Joseph Musso: Western Historian, Artist, and Blade Collector

by Jeffrey Dane

The music library and those who administer it at any major symphony orchestra are behind-the-scenes but very crucial organs and people, without whom the ensemble can’t function. Similarly, the storyboard artists and conceptual illustrators in Hollywood serve a corresponding purpose that’s just as important: their work enables the film-makers to plan and make their movies. How will the producers, directors, art directors, set decorators and others in the film crew determine, plan and map out the scenes viewers will see on the screen, without having literally detailed illustrations and storyboards as visual points of reference?This is how Joseph Musso earns his livelihood: a conceptual illustrator and storyboard artist in the film capital. His personal calling is as an historian, whose contributions are many, varied, and singularly significant — especially regarding some of the controversies surrounding the Alamo in general, the death of David Crockett specifically, and the origins of James Bowie in particular.

Musso’s work as an independent historian and author gives him a different but totally genuine and valid perspective of the history of the American West. Some of his findings may initially seem at odds with what we’ve heard from legend, but they also solve and lay to rest some long-standing problems, and they shed light on some long-outstanding questions by putting things into fresh historical context.

Though his historical focus is primarily on the Alamo era — he’s more well-versed in Texas history than many native Texans — he’s a virtual San Saba silver mine of both broad and explicit information about the history of the United States during the last century. An ideal blend of engaging conversationalist and considerate listener, it’s from Joseph Musso that we can learn about some of the more obscure (that is, the darker and more shameful) chapters in our own history, including the disgraceful incidents involving the native American, Mangus Colorado, and the embarrassing reasons why his story isn’t more popularly publicized in the American culture.

Musso’s personal research into past eras has also enabled him to apply his illustrative skills to the very specific details of his historic pictorial interpretations, and easily qualifies him as a foremost illustrator in this genre as well. His visual renderings of various historic concepts, events, and people — and even their period attire — thusly lend an accuracy, distinction and special character to his historical work that would be the envy of most of his peers.

During his long and still-active career in Hollywood as an artist, Musso has worked with film-makers like Irwin Allen, Frank Sinatra, John Carpenter, Norman Jewison, Mike Nichols, John Huston, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock, perhaps the greatest director of the suspense film, and whom Musso holds in particularly high regard. He speaks very warmly, too, of Sidney Poitier and especially of William Holden. In the Hollywood arena, he most enjoyed meeting John Wayne and Johnny Weissmuller; in the historical arena, he has a very special personal feeling about having met and come to know some of the descendants of the Louisiana branch of the Bowie family. When asked if he had any major “regret” regarding the time he has spent in Hollywood, he replied, without hesitation, that he’d like to have met Errol Flynn, but whose death pre-dated Musso’s own arrival in California.

The roster of films to which Musso has contributed include Flags of Our Fathers, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Space Cowboys, The Italian Job, Phantom of the Opera, Dragonheart, Volcano, Star Trek: First Contact, Escape From L.A., Naked Gun 33-?, Basic Instinct, Dick Tracy, The Three Amigos, The Towering Inferno, Torn Curtain, Tora! Tora! Tora!, The Blue Max, In the Heat of the Night, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Body Heat (a film that composer Miklós Rózsa had originally been asked to score).

Musso also provided a piece titled Forty Acres: A History of the RKO Backlot Films, for the Burroughs Bulletin (Nr. 14 New Series), Sierra Madre, CA, April, 1993.

Schooled at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where he earned his degree in Fine Arts, and serving honorably in the U.S. Marines, Musso traces his earliest conscious interest in edged weapons to his childhood fascination with the knife Johnny Weissmuller used in the Tarzan films. Being told of this, a friend gave him the kind of “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” advice that sent the young Musso scurrying to see the then-recent Alan Ladd film, The Iron Mistress, in 1952, based on the book by Paul Wellman. From then on, Musso was hooked. He had no way even of conceiving of the possibility that he’d someday own the very studio prop knives used in that film, as well as the original “Tarzan” knife that had first piqued his interest. It should surprise no-one that these are his two modern favorites among the many antique and replica weapons he owns.

