/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>1318590
Pre-civil war and the colonisation era in the US had the vast majority of knives come from the UK, France and Germany, where they'd generally be a re-purposed butcher knives of various shapes and sizes, commonly called the 'Trade Knife'. Which is an era of cutlery I'm interested in, despite not being american, those there sold all over the world on the rise of industrialisation in Europe.
Bowie's where a mix of Sheffield kitchen/butcher knives re purposed to make them a bit more stabby and borrowed a bit of their designs off the Spanish navaja blades- some made locally of course in the US when they could get steel of decent quality and they remained very popular for a long time.

So much so the Sheffield factories tooled up to make Bowies and shipped them out en-masse to meet the demand for big ol pig beater type knives that where picked up by anyone heading west. Another knife style which arrived after the Bowie was the Arkansas Toothpick, which is sometimes double edged, sometimes a single edge clip point and generally has larger guard to stop your fingers being chopped off (as much) when you're fighting bears, mexicans, drunks, poor losers in cards and indians.

Both the Bowie an Toothpick had a long old popularity in the military and militias of the civil war, never officially issued, but sometimes they'd run with what you brung