shoot him.
[00:41:31]  He refused to talk, and the whole business was repeated twice more, even though one of Bowie's men rebelled at the cruelty and refused to participate further.
[00:41:38]  After the third time, the Mexican revealed the whereabouts of a herd of horses, although Bowie's one rebel suspected they may have belonged to the man himself instead of the enemy army, and he gave them up simply to save his life.
[00:41:49]  Even then, it seems, Bowie was not done, announcing that he intended to continue the torture the next morning, although what there was left to gain is a mystery.
[00:41:57]  Now, thankfully, he doesn't go through with continuing to torture this poor son of a bitch, but he does make the guy who'd refused to torture the prisoner guard him that night.
[00:42:05]  This is like a punishment because he's a dick.
[00:42:08]  Yeah.
[00:42:11]  Almost out of hand, Billy.
[00:42:13]  Almost.
[00:42:14]  Almost out of hand.
[00:42:15]  Do you think like some of his friends, like the next day, were like, see, dude, this is what we're talking about.
[00:42:19]  This is why we can't elect you in charge.
[00:42:22]  Because you keep doing this shit, Jim.
[00:42:25]  Nobody wants this guy in charge.
[00:42:27]  Like, we're all pretty racist, but come on, man.
[00:42:31]  But come on, dude.
[00:42:34]  So, the Texas Revolution had, as I said, started out against a revolution against Santa Ana, and a number of the early revolutionaries were, in fact, loyal to the Mexican Constitution.
[00:42:43]  Bowie himself professed a loyalty to it initially, but as the fighting went on, the cause of total independence took off, primarily among the white residents of the area.
[00:42:51]  And Bowie got on board with this train.
[00:42:53]  William C. Davis clearly believes that he did so out of a mix of patriotism and a healthy desire to get back all the land he'd stolen and then had stolen back from him.
[00:43:01]  I personally see Jim and his participation as an even mix of land grab and an addiction to violence, but whatever.
[00:43:09]  Honest men can disagree.

=== Divided Troops and Command (03:10) ===

[00:43:10]  In any case, Bowie's path through the war eventually led him to the Alamo in modern-day San Antonio.
[00:43:16]  Now, the town around it was then called Behar, and the fort of the Alamo contained a large number of field guns, which was actually the vast bulk of the artillery available to the Texan rebels.
[00:43:26]  As Santa Ana marched forth, because the army he had first sent in, they do eventually beat that army, so Santa Ana has to march up with a larger Mexican army, thousands and thousands of soldiers.
[00:43:35]  And at first they think he's just going to send a few men to attack the Alamo and they have plenty of guns to hold it, but then he sends like the bulk of his army there.
[00:43:42]  And they don't abandon it because all of the guns it has means that it's kind of critical to the war effort.
[00:43:47]  And to make a long and pretty boring story short, eventually Santa Ana's whole big-ass army winds up marching on the Alamo and the two men in charge of its defense were a guy named Colonel William Travis and Jim Bowie.
[00:43:58]  And by the way, Austin is in Travis County.
[00:44:01]  I was going to say, I know how all that comes together.
[00:44:04]  Yeah.
[00:44:04]  Yeah.
[00:44:05]  The joke I usually do when I'm in Austin is like, it's just two of the widest names you've ever heard of.
[00:44:11]  Just like, it's just somebody from around rock yelling at their kids.
[00:44:15]  Austin Travis, get in here.
[00:44:17]  Get in here.
[00:44:17]  Austin Travis, Jim Bowie, you get in here now.
[00:44:20]  Get in here.
[00:44:22]  Yeah.
[00:44:23]  Get y'all in here.
[00:44:24]  Yeah, it's it's it's uh good old home state of Texas.
[00:44:29]  It is, yeah.
[00:44:30]  So Bowie's rank of colonel had never really been real.
[00:44:33]  He'd been elected by militia and then sort of voted into or appointed into a couple of different command positions.
[00:44:39]  But his troops were like irregulars.
[00:44:41]  They were what was called volunteers.
[00:44:43]  While Colonel Travis was a man with an actual military experience and his troops were like regular trained troops with like they couldn't just leave if they wanted to.
[00:44:52]  Like Bowie's men were kind of there as volunteers.
[00:44:54]  They could fuck off at any point.