Among his publication accomplishments are illustrated articles for various knife and other weapon-related magazines. One of the most outstanding is Jim Bowie’s ‘Iron Mistress’ — Reel Knife vs. Real Knife, published in the 1991 Guns & Ammo Annual. The article is lengthy and profusely illustrated. Along with two later articles in The Texas Gun Collector, Spring 2000 and Fall 2001, they contain mouth-watering specimens from Musso’s own collection, now conservatively valued at well over one million dollars. It includes not only countless studio prop knives and other weapons that his historic interests have induced him to acquire over the years, but also innumerable antique and authentic historical pieces from those eras. Peripherally related Alamo-era artifacts, many of them extremely rare — and many of those, in turn, truly unique — are also part of the Musso collection, including rifles, swords, military uniforms and other accouterments.

Discussed and/or pictured in Musso’s Guns & Ammo article are the knives used by Bowie-portrayers Sterling Hayden in The Last Command, by Alan Ladd in The Iron Mistress, by Kenneth Tobey in the last part of the Walt Disney trilogy, Davy Crockett — King of the Wild Frontier, by Scott Forbes in the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Jim Bowie, and by Richard Widmark in John Wayne’s The Alamo.

Over ten years later, Musso followed this article with a four-part series in the May-August 2002 issues of Blade, The Iron Mistress: Movie that Changed Knives Forever and then a two-parter in the July-August 2007 Blade issues on John Wayne, Duke’s Movie Knives. He was assisted in the latter article by Wayne’s now-late son, Michael, and Michael’s widow, Gretchen.

For anyone who was in some way influenced in his or her youth by the films and TV shows of that era (just as Joseph Musso was), these articles would be required reading as the veritable answer to a prayer — an answer “years in the making” and long overdue, but certainly none the worse for it. There are many such people — and by virtue of that very formative influence, some of them are now themselves directly involved in the Western historical field. Certainly for this, we owe a lot to Joseph Musso. That stimulus corresponds to the young admirer who once told Miklós Rózsa that his music for the film King of Kings prompted him to investigate the same events as recounted by Bach in the Passions. This is influence exemplified — and for the creative artist, is a compliment of the highest order. Musso is regarded as being among the foremost authorities in the USA on the subject of the Alamo era, generally, and on James Bowie specifically.

Musso’s personal contributions to the field of Western history at large might be even more significant than those he’s made to the films, individually or collectively, on which he’s worked. At the outset of the 13-day siege, the Alamo had two commanding officers: William Barret Travis, and James Bowie. For years, Bowie’s birthplace was disputed, with Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana and even Maryland claiming the distinction of having been where Bowie first saw the light of day. Even the Alamo in San Antonio, where Bowie and all the other combatants perished on the morning of Sunday, March 6, 1836, has a large bronze plaque memorializing Tennessee as his native state. Throughout the ensuing decades, the Bowie legends only deepened and compounded the confusion. The uncertainties about him are embodied in the claim that he was born in five different states and that he died in nearly as many spots at the Alamo.

Joseph Musso cast a sharp, bright light on some of the more unfocused and shadowy areas of James Bowie’s life and background, and he ultimately determined Bowie’s actual birthplace. Through extensive personal research and consultation of primary sources — original property deeds, musty hand-written records, and other such documents — Musso found that the Bowie family was living 9 miles northwest of Franklin, Kentucky, in what was then Logan County (now Simpson County), when James was born in 1796. Peripherally, he’s also found that many other accepted and published details about and accounts of Bowie’s life were, to say the least, questionable in the extreme.

After receiving the necessary documentation, the Texas State Historical Association, at Joe Musso’s suggestion, revised its relevant entries in the second printing of The New Handbook of Texas, which now reflects the corrections regarding Bowie’s birthplace and other information about him.

