Bowie knives" which played so great a part in frontier quarrels.

In the general _melee_ which followed the death of Wright and Currey,
six other men were killed and fifteen severely wounded. Bowie was a
noted duellist {254} in his day, and died heroically in the famous
siege of the Alamo[2].

On one occasion he was a passenger on a Mississippi steamboat with a
young man and his bride. The young man had collected a large sum of
money for friends and employers, which he gambled away on the boat.
Bowie kept him from suicide, took his place at the gaming-table,
exposed the cheating of the gamblers, was challenged by one of them,
fought him on the hurricane deck of the steamer, shot him into the
river, and restored the money to the distracted husband.

Brief reference may be made to an affair between Major Thomas Biddle,
of the United States Army, and Congressman Spencer Pettis, of Missouri,
on August 27, 1831. The cause of the duel was a political difficulty.
The two men stood five feet apart, their pistols overlapping. Both
were mortally wounded. This was nothing less than a double murder, and
shows to what length men will go under the heat of passion or the
stimulus of a false code of honor.

V. A Famous Congressional Duel

On February the 24, 1838, at a quarter after three o'clock on the
Marlborough Road in Maryland, just outside the District of Columbia,
two members of Congress, Jonathan Cilley of Maine, and William J.
Graves of Kentucky, exchanged shots with rifles at a distance of ninety
yards three times in succession. At the third exchange, Cilley was
shot and died in three minutes. Of all the causes for deadly
encounters, that which brought these two men opposite each other was
the {255} most foolish. Cilley, on the floor of the House, had
reflected upon the character of a newspaper editor in the discussion of
charges which had been made against certain Congressmen with whom he
had no personal connection. The newspaper editor, whose subsequent
conduct showed that he fully merited even more severe strictures than
Cilley had passed upon him, sent a challenge to the gentleman from
Maine by the hand of Congressman Graves.

Cilley took the justifiable position that his language had been proper
and privileged, and that he did not propose to accept a challenge or
discuss the matter with any one. He assured Graves that this
declination to pursue the matter further was not to be construed as a
reflection