[00:44:56]  Travis's troops were like normal soldiers.
[00:44:59]  So yeah.
[00:45:02]  Once they arrive, you've got the military at the Alamo divided into like regular soldiers under Travis and irregulars under Bowie.
[00:45:09]  And Travis is ostensibly supposed to be in charge of the whole operation, but Bowie's men aren't willing to listen to this guy.
[00:45:15]  They trust the dude that they've been fighting with more than some like fancy colonel with his fucking army degree.
[00:45:21]  So the whole army holds yet another fucking election, and the two, the result of it leaves the two men sharing power.
[00:45:27]  Bowie stays in charge of the volunteers and Travis is in charge of the regular army.
[00:45:32]  And this is not a good state of affairs, having the army divided into two chunks who don't listen to each other or each other's commander.
[00:45:39]  Turns out that's actually not like an ideal way to army.
[00:45:43]  No, no.
[00:45:45]  Yeah.
[00:45:46]  As Davis writes, quote, no one was completely in charge.
[00:45:49]  Bowie would not obey Travis and Travis certainly would not yield to Bowie.
[00:45:53]  So the garrison divided into somewhat unfriendly camps.
[00:45:56]  On February 12th, Adjutant JJ Baugh saw that Bowie, availing himself of his popularity among the volunteers, seemed anxious to arrogate to himself the entire control.
[00:46:05]  So he's trying to like, he wants to take control.
[00:46:08]  But the next day, the situation becomes intolerable, precipitated mainly by Bowie unfortunately choosing his election as an event worth celebrating with a two-day drunk.
[00:46:16]  So they have this vote that splits them in two, and Bowie just spends the next couple of days wrecked out of his fucking head.

=== No One Was In Charge (03:58) ===

[00:46:21]  Robert, do you know what else celebrates a two-day drunk?
[00:46:24]  Me?
[00:46:25]  Yeah, who else?
[00:46:27]  Yeah, that's, I mean, Quip, the toothbrush people.
[00:46:30]  Probably.
[00:46:32]  For sure, they do.
[00:46:33]  That's why I like them so much.
[00:46:35]  And also the other products and services that support this podcast.
[00:46:38]  All big fans of being drunk for two straight days.
[00:46:41]  Yeah.
[00:46:47]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:46:51]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:46:54]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:46:57]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:47:00]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:47:04]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:47:08]  Oh my god, this is the same man.
[00:47:10]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:47:15]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:47:17]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:47:18]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:47:21]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:47:24]  They said, oh, hell no.
[00:47:25]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:47:28]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:47:32]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:47:34]  Trust me, babe.
[00:47:35]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:47:44]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:47:50]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:47:55]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:48:00]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:48:10]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:48:15]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:48:18]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:48:21]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:48:23]  That's so funny.
[00:48:24]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:48:33]  Say you love me.
[00:48:36]  You know I.
[00:48:37]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:48:45]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:48:51]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:48:57]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:49:04]  From power to parenthood.
[00:49:06]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:49:09]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:49:11]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:49:14]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:49:18]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:49:25]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:49:27]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:49:34]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:49:36]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:49:38]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:49:47]  What's up, everyone?
[00:49:48]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:49:49]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:49:56]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:50:00]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:50:03]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:50:08]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:50:11]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:50:12]  I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:50:15]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

=== Yellow Fever and Heroism (13:40) ===

[00:50:20]  Yeah.
[00:50:20]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:50:23]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:50:24]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:50:33]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:50:35]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
[00:50:41]  Just hang in there.
[00:50:43]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:50:44]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:50:46]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:50:47]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:50:57]  We're back.
[00:50:58]  Oh, what a day.
[00:50:59]  What a day it is.
[00:51:01]  Yeah, so Jim Bowie, they've just held this election.
[00:51:03]  They've split the control of the army in two, and Jim Bowie is just fucking celebrates this by getting shithouse wasted.
[00:51:10]  Like, he's never succeeded in being elected to command of the army, but he's gotten elected to command of half of an army, and that's that's worth celebrating.
[00:51:18]  So Drunk Bowie pretty much immediately let this new state of affairs.
[00:51:24]  Yeah, might as well be for a good reason.