“I was made an Honorary Colonel by the governor of Kentucky for going through two hundred years of property deed records to pinpoint . . . James Bowie’s exact birth site and was asked to write the wording on the official birth site state marker. I also received a personal thank you letter from the then-governor of Texas, George W. Bush, for my Bowie research,” Musso said.

Further acknowledgement and kudos came from the Alamo itself. While the expense of replacing the bronze plaque is prohibitive, Dorothy Black, one of the Alamo officials, said about Musso, “Without a doubt, what he has put together is more than enough,” and that the Alamo’s printed literature is modified to mirror the changes.

As Bartolomeo Cristofori and James Watt are traditionally acknowledged by history as having “invented” the piano and the steam engine, respectively, so, too, is Joseph Musso recognized as having determined James Bowie’s true birthplace.

Succeeding in discovering where Bowie was born, and having been honored with the responsibility of cleaning the only known life-painted portrait of James Bowie (done in Boston by George P.A. Healy in the early 1830s), are two episodes in Musso’s professional life he considers particularly fulfilling. He subsequently shared his investigative research on Bowie’s portrait in the January 2007 issue of the Texas State Historical Association’s prestigious Southwestern Historical Quarterly Magazine, with his article, A Reevaluation of ‘The Face Behind the Knife’.

He has also been a guest speaker and Historical Consultant on the Arts & Entertainment Network, the History Channel and the Outdoor Channel in various documentaries dealing with Bowie and the Alamo. He’s currently involved with the new website, The African American Channel, in a production based on his September 2006 Alamo Journal article, Col. James Bowie’s Freed Slaves.

His historical goal “. . .is to get the facts out and set the record straight.” Mindful of this, he’s writing two books about Bowie, at least one of which will contain his own illustrations. That it’s taken Musso several years to do the research and prepare these books is a testimony to his diligence and revererence for the subject matter.

Part of his extraordinary collection was exhibited in 2001 at San Antonio’s venerable Buckhorn Saloon, fittingly located a short walk from the Alamo and later at the Texas State History Museum in Austin.

Among the many items displayed in these exhibits were various Alamo-era artifacts, historic prop knives and antique rifles used by the studios, and a number of exceptional antique Bowie knives. One of these, in particular, the centerpiece of the display, seems to have an undefinable but almost palpable “presence.” Extraordinarily shaped and unusually large, the knife’s blade itself is almost 14 inches long, making the weapon effectively a small sword. It is pictured in an article about his collection, published in the Spring 2000 issue of The Texas Gun Collector.

From residue traces found in the steel and in the brass, a metallurgical laboratory that performed tests on the knife in 1981 determined the likelihood that it was made in the Washington, Arkansas area around 1830 — intriguingly, just when James Bowie was in the prime of his life. The letters JB appear on part of the quillon. Some feel they might be the initials of James Black, a blacksmith who was active in that area at that time and whom some believe may have made knives specifically for Bowie. Others, however, feel the letters could be the initials of the owner — James Bowie — rather than of the maker. Conjecture is fruitless but still fascinating, but if the latter is the case, Joseph Musso has in his possession a knife made for — and, by extension, owned by — James Bowie himself.

Applied and affixed to the spine of the blade on what’s since become known in the relevant historical circles as “the Musso Bowie” is a strip of brass. Since it’s softer than steel, in theory the purpose of this brass strip would have been to enable the weapon’s user to more efficiently parry the blow of an opponent’s blade, which would have stuck fast to the brass strip, rather than sliding down to the crossguard if the blade’s spine had been of naked steel. A two-part article by J.R. Edmondson about this knife, suitably titled, The Brass-Backed Bowie, was published in the January and February 1993 issues of Knife World Magazine.

