TV Review: The Adventures of Jim Bowie

TV Review: The Adventures of Jim Bowie

Bowie

I watched several episodes of this 1950s television show via a Mill Creek DVD.  As you might have guessed, this series is a heavily fictionalized story about the famous land speculator and knife fighter, Jim Bowie, popularizer of the blade that bears his name.

The series is primarily set in Opelousas and New Orleans, Louisiana in the early 1830s.  (A time when the real Bowie had already moved to Texas.)  JIm rescues fair ladies and fights various badmen, usually culminating in him reluctantly using his famous knife to settle affairs.

The best thing about this series is the music, almost entirely choral arrangements by Ken Darby and the King’s Men.  They give a unique flavor to the show.

However, the music points out one of the less pleasant things about the series.  In particular the theme song’s line, “He fought for the rights of man.”

Two of the episodes I watched referenced the Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed into law by Andrew  Jackson.It authorized the U.S. government to negotiate with the Native American tribes of the Southeast to give up their native lands in exchange for federal reservations west of the Mississippi.  You may know it by the more poetic name, “The Trail of Tears”, a name never mentioned in the program.

In the episode “Osceola,”, Jim meets and bonds with the famous Seminole leader.  Although he admits that the natives are getting a raw deal, and saves Osceola from the army, he also advises his new friend that he should give up battling the removal to avoid more bloodshed.

The episode “Jackson’s Assassination” sees Bowie accompanying a Cherokee man to the president’s residence to see if his dishonorable discharge from the Navy on trumped-up charges can be reversed.  Jim and Andrew Jackson convince the lad that Jackson’s not an “Indian hater”, and get him restored to his rank so that he can convince the Cherokee people to accept the removal peacfully.

In both episodes, Jim Bowie is contrasted with open bigots, but behaves paternalistically towards Native Americans, and shows little interest in fighting for their overall rights, as opposed to helping out people he personally knows.

And then there’s the elephant in the room.  It’s the 1830s in the Deep South, how does the show handle the topic of slavery?  By not ever mentioning it.  While black people appear in bit parts as servants, their status and the economic system of the time goes completely unspoken.  Of course, this show was produced in the 1950s, a time when TV networks were extremely skittish about offending their white Southern viewers.  And it might have been going too far to have Jim Bowie come out against slavery, given that in real life he was a slave trader in league with pirates.

 

Overall:  While the writing is clever and there are some great turns by the character actors, the disjoint between the show’s heroic Bowie and the man he actually was gives me an uneasy feeling in the gut.  I can’t recommend it except as a starting point for discussion of historical revisionism and Hollywood’s whitewashing of those it wants to be heroes.