[00:51:27]  So he's wasted in celebrating his control of half of an army when he sees a group of local bejarinos, like citizens of the nearby town, trying to flee the town with their property to avoid the fact that a battle is about to happen.
[00:51:40]  And he arrests these people for no real reason.
[00:51:43]  Now, at the same time, he also started randomly de-arresting people that the local judge had already sentenced for crimes.
[00:51:50]  There seems to have been no real rhyme or reason for any of this because he'd actually sat on the judge panel that had convicted some of these friends, these men, when he was sober, and then just decided to free them from jail at random.
[00:52:03]  When the judge complained about this, Bowie had his volunteers march through the main square of the town of Behar to intimidate him.
[00:52:09]  Unfortunately, Bowie and all of his men were wasted, as one volunteer described the marching in, quote, a tumultuously and disorderly manner, Bowie himself and many of his men being drunk, which has been the case ever since he has been in command.
[00:52:23]  So like he randomly decides to free a bunch of prisoners.
[00:52:25]  The judge complains and he has a drunken mob gather in the middle of town to yell at the judge.
[00:52:30]  All this sounds like fire.
[00:52:34]  Yeah, I do think, yeah, he's got all his killing done.
[00:52:37]  He's like, let's just mix it up a little bit.
[00:52:39]  Let's just get wasted, buddy.
[00:52:41]  So next, Bowie de-arrested a private in the regular army, a man that Colonel Travis had convicted of mutiny, for again, no real reason.
[00:52:48]  Oh, man.
[00:52:50]  This pissed Travis off, and he went on.
[00:52:52]  I bet he did.
[00:52:53]  I bet he did.
[00:52:55]  He wound up writing a letter to their governor, and Davey Crockett also wrote a letter, because Davey Crockett was there at this point, and he's really pissed at Jim Bowie's bullshit.
[00:53:03]  Now, in his letter, Travis complained that the situation was, quote, truly awkward and delicate due to the fact that his co-commander had been roaring drunk all the time and was turning everything topsy-turvy.
[00:53:14]  He ended the letter by stating he would remain at the Alamo for the sake of honor, but quote, I am unwilling to be responsible for the drunken irregularities of any man.
[00:53:22]  I mean, that's going to cost him his life.
[00:53:25]  That's what's going to happen.
[00:53:27]  They're all going to die.
[00:53:28]  Yeah.
[00:53:28]  Yep.
[00:53:29]  Yeah, they don't know it.
[00:53:30]  Yeah.
[00:53:31]  Maybe Jim does.
[00:53:32]  That's why he's stammered.
[00:53:34]  So the situation continued to deteriorate, and Bowie's drunkenness grew even more extreme.
[00:53:39]  His volunteer army turned into a multi-day-long keg party, and some of his men actually sold their rifles to buy liquor.
[00:53:46]  I like them.
[00:53:46]  They sound fun.
[00:53:48]  I'm not going to need this.
[00:53:49]  You know what?
[00:53:50]  I haven't used this whole damn time.
[00:53:52]  This, this thing.
[00:53:53]  This fucking thing.
[00:53:55]  So, one observer at the time reported most of the garrison was drunk.
[00:54:00]  Travis kept on complaining about this, and the fights between the two men soon degenerated into an utterly untenable situation.
[00:54:06]  Travis eventually had to leave the Alamo with his regular soldiers because he was afraid the two groups would start shooting at each other if they stayed together any longer.
[00:54:14]  But then on Valentine's Day, Jim Bowie sobered up, and we don't really know why.
[00:54:19]  He might have come to his senses, or he might have just ran out of liquor and guns to trade for liquor.
[00:54:24]  But as Davis writes, as quickly as it arose, the problem seemed to evaporate, and that was probably due to Bowie.
[00:54:30]  It is well known that he sometimes drank too much, recalled William W. Fontaine, who was one of the little children at Montville with Charles Travis.
[00:54:37]  But it is not so generally known how quickly he hastened to make the amends honorably, so that he soon came under the influence of as soon as he came out from under the influence of liquor.
[00:54:46]  On February 14th, Bowie sobered and apparently went on to see Travis and gave an apology, for immediately Travis and his command returned to San Antonio, and all signs of friction between the two disappeared for good.
[00:54:56]  Wow.
[00:54:57]  Yeah.
