The Adventures of Jim Bowie (1956)
The Adventures of Jim Bowie is an American Western television series that aired on ABC from 1956 to 1958. Its setting was the 1830s-era Louisiana Territory. The series was an adaptation of the book Tempered Blade, by Monte Barrett. The series stars Scott Forbes as the real-life adventurer Jim Bowie. The series initially portrayed Jim Bowie as something of an outdoors-man, riding his horse through the wilderness near his home in Opelousas, where he would stumble across someone needing his assistance. He was aided by the Bowie Knife, his ever-present weapon. He designed it in the first episode, The Birth of the Blade.
Seasons & Episode
When Bowie goes to his dead Indian friend's home town to deliver the news to his father, he finds that the father has just been shot.
A wily Scotsman gets the better of Bowie on an important real estate deal.
A indentured servant, whose contract is purchased by Bowie, deludes an innkeeper that he is the master and Bowie the servant.
Bowie solicits the help of a former pickpocket and a former horse thief to defeat a gang of counterfeiters.
Bowie tries to purchase a lead mine, but the pacifist owner refuses to sell it to him if the metal will be used to make bullets.
Bowie risks his life to recover a stolen shipment of desperately needed smallpox vaccine.
When Bowie finds that he cannot purchase some land because the owners have just been swindled out of it, he decides to help them recover it.
Recovering from a gunshot wound in a fancy mansion, Bowie is asked by a young woman not to identify the person who shot him.
While on his way to inform the authorities of a plot to misuse the labor of prisoners, Bowie is trapped in a warehouse and attacked by a whip-wielding stranger.
When Bowie and an Indian friend make up a story to send an annoying acquaintance on a wild goose chase, it comes back to haunt them.
Bowie becomes suspicious when an elderly man dies abruptly on the night of his wedding.
Bowie uncovers a plot to increase the value of some land upriver by moving the state capital there.
In order to hide from a waterfront gang, Bowie has to pretend to be a prospective bridegroom at a French home.
Inside a doll he bought as a birthday gift, Bowie finds a clue to a homicide plot.
Bowie and his brother's fiancee are duped by swindlers claiming that a relative has been unjustly imprisoned in Mexico.
Bowie and his pirate friend Jean Lafitte, attempting to rescue a U.S. ambassador who has been captured by revolutionary forces in Mexico, take refuge in an inn at Christmastime.
When a hillbilly puts up his daughter as a stake in a poker game, Bowie goes along with the idea to teach him a lesson, and then decides to send her to a finishing school to become a lady.
When Jim Bowie is robbed, he learns that the man who robbed him is also wanted by an Indian tribe for murder.
An assassin after Bowie kills an innocent man instead, but that doesn't stop him.
Bowie tracks down an outlaw gang when he finds out that one of them is using his name.
When Bowie and his brother learn that the bank they own in New Orleans is being robbed, they try to keep the thieves from getting away by using the city's signaling cannon.
Bowie learns that foul play may be attempted at a concert arranged by his friend at the newspaper for composer John Howard Payne.
Now in Texas, Bowie encounters famous scout Deaf Smith while on the trail of an outlaw gang.
While negotiating with Mexican government officials to build a cotton mill in Texas, Bowie is attracted to the daughter of one of them.
Bowie gets a lead on the location of the lost silver mine of the Apaches, but both hostile Apaches and Mexican officials make it difficult for him to follow it up.
Bowie comes to the aid of naturalist Johnny Appleseed, who has been captured by criminals who think that the riches in the ground he talks about are buried treasure.
When Bowie solicits help from his cousin after being swindled by a group of good-natured hillbillies, he almosts gets the poor fellow married to one of them.
Bowie manages to get back across the border into Texas by signing on as an Englishman's valet, but then the pair are attacked by both outlaws and Comanches.
Bowie almost loses the friendship of the Mexican governor of Texas when an old friend turns out to be a horse thief.
Bowie becomes the blood brother of an Apache tribe whom he believes know the location of the lost silver mine he has been searching for, but discovers that his old friend has done the same thing with a tribe of Comanches who also know the secret.
When young Jefferson Davis wants to join Bowie in his search for the lost mine, his older brother objects and challenges Bowie to a duel.
Looking for an investment for his mother, Bowie considers purchasing artwork instead of another plantation.
At the President's urgent request, Bowie guides a doctor to a Choctaw village to cure a sick boy, only to discover that the doctor is an inexperienced youth fresh out of medical school.
Bowie decides to run for Congress from Louisiana, and meets another frontiersman who did the same thing from Tennessee, Davy Crockett.
In Natchez, Bowie tries to find a new home for an infant who was the sole survivor of an Indian attack, but has trouble with the sheriff.
Bowie tries to find out what happened to his cousin's bride, who disappeared on her wedding day after being seen with a hypnotist.
Owed a lot of money by a man who has no cash, Bowie makes him an offer for his land in New Orleans, and we learn the origin of some of the street names there.
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