"why do these figures have swords?" Topic

Is that a sword on the left two figures? Anyone know why they would be depicted with swords?

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They're quite short. I've seen photos of early war Confederates with "fighting knives" that had saber-like hilts.

That's why.

Artillery were issued with short swords sometimes.

So they can stab people in the eye. Wake up man, there's a war going on! It also lends a martial air to the whole affair.

"You call that a knife? That's not a knife. This is a knife."

It's a Arkansas Toothpick or Bowie knife?

Don

If it were meant to be a bowie knife I could almost believe it. I guess I'd expect to see that on more different kinds of figures then. But, I doubt many (any?) bowie knives had sword hilts like that. Not sure what a "fighting knife" is, but agree they look really short on the fig. Just odd….

Those pictures are photo props. The photographer uses them (and the guns too) so that the person photographed looks more warlike. I can't tell from the figures what they're actually carrying.

They might be sword bayonets. I don't know if they'd be frequent enough to be two out of six, though.

I think there were a lot of Confederate lads who took big knives with them at the start, found little use for them and stopped carrying them. Or so I read here and there.

They're Bowie Knives – prior to them finding them a heavy pain in the posterior and dumping them.

The man in the top photo appears to be carrying what I saw in one museum labelled as a cutlass. The Medicine Lodge Stockade Museum in Kansas had a number of these weapons which had been seized as they were being smuggled to the Confederate Army from the North.

Arkansas pig sticker………suuuuuiiiee