Geronimo's Skull

Prescott Bush's crew, the story goes, robbed a grave for the tomb's trophy case.

So here's where it gets strange. Geronimo, the legendary Apache leader, died in 1909 as a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He was buried there, in the Apache prisoner-of-war cemetery. And that, you'd think, would be the end of the story. Except there's a claim, whispered for a century, that Geronimo's grave was robbed. And not by ordinary grave robbers. By members of Yale's Skull and Bones society. Including, the story goes, a young soldier named Prescott Bush, the father and grandfather of two future presidents. Now, I want to be careful here, because this is a place where the documented and the legendary are braided so tightly it's hard to pull them apart. Let me show you both threads. Here's what's DOCUMENTED. In 1918, several young Bonesmen were stationed at Fort Sill during World War One. And there exists a real letter, written that same era by a Skull and Bones member named Winter Mead to another Bonesman, F. Trubee Davison. In that letter, Mead writes, and this is a genuine, archived document, that 'the skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible' had been 'exhumed' and now sat inside the Tomb at Yale, 'safe inside the T—together with his well worn femurs, bit & saddle horn.' That letter is real. Historians have seen it. Alexandra Robbins, who wrote a serious book on the society, reported on it. But here's the part most people don't know. Winter Mead wasn't even at Fort Sill. So the letter is, at best, secondhand, a member bragging about something he'd heard, not something he did. And when you actually dig into the geography and the timeline, the graves at Fort Sill weren't marked the way the story assumes, and it's genuinely unclear whether the correct grave could even have been found. So the core claim, that Bonesmen actually dug up Geronimo's remains and enshrined them at Yale, has never been proven. Then, in 2009, the legend collided with the real legal system. On the one hundredth anniversary of Geronimo's death, his descendants, led by Harlyn Geronimo, filed a lawsuit in federal court. They named Skull and Bones, Yale University, and the U.S. government, and they demanded the return of Geronimo's remains, wherever they were. That lawsuit is completely documented. It's public record. And here's how it ended. In 2010, a federal judge dismissed the case, ruling that the law the family relied on didn't apply to remains taken before it was enacted. The court never determined whether Skull and Bones actually had the skull. The mystery was never solved. It was simply closed. So what are we left with? A real letter. A real lawsuit. A real, aching desire by a family to bring their ancestor home. And at the very center, an unproven claim that may be true, may be a young man's dark boast, or may be something in between. On our map, Geronimo's skull hangs off a single thread, running straight back into the Tomb of Skull and Bones.