The authors of Forget the Alamo, Chris Tomlinson, Jason Stanford and Brian Burroughs need to brush up on their fact checking skills.
In the article "Come and Fake It" in the June 2021 issue of Texas Monthly, they erroneously assert that as land commissioner I agreed “to display a collection in its entirety without authenticating every item," claiming that I obligated the Alamo to display items that may have had questionable provenance.
This is demonstrably false.
Under the agreement I signed on behalf of the General Land Office with Phil Collins there, is no requirement to display every single item of his donated collection. In fact, in the October 29, 2014 contract, Collins granted to me and my successors acting on behalf of the Texas General Land Office complete discretion to display or not display any particular item.
In the relevant provision on page 1 of the agreement, Collins stipulates: “By signing this deed, I understand and agree that the location, retention, cataloging, preservation, and disposition of the Donated Materials by the Alamo will be conducted in its discretion, in accordance with General Land Office and Alamo policy and other applicable law. Common discretionary uses by the Alamo include, but are not limited to, exhibition, display, digitization for preservation and access purposes, and making works available for research and scholarship.”
In “Come and Fake It,” my agreement to build a state-of-the-art museum is repeatedly mischaracterized. Tomlinson demands, for example, that state experts must “set out which of the artifacts rock singer Phil Collins donated are legitimate before the General Land Office spends another penny on a new museum to house them.”
No. They. Don’t.
Even without the Collins collection, we didn’t have room to display all the Alamo-related artifacts we already had at the Alamo. We needed a museum then and we need a museum now — even without the 207 items in Collins collection.
Were there questions about the provenance of some of the items in the Collins collection? Of course there were! The authors present this as some “aha” moment, but I learned that some items had questionable provenance when I read Collins’ own book, “The Alamo and Beyond, A Collector’s Journey,” long before we agreed to accept his generous donation.
The authors raise issues on about a dozen artifacts. Let’s assume their doubts are well founded on the entire dozen (they are not) and then let’s add in another dozen for good measure. That makes twenty-four “tainted” gifts, and leaves us with 183 that are not. Therefore, the smart thing to do is “just say no” to the 183?
Really?
In the forward of Collins’ book, historian and author Stephen L. Hardin states that the provenance of some items is subject to question and notes that “the acceptance of questions and criticisms is a legitimate part of the historians method.”
Collins himself comments on the unclear origins of items multiple times throughout the book — using phrases like “it is possibly thought to be” or “would possibly have belonged to” or “William Travis’s Sword Belt from the Alamo?” Yes, on page 173 in big bold letters above the picture of the sword belt is a question mark. Where was that acknowledgement by the “Come and Fake It” authors? Lost, no doubt, in their rush to sell a narrative, the facts be damned.
I hate to rain on the authors’ parade of startling revelations (actually I don’t), but the idea that the General Land Office and/or Commissioner Jerry Patterson were duped by Phil Collins or anyone else is just false. Collins is as much a benefactor to Texas as were the citizens of Cincinnati, Ohio when they gifted Texas with the Twin Sisters cannon that helped carry the day at San Jacinto.
Texas thanks you Phil Collins!
Speaking of the Twin Sisters cannons used by the Texans at the Alamo, the authors’ go-to archeologist, Tom Nuckols, makes yet another of the book’s demonstrably false assertions when he claims we don’t know what caliber the cannon-balls were.
“(Collins) says he has cannon-balls shot by the Twin Sisters at San Jacinto,” Nuckols writes. “Nobody knows what caliber those cannons were!” Well, yes we do.
The overwhelming majority of historians know they were of 6 pound caliber. President Sam Houston and Texas Secretary of War Thomas Rusk said they were 6 pounders. President David J. Burnet did as well. Ben McCulloch and John Ferrell, who were actually in the San Jacinto artillery detachment, said they were 6 pounders and Texas Army ordnance reports after 1836 all list them as 6 pounders.
Were the cannon-balls from San Jacinto? With only one battle there, one can conclude a cannon-ball documented to have been found at San Jacinto comes from that battle. Was it fired from the Twin Sisters? Since Texas had 2 cannons and Mexico had one, yes it probably was. If the cannon-ball was found in the Mexican position it was likely fired by the Texans and vice-versa. Add the fact that the single Mexican cannon is thought to have fired only 3 times, a reasonable person would conclude a Twin Sisters attribution is well-founded.
Upon reading their description of the Phil Collins donation, I assumed they simply did not have the benefit of examining a copy of the original Land Office agreement with Collins.
But they did. And they chose to ignore it. That is not an error of sloppy journalism. That is an error of questionable integrity.