[00:54:58]  He's a charming guy.
[00:55:00]  I guess, I mean, that's real charming when you have to move an army because you're so drunk and then you go, hey.
[00:55:06]  Hey.
[00:55:07]  Hey.
[00:55:08]  Shit got wild, didn't it?
[00:55:10]  I apologize for that.
[00:55:12]  Are you still mad, or Lico?
[00:55:15]  In retrospect, I was drunker than you should be while commanding an army.
[00:55:19]  I see that now.
[00:55:20]  I see that.
[00:55:21]  It's clear to me now.
[00:55:23]  Also, can I borrow some money?
[00:55:24]  We need to get our guns back.
[00:55:27]  Yeah.
[00:55:27]  Now, other sources I've read suggest that the reason Bowie chilled out, maybe that he got sick with yellow fever right around this time.
[00:55:35]  He definitely got sick with yellow fever.
[00:55:36]  It just kind of is up to debate what that had an impact on.
[00:55:39]  And his illness was probably due to a combination of poor sanitary conditions at the Alamo and the fact that he'd been on a multi-week alcohol bender, which is bad for your immune system.
[00:55:49]  Whatever the truth, by the time the Battle of the Alamo started on February 23rd, Colonel Travis was back in the fort and Jim Bowie was confined to a sick bed, unable to command or fight.
[00:56:00]  And I'm not going to detail out the battle for the Alamo.
[00:56:02]  Everyone listening to this knows the broad strokes.
[00:56:04]  The Texans got wiped out.
[00:56:05]  They killed a lot of the besieging Mexican army, and that provided the Texan revolutionaries with a powerful rallying cry, yada yada, remember the Alamo, all that bullshit.
[00:56:13]  The actual reality of the battle is less glorious than what I was raised to believe in school.
[00:56:17]  You know, we were told that thousands upon thousands of Mexicans had been killed by the defenders.
[00:56:21]  That's almost certainly bullshit.
[00:56:24]  It is probably to say that they, on balance, fought competently and acquitted for themselves pretty well, but it was never a close fight, you know?
[00:56:32]  They were horribly outnumbered and outclassed.
[00:56:36]  Now, for some amount of time, it was DeRigueur for patriotic retellings of the story of the battle to invent a heroic end for all of the main figures.
[00:56:45]  You've got William Travis, you've got Bowie Crockett, you've got Jim Bowie.
[00:56:48]  All these famous guys are at this fight, and they all have to die heroic deaths if you're doing like the propaganda retelling of this, right?
[00:56:56]  Yeah, the mythos.
[00:56:57]  The most famous painting of Jim Bowie at all is him at the Alamo, leaping out of his sick bed and shooting a pair of Mexican soldiers with a brace of pistols that he's concealed under his bed.
[00:57:09]  And that's kind of like the picture that a lot of people like to portray him, like how he went out as.
[00:57:15]  I found a passage from 1957's Jim Bowie, James Bowie Big Dealer, which is an article about the man's life, that kind of gives you an idea of how his last days are portrayed by the pro-Bowie crowd.
[00:57:27]  For Bowie not to have his knife at the end would be unthinkable.
[00:57:30]  David Crockett had arrived before Bowie became critically ill.
[00:57:33]  In Colonel Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas, a farago of undetermined authorship that rings true to Crockett only in spots, is this passage.
[00:57:41]  I found Colonel Bowie in the fortress, a man celebrated for having been in a more desperate personal conflict than any other in the country.
[00:57:48]  He gave me a friendly welcome and appeared to be mightily pleased that I had arrived safe.
[00:57:51]  While we were conversing, he had occasion to draw his famous knife to cut a strap.
[00:57:55]  And I wish I may be shot if the bare sight of it wasn't enough to give a man of squeamish stomach the colic, especially before breakfast.
[00:58:01]  He saw I was admiring it and said, Colonel, you might tickle a fellow's ribs a long time with this little instrument before you'd make him laugh.
[00:58:09]  Now, this story never happened.
[00:58:12]  David Crockett never wrote this.
[00:58:14]  Crockett actually probably hated Bowie because we know he wrote a letter complaining about his behavior.
[00:58:19]  And the book that this is being quoted from was written by somebody else, just in Crockett's name, to capitalize on his legend.
