WHAT DOES FULL TANG BOWIE KNIFE MEAN?

just after his three-year stay in California in the course of the peak of the gold rush, writer Hinton R. Helper wrote, “I have observed purer liquors, better segars [sic], finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirk and Bowie knives, and prettier courtesans listed here in San Francisco than in some other place I have at any time visited,