not2sharp
Platinum Member
- Joined
- Jun 29, 1999
- Messages
- 19,876
The Musso bowie is one of the most controversial knives for knife collectors and historians. Joseph Musso claims to have purchased the knife during the early 1970s at an antique store and later to have discovered the initials JB marked on the knife. He then has the metallurgy examined and receives a lab report, which he claims, dates the knife to the 1830s. So it must have been Jim Bowie's knife from the Alamo. 
It is quite a story. But, however we feel about it, the knife has sold for very large figures and was last purchased by Phil Collins (of the band Genesis) and donated to the Alamo Museum in San Antonio Texas.
I do not intend to drag up all of the usual controversy over the knife and its questionable provenance. My question is simply this:
Question: Has anyone checked to see whether the Musso bowie is an exact match with any of the known fake bowie knives circulating during the 1960s and 70s? Can we rule out that it wasn't just another example produced at one of the same underground factories, shortly before Joseph Musso acquired the knife?
For example:
Here is a similar, but offensively marked knife, that is believed to have been massed produced and circulating at the time that Musso acquired his famous knife.
I am only linking the old thread because we do not need this thread unnecessarily closed for offensive content. The take away for me is that there were other very similar knives in circulation around 1970, and that there appears to have been some branding confusion since it is questionable whether a knife associated with KKK would have been more desirable then one associated with the Alamo Jim Bowie knife.
Link:
https://bladeforums.com/threads/it-has-a-dark-history-but-i-want-to-learn-more-about-it.1634911/
We are not discussing the nefarious organization. We are only examining whether the Musso Bowie could have been just one of these same knives before the superfluous markings were applied? Since the Musso knife was only rediscovered and popularized during the 1980s, it would be very unlikely that other knives would have been made in homage to it during the 1960s.
n2s
It is quite a story. But, however we feel about it, the knife has sold for very large figures and was last purchased by Phil Collins (of the band Genesis) and donated to the Alamo Museum in San Antonio Texas.
I do not intend to drag up all of the usual controversy over the knife and its questionable provenance. My question is simply this:
Question: Has anyone checked to see whether the Musso bowie is an exact match with any of the known fake bowie knives circulating during the 1960s and 70s? Can we rule out that it wasn't just another example produced at one of the same underground factories, shortly before Joseph Musso acquired the knife?
For example:
Here is a similar, but offensively marked knife, that is believed to have been massed produced and circulating at the time that Musso acquired his famous knife.
I am only linking the old thread because we do not need this thread unnecessarily closed for offensive content. The take away for me is that there were other very similar knives in circulation around 1970, and that there appears to have been some branding confusion since it is questionable whether a knife associated with KKK would have been more desirable then one associated with the Alamo Jim Bowie knife.
Link:
https://bladeforums.com/threads/it-has-a-dark-history-but-i-want-to-learn-more-about-it.1634911/
We are not discussing the nefarious organization. We are only examining whether the Musso Bowie could have been just one of these same knives before the superfluous markings were applied? Since the Musso knife was only rediscovered and popularized during the 1980s, it would be very unlikely that other knives would have been made in homage to it during the 1960s.
n2s