[00:58:26]  And there is no evidence whatsoever that his famous knife was ever used, even as like a camp tool in the battle, especially since Bowie was too sick to get out of bed.
[00:58:35]  Yeah.
[00:58:37]  And it the task of trying to unravel exactly how Bowie died is difficult both because of the hero worship around him and because of the network of grifters that arose around the Battle of Alamo.
[00:58:48]  The most famous of them was Madame Candelaria, a woman who in her old age claimed to have been Bowie's nurse during the battle.
[00:58:55]  She made a sizable living and secured a pension from the state of Texas by providing patriotic Texans with heroic stories about how Travis, Bowie, and Crockett all died because she claimed she'd been there.
[00:59:05]  There's no evidence that this is true, and her stories about what happened at the Alamo changed repeatedly over the years of her life.
[00:59:11]  I found a good article, though, in True West magazine that's attempted to collate all the different rumors of Bowie's end.
[00:59:19]  Quote: According to stories spread after the battle, Bowie died either as a murder victim, a suicide, a battle casualty, or a victim of sadistic torture.
[00:59:27]  He may have died fighting from his sickbed, helplessly in his sick bed, or of an illness before Mexican soldiers did the job.
[00:59:33]  He may have been killed by swords, bayonets, gunfire, or fire.
[00:59:36]  He may have died heroically or as a coward.
[00:59:39]  One of the first reports to Sam Houston after the battle reported that Bowie was killed while lying sick in bed.
[00:59:44]  Houston and others passed on this information, interpreting it to mean he had been murdered while sick in bed.
[00:59:48]  However, Houston changed the story two days later, writing, Our friend Bowie, as now was understood, unable to get out of bed, shot himself as the soldiers approached it.
[00:59:57]  An unidentified Mexican soldier expressed a different opinion in the April 15, 1836 edition of El Mosquito Mexicano.
[01:00:05]  He stated, The perverse and braggart Santiago Bowie died like a woman, almost hidden under a mattress.
[01:00:10]  Alamo survivor Susanna Dickinson-Hannig waited on the subject 38 years later.
[01:00:15]  She stated that Bowie was sick in bed, and when Mexican soldiers entered his room, he killed two of them with his pistols before they pierced him with their sabers.
[01:00:22]  Nothing in Hannig's statement indicates she actually witnessed this.
[01:00:25]  Perhaps the most horrifying tale of Bowie's death came in 1882 when William P. Zuber, who popularized the Alamo's famous Line in the Sand story, told the tale of a young Mexican Pfeiffer, Apolinaro Saldinaga.
[01:00:36]  Poland, Zuber claims, witnessed Bowie brought out alive on a cot and placed before a Mexican captain.
[01:00:42]  Bowie delivered a short patriotic speech to the captain, who became so outraged that he ordered his soldiers to cut Bowie's tongue out and hurl the still-living man onto the Texas Texan dead's burning funeral pyre.
[01:00:52]  So these are the different stories.
[01:00:55]  We will never know which of these is true.
[01:00:58]  We do know pretty well that he had yellow fever.
[01:01:01]  So one thing we can all safely assume is that however James Bowie went out, he died with the symptoms of advanced yellow fever, which are uncontrollable diarrhea and vomiting.
[01:01:11]  So that's that's that's the story.
[01:01:15]  Wow.
[01:01:16]  Wow.
[01:01:17]  Fitting into a frontier hero.
[01:01:19]  I mean, I just, I mean, I'm not super shocked because I assume everyone starting about 150 years ago back just had constant diarrhea.
[01:01:31]  So yeah, yeah, he was sick and yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:01:36]  But it sounds consistent that he was in bed.
[01:01:39]  Like both sides.
[01:01:40]  He was definitely in bed.
[01:01:42]  Seem to say he was in bed.
[01:01:43]  Some say like, ah, he's being real pussy about it.
[01:01:46]  And others say, no, he kind of fought, but he wasn't laying down.
[01:01:49]  Yeah.
[01:01:50]  It would have been hard for him to have done much fighting with the yellow fever.
[01:01:55]  It's pretty crippling.
[01:01:57]  So yeah, that's the story of old Jim Bowie.
[01:02:00]  That's.
[01:02:01]  I mean, I'll be honest, I never thought if you have a weapon named after you, your life was probably rough.
