Later Years
After returning home, Bowie and his family moved to a plantation in Iberville Parish. While there, Bowie, along with General John Wilson, acquired the papers of Captain Vicente Sebastian Pintado, the royal surveyor for the Spanish government. Pintado had kept his surveys and records of deeds and grants in the Louisiana Territory as his personal property and refused to sell them to the United States. After Pintado's death, his widow sold the papers to Bowie and Wilson for $24,500 (the United States declined to pay the high price). Bowie wanted the papers to help him in his land speculation dealings, but it is unknown whether he derived any benefits from them.
Bowie died in New Orleans on January 17, 1841, leaving his wife and three daughters. He was originally buried in the San Gabriel Catholic Church cemetery, but in the 1850s his body was disinterred and reburied at St. Joseph Catholic Cemetery in Port Gibson, Mississippi, the home of his daughter Elve.
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Famous quotes containing the word years:
“After years of vain familiarity, some distant gesture or unconscious behavior, which we remember, speaks to us with more emphasis than the wisest or kindest words. We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our Friends’ thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)