Also on the cross-guard is a six-pointed star, the pre-1850 insignia of the American officer, and a rendering of the knife is clearly visible in an illustration that appears in the memoirs of Sam Houston — published in 1855, a mere nineteen years after Bowie’s death. It is also depicted in the 1864 lithograph by Currier & Ives, titled Your Plan and Mine, with the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, holding it, complete with its brass strip along the blade’s back, as the symbol of the South.

Rather singular and historically almost unique of shape, positively frightening of configuration and monstrous in its size, there is a near-disturbing mood about it which is, in a word, unsettling, as though it has some hidden story to tell, if only it could speak. Inanimate, the weapon has no life of its own — but its presence, which can be sensed even in its photos, is unmistakable.

It is this massive knife that was used as the model for the one that Jason Patric (portraying James Bowie) carried in the 2004 Disney/Touchstone film, The Alamo.

An “autobiography” of Crockett (who signed his name as both “David” and “Davy”) offers what’s purported to be his own impression of Bowie’s knife, and which he’s supposed to have seen the first time the two men met, at the Alamo: “I wish I may be shot if the bare sight of it wasn’t enough to give a man of squeamish stomach the cholic, especially before breakfast.” Our first notion might be that for a seasoned man like Crockett to so refer to some garden-variety hunting knife seems rather unlikely, and that it’s reasonable to presume there was something rather special about the weapon in question which James Bowie would have had with him in the Alamo.

Unfortunately, the “autobiography” in which that Crockett “quote” appears was actually written by Richard Penn Smith very soon after Crockett’s death. However, even though we’re faced with the likelihood that the remark’s attribution to Crockett is spurious, Smith nevertheless gives posterity a contemporary 1836 opinion, hearsay or not, that suggests the fearsome visual aspects of Bowie’s legendary blade.

The fact is that if it was Bowie’s own blade, it represents its own cumulative past. Do those who conclude it was James Bowie’s knife believe it because they wish to? It may be so, but that it might have belonged to and been used by James Bowie is a possibility — unprovable, but very real — with which we’re still faced, and it must be if not “accepted” then certainly considered.

Musso considers the three prize historical pieces of his collection to be this enormous knife, another, with a 12″ long blade, made by Henry Schively, an expert cutler and surgical tool maker then located at 75 Chestnut Street (the site is now called 231 Chestnut) in Philadelphia–a city visited by James Bowie and his three years-older brother, Rezin (pronounced REE-zin). Rezin gave a similar, but slightly smaller Schively knife to Jesse Perkins in 1831. The third piece is a guardless coffin-handled knife attributed to James Black, and it’s a this piece that seems to have a particular specialty. One day in March, 2007, leaving the Warner Bros. Commissary, Musso was asked by a frend, “Do you believe you may have the original knife that Bowie used at that Sandbar Fight?” Musso’s frank reply was, “I don’t know. But I have a knife that matches the dimensions of Rezin Bowie’s own description of it.” The now-near-mythical 1827 Sandbar Fight became the pivot-point on which the Jim Bowie legend would revolve. Of equal possible significance, it is also in the same style, construction and materials as the knife Rezin presented to Captain Thomas Tunstall in 1833, which is now on display at the Saunders Memorial Museum in Berryville, Arkansas.

Among Musso’s other personal favorite antique Bowies in his collection is one with a German silver horse head on the pommel, another made by the firm of English & Hubers in Philadelphia and a large ivory handled knife with a German silver “half-horse, half-alligator” motif on the pommel, that reflects Davy Crockett’s memorable description of himself. These handsome knives are pictured in The Texas Gun Collector article.

Joseph Musso has also made notable findings in the heated disputes surrounding the existence of a controversial memoir. Translated into English by Carmen Perry and originally published under the title With Santa Anna in Texas, it’s purported to have originated in the 1840s by a high-ranking Mexican officer who was present at the time of the Alamo battle. In this chronicle, Lt.Col. Jose Enrique de la Peña is said to give an eyewitness account of the siege. The supposed memoir has caused a good deal of disagreement, conflict and friction among Western historians regarding whether it’s authentic or a forgery. One of its implications is that David Crockett didn’t die fighting, but that he was captured and then executed by command of Santa Anna.

