What do the Presidential family, aging British Rock stars and a couple of hillbillies who peddle trinkets have in common?
Like many boys his age, Phil Collins fell in love with the Alamo in the mid-fifties while watching Walt Disney’s movie Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier. “The memories I have . . . were that this group of people were going—and they knew that they were going—to die,” he said during a panel appearance at the Texas Tribune Festival in 2016. “That just moved me as a five- or six-year-old. From that moment, I was obsessed.” He drew the facade of the chapel on the garden wall of his childhood home, in West London, and recreated the Battle of the Alamo with his toy soldiers.
Even as an adult, Collins nurtured his fascination. In 2004 he traveled from Houston to San Antonio during his First Final Farewell tour to show the Alamo to his wife, his three-year-old son, and his assistant. Afterward, they walked around the corner to the History Shop. Guimarin struck up a conversation with Collins, whom he did not recognize at first. “He was interested in documents, and I had a Sam Houston document,” Guimarin says. “He bought that later, but he left me his information and said whenever I got something, he would like first look at it. He was interested in anything to do with the Alamo.”
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Fast-forward to California in the early seventies, where Musso spotted a handsome Bowie knife at a gun show that looked as if it could date to the nineteenth century. Musso noted that the blade had an unusual feature: a strip of brass that extended from the hand guard to the dip in the knife called the clip. Musso bought the knife for a small amount and says he didn’t think much about it until eleven years later, when he was cleaning his firearms and decided to rub a little solvent on the knife to get the crud off. “In doing so, I found it had the initials ‘J. B.’ on it,” Musso says. “I had to sit down and have a long talk with myself because I knew that I didn’t put [them] on it.”
Of course, there was no proof that Jim Bowie had owned the knife; anyone could have scratched those letters into the metal, including the blacksmith James Black, who also had the initials “J. B.” Musso has hired several companies over the years to determine the age of the knife metallurgically. He says the first report he received revealed that the steel dated to the 1830s and was made in a relatively primitive charcoal furnace. Another lab determined that the brass was consistent with alloys made in small workshops during that era and had trace elements matching those found in a fairly uncommon type of green sand, derived from marine sandstone, that could be found 250 yards from James Black’s Arkansas workshop.
Musso decided to take the knife to a psychic. But because, he says, he doesn’t really believe in the paranormal, he wanted the best: Peter Hurkos, a Dutch clairvoyant who claimed a head injury had given him special powers. “I figured he was the only one I could believe in because he was decorated by a Catholic pope and he was supposed to have an eighty-seventh-percentile degree of accuracy,” Musso explains.
Hurkos, who had worked on the Charles Manson and Boston Strangler cases, agreed to a meeting, Musso says. After Musso handed him a brown paper bag with the knife inside, Hurkos reportedly named the man who had sold the knife to Musso. Musso says he then laid out several photos facedown and Hurkos pointed at one, which Musso then flipped over. It was Bowie’s portrait; Hurkos declared the knife had belonged to him. To Musso, this was just another piece of evidence that would help him build a case for authentication.
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While the Alamo has long commanded a leading role in the story of Texas, much of the mission’s original footprint, which is bisected by city streets and encompasses tourist traps, has long been an afterthought. The historical exhibits inside the Alamo aren’t much better. The “Cradle of Texas Liberty” hasn’t made a great impression on visitors. The average time spent inside Texas’s most visited historical site? About ten minutes. The site is boring and gives tourists no sense of the Alamo’s original scale.
And what is shown inside the Alamo is, to put it gently, one-sided. Anecdotes abound of Mexican American students discovering on field trips that their forebears were the bad guys—and, eventually, the losers—in Texas’s creation myth. The Alamo has, over the years, become a story that white Texans retell and many Hispanic Texans, especially in San Antonio, ignore or resent. Historical findings of the last few decades that challenged the traditional narrative—most notably evidence that Davy Crockett did not go down swinging, as was portrayed by Fess Parker, but instead begged that he be spared—are considered taboo by many. And evidence that some of the Alamo defenders were motivated by their desire to retain ownership of their slaves rather than be subject to Mexico’s prohibition of the practice is regarded by many Alamo traditionalists, including many elected officials, as incendiary. Yet the need to tell a more accurate, inclusive story of the Alamo, especially given that the site is located in the middle of the country’s largest majority-Hispanic city, seems undeniable.
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The 2014 report recommended that the site tell the story of the centuries-long sweep of the Alamo’s existence. And it proposed doing so in a history museum that would take longer than ten minutes to breeze through. It also recommended closing the streets in front of the Alamo and moving the Cenotaph, which badly needed repairs, outside the walls of the Alamo. The sixty-foot-tall monument to the Texans who fell at the battle is a twentieth-century creation; its relatively recent vintage, it was felt, violated the historical integrity of the fort.
That’s where George P. Bush entered the picture. He moved into Texas politics at flank speed, winning a 2014 statewide election in his first bid for public office. His timing was opportune. Following Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, the GOP convinced itself that it needed to reach out to Hispanic voters, and a photogenic, Spanish-speaking, half-Mexican heir to the party’s greatest political dynasty must have looked like the man for the job.
When he assumed the land commissioner job in 2015, Bush was on board with the master plan produced by Castro’s citizens’ committee. Bush, a former high school history teacher, was even on board with the city’s requirement, in its lease with the state, that the site not focus solely on the thirteen famous days in 1836 and instead teach the warts-and-all, three-hundred-year-long history of the site. “The Alamo can be a centerpiece for taking on the controversial issues of the past,” he said at the same Texas Tribune Festival panel that Collins appeared on, specifically mentioning slavery, Mexican control of Texas, and Spanish colonization.
This was in late September 2016, when nearly everyone believed that Donald Trump’s coarse pluto-populism, including his invective against Hispanic migrants, was going to doom him to defeat in the presidential race. The GOP’s elite was still committed to a multicultural future for the party, and Bush was all in with that vision. In 2015 he toured Gettysburg National Military Park, in Pennsylvania, to get a sense of how to create a historical site that balanced fact and legend. San Antonio City Council member Roberto Treviño, who cochaired the Alamo Plaza Advisory Committee, joined him for the trip, and came away convinced of Bush’s sincerity. “I had the impression all of us on the trip had the same vision for the Alamo,” Treviño says.
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But the issue that really brought the situation to a boil was the plan to remove the Cenotaph for repairs and then relocate it just outside the footprint of the Alamo fort.
This move had drawn little complaint earlier. But in 2017 the world had changed. The violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in May spurred many across the country to engage in a reckoning with America’s racist past. Statues of Confederate soldiers were removed from cities all over the U.S. In September, San Antonio removed a Confederate statue in Travis Park—without public notice, in the middle of the night—and sent it to an undisclosed location, ostensibly for repairs. That clandestine removal set off alarms among the state’s more militant Alamo traditionalists, who were now convinced that the plan to repair the Cenotaph was a lie, and that Bush planned to stick it in storage somewhere.