Knife Talk: Bill Scagel, The Clear Reference

Although James Black certainly existed, as is clearly proven by the numerous articles published at the time concerning him, there exists not a trace, not a vestige of a single one of the numerous knives he produced; indeed the only descriptions we have come from are those very same press cuttings. Fortunately, the situation is completely different for Bill Scagel, the secondary legendary bladesmith. “Old Bill” as he was usually called, was born near Alpena, Michigan February 12, 1873 and raised in Ontario Canada. After an unhappy marriage, he decided to turn his back definitively on civilization to go and live as a true hermit in a trapper’s cabin with only beavers and raccoons for company.

From 1920 through 1929 Scagel sold his knives through Abercromble & Fitch of New York and their subsidiaries such as Von Lengerke & Antoine. Scagel made Bowie knives, hunting knives, machetes, and axes for the expeditions of the Smithsonian Institution. One of the rarest of Scagel’s knives is his personal hunting pattern, a fixed blade drop point hunter with a secondary folding spey blade in the handle. Valued at over $15,000, seven of the twelve made are accounted for in private collections.

From the 1930 onwards, he commenced a passion for huge black Labradors, which were perfect for retrieving the wild ducks he regularly hunted from the icy water. Faced with a tough forest life and the various requirements of fishing and hunting, he started to make his own knives, basic perhaps, but each detail of them thought out according to a precise use. There is nothing but the essential in a Scagel knife: perfect size, balance, weight, and proportions, with sober but sturdy materials. Each one had a detail that made it unique, proof that even in the wild forest, beauty and aesthetics were not neglected: here an inlay in copper or brass, there a strip of red leather to stand out, or the most beautiful part of a stag’s antler for a pommel. The number of different models that this man was able to forge with his own hands, without any assistance until his departure for another territory at ninety years old, is impressive: all shaped, types and sizes, without counting the saws and hatchets.

Scagel used a half stag and half leather stacked washer assembly in his knife handles that became his trademark style. One such Scagel knife provided the influence for Bo Randall to start making his own knives. In 1937, Randall witnessed someone using a Scagel knife to scrape paint off of a boat near Walloon Lake, without damaging the edge of the blade. Randall bought the knife and in the years that followed Scagel became a mentor to Randall, influencing many of his designs. In addition to leather and stag handles, Scagel had several friends who worked at the Brunswick Pool Table and Bowling Ball Company who kept him supplied with scrap pieces of ivory, rosewood, Bakelite, vulcanized fiber, and maple spacers which he used in his knife handles over the years.

Every knife Scagel made was completely by hand and without modern tools such as a grinder or buffer, his Fruitport shop was powered off a gasoline engine from a Cadillac automobile and as a result, the quality of knives he produced over his 50 years of knifemaking is very low. Scagel was known for not trusting “mass produced items” and successfully extracted his own teeth and made his own dentures. During the polio epidemic in 1939, he made leg braces for children at his shop.

Scagel made his last knife in 1962, the years before he died. Twenty-three years later he was inducted into the Blade Magazine Cutlery Hall of Fame at the 1990 Blade Show. In 1996, Scagel was inducted into the American Bladesmith Society Hall of Fame as an inauguree. The Randall Knife Museum in Orlando, Florida is home to the world’s largest collection of Scagel knives.