JERRY Fisk never knows where his custom-made knives might wind up, or what task they’ll be called to perform. One client paid thirteen thousand dollars for a Fisk bowie knife, and when Fisk later asked the man what he did with the knife—an ivory-handled Damascus blade with a touch of engraving—the fellow told him, “We cut crust off the toast for the kids.”
Fisk tells me this story while a gas forge is heating up in his Southwest Arkansas shop, and he’s changing headgear from a clean and pristine white beaver cowboy hat to the slightly battered and irregularly singed straw cowboy hat he wears while pounding on glowing hot metal.
“Really?” Fisk replied at the time, incredulous.
“Yeah, man,” the fellow said. “They really don’t like crust. And I want my kids to know that quality matters, no matter what you’re doing.”
Some of Fisk’s knives end up in collections, such as Arkansas #1, a commemorative knife now on exhibit at the University of Arkansas Hope-Texarkana. The ornate blade was commissioned in 2019 to celebrate the heritage of the bowie knife, the most famous knife style in America. Many historians agree that James Bowie, a Louisiana planter and the famed Alamo martyr, had the original bowie knife made in the early 1830s, by a Washington, Arkansas, blacksmith named James Black. The bowie knife and its Arkansas roots are experiencing a renaissance in interest these days, in no small part due to Fisk’s coattails.
For Arkansas #1, Fisk forged the Damascus steel blade in his signature Dog Star pattern, with 1,836 layers of metal to honor the year Arkansas gained statehood. The blade contains metal collected from leading Arkansas industries—from a chicken house, a cattle fence, and an old skidder used in the timber business. The handle mountings are fully engraved. Each single leaf, Fisk says, required up to eighty-two chisel cuts.
Other Fisk knives end up in the velvet-lined drawers of collectors, rarely seeing daylight. They are exquisite pieces, boldly engraved, crafted with precious metals and
