California Knife ?

[mojjax]

Wondering about this knife ? We use it in our kitchen for carving roasts , turkey , etc .
We got it in a box of utencils many years ago at a yard sale .

T.L PREFER
W.P. JACKSON
SHEFFIELD

Thanks for any info !

 

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[justine093]

from a knife newletter
"One marketing device the Sheffield cutlers employed to make their knives
more popular in the former colonies was to acid etch popular slogans on the blades. The knife typifies the bowies that
Sheffield supplied to the forty-niners racing West to make their fortune.
When the War Between the States erupted, the resourceful Sheffield cutlers
provided bowies with slogans that appealed to both sides of the conflict."

possibly?:
WILLIAM JACKSON & CO
Sheaf Island Works, Sheffield
c. 1850 - 1892


suggestion would be to google search "etched sheffield knife."
knives can be worth a great deal of money.
It appears alot of Sheffield manufacturers were making Bowie
knives in the mid to late 1800s.
It is a very nice knife!
good luck, can't wait to find out what it is!

 

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[Charlie P. (NY)]

To begin with, I am not a knife expert, but from observation, the knife look like it is meant for display only and hasn't been used as a hunting knife, or any other use.

I doubt that it was meant to be used for cutterly or carving.

The blade doesn't appear to have been sharpened. No obvious scratches in the polished finish.

A letter to Sheffield may breath life to this knife.

Sheffield is a large city, not a company. There have been hundreds of knife firms that have come and gone there.

A well forged knife is sharp from the get-go.

Modern knives are stamped and then ground, whole different process. A well cared for forged sword or knife need not show any signs of grinding, filing or stoning on the blade. That's abuse. The edge itself can be just a hair's widths.

I know, I pulled a 150 year old Kris out of wood sheath and didn't notice the sheath was split until the blood started dripping on the floor from my left hand - that I'd sliced to the bone without feeling it. SCARRY sharp and not a scratch on the damascus pattern right to the edge.

 

[DaChief]

Click on this link and scroll down to the California Bowie Knife to see a modern reproduction. Yours looks like the real deal. Originals, if yours is one, goes for big bucks. If it is original, you are the proud owner of a knife that could easily fetch a couple of grand or more if you sell it. Good find for you if you can authenticate it.

Jim

http://www.by-the-sword.com/acatalog/Bowie_Knives.html

 

[Bigcypresshunter]

Click on this link and scroll down to the California Bowie Knife to see a modern reproduction. Yours looks like the real deal. Originals, if yours is one, goes for big bucks. If it is original, you are the proud owner of a knife that could easily fetch a couple of grand or more if you sell it. Good find for you if you can authenticate it.

Jim

http://www.by-the-sword.com/acatalog/Bowie_Knives.html

Good research Chief.

California Bowie (KH2186) When the forty-niners went overland to the Gold Rush of California, most took along a Bowie knife to use on the trail, and for “social purposes,” if the need should arise. Some had a fancy side etch like this one: “Californian Bowie Knife”; it’s rare to find one these days.

The Bowie Knife
The Bowie Period in American History was a turbulent one. It was born on a sandbar on the Mississippi River near Natchez, Mississippi in 1827. A political duel became a free-for-all. James Bowie, who was an observer at the duel, was shot and stabbed through with a sword cane, but he managed to dispatch his major opponents with a Bowie knife, even though his wounds were so grave that his life hung by a thread for weeks afterwards. The infamous Sandbar Fight, as it was later called, took the imagination of the country by storm. Newspapers far and wide copied the stories from the Natchez papers and soon every man wanted a knife like Bowie's--a Bowie knife. American cutlers (many of them surgical instrument makers) and Sheffield, England cutlers began to make Bowie knives to fill the market demand. The Bowie Period only lasted about forty years -- from the Sandbar Fight to the end of the Civil War. When pistols got reliable and plentiful the size of the knife shrunk; by the 1870s and 1880s, the Bowie knife was used as a hunting knife much more than as a primary defense arm.

The Bowie was made in a period of hand labor; the industrial revolution had not touched the cutlery trades. All the work on the old knives was by hand, with an artisan's craft skills that were learned during a long apprenticeship to master forgers, grinders and cutlers.