May 12, 2006
Did Bush Rob Geronimo’s Grave? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 03:00 PM EST For years there have been rumors that a bunch of members of Skull and Bones, the secret society at Yale, dug up the skull of the great Apache leader Geronimo from its resting place at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, stole it, and put it on permanent display at Skull and Bones headquarters in New Haven, where new members (presumably including both Presidents Bush and John Kerry) have had to kiss it as part of their initiation rite. And one of the group that is supposed to have done this was Prescott Bush—future senator, father of President George H. W. Bush, and grandfather of President George W. Bush. It sounds very unlikely on the face of it, but now, Yale Alumni Magazine tells us, there’s new evidence supporting the old tale, in a letter that was just discovered. “The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumbed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club & the K--t Haffner, is now safe inside the T-- together with his well worn femurs[,] bit & saddle horn,” wrote Winter Mead, a member of the club, on June 7, 1918. (“K--t” meant knight, a member of the club, and “T--” meant the Tomb, the clubhouse in New Haven.) The rumor last got attention in 1986 when Ned Anderson, an Apache leader who was campaigning to have Geronimo’s bones moved from Oklahoma to ancestral lands in Arizona, received an anonymous letter from someone who said he was a member of Skull and Bones and said they had the skull. The letter included a photograph. Anderson arranged a meeting with two Skull and Bones alumni, including George H. W. Bush’s brother Jonathan (being a Bonesman seems to be a requirement for being a Bush man). The two Bonesmen showed Anderson a skull the club owned but said it was of a ten-year-old boy. Anderson thought the skull didn’t look like the one in the picture, but nothing further happened. So the matter rested until Marc Wortman, another Yale alum, discovered the new letter in university archives while researching a book about Yale World War I aviators. What does it prove? The consensus seems to be that Skull and Bones, whose lips, as ever, are sealed (it is a secret society), but which has always liked to pilfer things in a spirit of college hijinks, did dig up a skull in Oklahoma in 1918 and does keep it, or one like it, on display by the front door. But Geronimo’s grave was unmarked and overgrown in 1918. David Miller, a history professor at Cameron University, in Lawton, Oklahoma, told Yale Alumni Magazine, “My assumption is that they did dig up somebody at Fort Sill. It could have been an Indian, but it probably wasn’t Geronimo.” One thing everything agrees is that robbing the Apache leader’s grave would have seemed a lot more acceptable then than today. As the Yale history professor emeritus Gaddis Smith puts it, “There was a racial consciousness and a sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority above all others.” In New Mexico, Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo is talking to lawyers. For more, see this article in the Yale Alumni Magazine.
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