The county is named for James Bowie, the legendary knife fighter who died at the Battle of the Alamo.

[4] The farming Caddoan Mississippian culture dates as early as the Late Archaic Period 1500 BCE in Bowie County.

French explorer Jean Baptiste Bénard de La Harpe founded the military fort Le Poste des Cadodaquious in 1719.

[9][10] Bowie County, in the years leading up to the American Civil War, was settled mostly by Southerners who brought their slave labor to work the cotton fields.

Legends abound as to his activities in Bowie and Cass Counties, including a rumored tie to the Ku Klux Klan.

[13][14] He was a Confederate States Army veteran who joined two units, designated as a deserter from the first, and receiving a disability discharge from the second.

Baker and his gang conducted a vicious rampage against citizens he perceived as being on the wrong side of the black labor issue, at William G. Kirkman and the Freedman's Bureau in Bowie County, and at the soldiers of the Union occupation.

Like Swamp Fox Francis Marion, Baker always managed to elude capture, often with the help of local citizens.

When the Texas and Pacific Railway was constructed through the county, a new town named Texarkana was founded.

Measurable relief came late when the Lone Star Army Ammunition Plant was established in 1942.

[23] Barry Telford Unit, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison for men, is in an unincorporated area of the county, near New Boston.