[01:02:12]  Yeah.
[01:02:13]  Yeah, not a lot of peaceful lives wind up with weapons named after them.
[01:02:19]  He was just a great diplomat.
[01:02:23]  No, he didn't like to argue.
[01:02:27]  Yeah, we probably should have a weapon named after Henry Kissinger, but I don't think there's any weapon system that's killed as many people as Henry Kissinger.
[01:02:34]  So, yeah, I guess so.
[01:02:36]  War crimes.
[01:02:37]  Isn't that what it is?
[01:02:38]  Yeah.
[01:02:39]  Yeah, we could just name the concept of bombing people the Kissinger.
[01:02:46]  Yeah.
[01:02:47]  Yeah.
[01:02:48]  So that is the motherfucking story of James Bowie.
[01:02:52]  How are you feeling about old Jimbo?
[01:02:54]  Jimbo.
[01:02:56]  There was more Louisiana than I had anticipated.
[01:03:01]  A lot of that.
[01:03:02]  Which makes more sense about who and how he gets that name.
[01:03:07]  I mean, but I like, I think my favorite part is just how everyone in his family capitalize on his fame.
[01:03:14]  Yeah.
[01:03:15]  Yeah, they would continue doing that well after his death.
[01:03:19]  Because it was easy and made him a lot of money.
[01:03:23]  Such an American thing, too.
[01:03:25]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:03:26]  They're the first duck dynasty is the Bowie family.
[01:03:30]  Well, and I can't, I keep thinking of, I've been to Buffalo Bill's grave site in several different locations.
[01:03:38]  So I keep thinking of that kind of stuff, too, where it's like, oh, it is.
[01:03:41]  It's like Jesse James hit out and everything.
[01:03:43]  Oh, you mean, you mean Wild Bill Hickok?
[01:03:45]  Yeah.
[01:03:45]  Yeah.
[01:03:46]  Okay.
[01:03:46]  Gotcha.
[01:03:46]  Gotcha.
[01:03:47]  Yeah.
[01:03:47]  No, not Buffalo.
[01:03:48]  Did I say the guy for like hooked up?
[01:03:49]  Yeah, those gears are.
[01:03:51]  Yeah, Wild Bill, sorry.
[01:03:53]  But yeah, I've been to his several of his graves, which always makes me laugh.

=== The Duck Dynasty Legacy (03:24) ===

[01:04:00]  That's like that kind of meet that happens.
[01:04:03]  Yeah, that's kind of what you get.
[01:04:06]  So, this has been the episode.
[01:04:07]  Billy, you got any pluggables you want to throw down?
[01:04:12]  Just find me on Twitter at Billy Wayne Davis or on Instagram at Billy Wayne Davis.
[01:04:19]  And I have a podcast out called Grown Local that is about the people and the communities that make up just who, where your cannabis comes from.
[01:04:28]  And the first season is about Eugene Oregon.
[01:04:31]  Check out Billy Wayne's cannabis podcast.
[01:04:34]  Pick up a buoy knife and follow us on behindthebastards.com and at BastardsPod on Twitter and Instagram.
[01:04:42]  And check out my new podcast, The Women's War, which is about people who aren't piece of shits like James Bowie and are cool.
[01:04:52]  So that's the episode, motherfuckers.
[01:04:56]  Wash your hands.
[01:04:58]  Goodbye.
[01:04:59]  Yeah.
[01:05:14]  10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
[01:05:17]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[01:05:18]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:05:20]  A shocking public murder.
[01:05:22]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[01:05:28]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[01:05:30]  Those are shots.
[01:05:32]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[01:05:34]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
[01:05:39]  Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:05:48]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:05:56]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:05:59]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:06:01]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:06:03]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:06:07]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:06:09]  Trust me, babe.
[01:06:10]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:06:14]  I got you.
[01:06:15]  I got you.
[01:06:20]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[01:06:24]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:06:28]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[01:06:35]  An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
[01:06:38]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
[01:06:41]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:06:50]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[01:06:56]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
[01:06:58]  You related to the Phantom at that point?
[01:07:01]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:07:03]  That's so funny.
[01:07:05]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[01:07:13]  Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:07:20]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:07:23]  Guaranteed human.