1 9 5 6 – 1 9 5 8 (USA)
78 x 25 minute episodes
From September 1956 to August 1958, families across America were tuned in to ABC on Friday nights for The Adventures of Jim Bowie, based on the real-life American folk hero and western frontiersman who invented the famous Bowie knife after an attack by a fierce grizzly bear in which his rifle jammed at a critical moment in the fight.
Against the backdrop of 1930s French-American New Orleans and backwoods Louisiana territory, Scott Forbes starred as wealthy young planter Jim Bowie.
Wielding a knife instead of a gun, Bowie forged the frontier, diligently pursued lawbreakers and battled social injustice in western adventures based on the book Tempered Blade by Monte Barrett.
A rugged adventurer, Bowie crossed paths with such famous and infamous historical figures as pirate and privateer Jean Lafitte, near-legendary bandit John Murrell, seventh US President Andrew Jackson, celebrated folk hero, frontiersman, soldier and politician Davy Crockett, painter John James Audubon, missionary, pioneer and conservationist Johnny Appleseed, actor, playwright and songwriter John Howard Payne, entrepreneur and philanthropist John McDonogh, physician, botanist and American statesman Joel Roberts Poinsett, and Juan Martin De Veramendi, vice-governor of Texas (then part of Mexico).
Jim Bowie
Scott Forbes
John James Audubon
Robert Cornthwaite
Rezin Bowie
Peter Hanson
Marie de Gravien
Joyce Vanderveen
Francois de Gravien
Paul Playdon