A week later, Tucker arranged for Collins to meet Patterson, and over agovernment-budget lunch of sandwiches and Diet Cokes in the Alamo offices, they hammered out the details. Patterson, a self-effacing Texas history buff whose tastes ran more to George Strait than to eighties pop, was excited, not so much because he was sitting down with a musical icon as because he realized what this deal could mean for the Alamo. During their conversation, Collins told Patterson that he expected everything to be displayed in one place, which Patterson agreed to. Patterson proposed that they enter into a contract obligating the state to reach a “schematic phase of build-out” on a “permanent museum and visitor center” by October 2021, or Collins would have the right to take his collection back.
“The contract was, like, three pages,” Patterson recalls. “I signed it, sent it to him, he signed it.” That agreement was publicly revealed a few months later, on June 26, 2014, during a press conference at the Alamo. “This completes the journey for me,” a beaming Collins said. “These artifacts are coming home.”
Patterson shook Collins’s hand, knowing his role was finished. He had lost a recent primary bid for lieutenant governor and hadn’t run for reelection as land commissioner. The hard work of turning the proposed deal into a reality would fall to someone else.
Perhaps that’s why no one on Patterson’s staff bothered to take a close look at Collins’s artifacts, to make sure they were authentic. It’s not, of course, unusual for an organization to accept a donation of historical items without checking their authenticity. What is unusual is for a reputable organization to agree to display a collection in its entirety (as Patterson did) without authenticating every item—and to commit itself to raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to house them on the mere assumption that they’re genuine.
Patterson left the details to his successor, a young man in a hurry whose family name is, in Texas, even more famous than Phil Collins’s. The new land commissioner, George P. Bush—grandson of one U.S. president, nephew of another, and son of former Florida governor Jeb Bush—took office the following January. He had big political ambitions that a major restoration of the Alamo would bolster.
What he didn’t know, or later, perhaps, pretended he didn’t know, was that while most of Collins’s collection apparently consisted of authentic documents and antiques, certain items may not have been what they seemed. Bush had no idea that he was walking into a battle royal between some very impassioned people that has been going on for years.