Musso isn’t alone in believing, like others, that the memoir is suspect because it seemed to have suddenly materialized, virtually out of no-where, in the possession of a Mexican coin dealer over a hundred years after the fact, and that it’s missing more than an entire century of provenance and documentation. “It doesn’t have 110 years of human records behind it,” Musso astutely noted.

It might be more than just coincidental that the memoir emerged unexpectedly in 1955 — just as the Davy Crockett craze, sourced by Walt Disney, was sweeping the nation.

Musso’s observations about the memoir matter brought some details into perspective. “Several years ago, while researching material for my biography of Alamo commander James Bowie, I noticed certain handwriting anomalies between the de la Peña memoir and that of a letter purportedly written by an Alamo defender, Isaac Milsaps. As it turns out, both documents had no known pedigree prior to 1955, and by March 1989 Texas Monthly magazine used research of the leading handwriting expert, Charles Hamilton, to report that the Milsaps letter was a suspected fake, written by a known forger . . . who died in 1970. . . Since I originally planned to quote from both documents in my Bowie biography, I decided to contact Charles Hamilton regarding the de la Peña memoirs. He, in turn, confirmed my fears and sent me a written certification, dated October 18, 1993, stating his belief that the de la Peña memoir was also faked . . .”

Even before the “original manuscript” of the memoir was auctioned by Butterfield & Butterfield (and purchased by two Texans, so that it can remain in the state where they feel it belongs), Musso urged the auction house to arrange some scientific tests (like ion diffusion analysis on the ink) to try to determine if the document is genuine.

An intriguing and perhaps even revealing postscript to this matter is a subsequent development in this ongoing controversy. Artist and author Rod Timanus learned that a well-respected Western historian in Austin, Texas, the late Thomas Ricks Lindley, had acquired an original document, complete with signature, written by Jose Enrique de la Peña: the handwriting in this document matches other known samples of de la Peña’s letterhand — but it does not seem to match the final-draft “memoir” that’s been causing the ruckus, lending yet further credence to the de la Peña memoir as being fraudulent rather than authentic. The subsequent research done in this area by Lindley, Musso and Crockett/Alamo author Bill Groneman in the Mexico City military archives has led them to collaborate on the subject in another forthcoming book, Lt. Col. de la Pena’s Rewritten Diary: the Mexican Military During the Texas Revolution.

Though not a shy man in the traditional sense, Joseph Musso prefers modesty and subtlety in his approaches, which render him pleasantly casual and informal in manner. Notwithstanding his investigative character and adventurous nature, one thing that sets him apart from many of Hollywood’s denizens is that he prefers the truth, and that he eschews publicity and opts to be behind the scenes, where his work will be if not as conspicuous and observable as that of the great actor or superstar, then surely as consequential as an integral component of the film-making teams of which he’s a member — and he pursues his interests in the field of Western history with the same tenacity and singularity of purpose as did the Alamo defenders.

If there is only one characteristic shared by both Joseph Musso and James Bowie himself, it would be this: to some a most formidable adversary, to others the staunchest friend.

( Author’s Bio ) :

Jeffrey Dane is a researcher, historian and author whose writing is published in the USA and abroad in several languages. He’s a contributor to numerous volumes, including several books by Western writer and artist Rod Timanus; he wrote the Foreword for The Alamo Story: From Early History to Current Conflicts by J.R. Edmondson; he delivered a presentation on James Bowie at the Alamo Society Symposium in San Antonio in March, 2007; his article, Alamo Connections, appeared in the April and May, 2008 issues of Blade Magazine; and he co-authored a book (about Texas), for which he is currently seeking a publisher.