The Man Beneath The Stone Eagle

At Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in a cemetery section called Apache Village, there is a grave marked with a cobblestone pyramid topped by a cast eagle.

Beneath it, according to the official record, rests Goyahkla — the man the world knows as Geronimo, the Apache leader whose name became synonymous with armed resistance, who fought the United States Army across the mountains and deserts of the Southwest for nearly thirty years, and who died as a prisoner of war in February 1909, never having been returned to his homeland.

Or does he rest there?

That is the question that has circulated for more than a century, growing from Skull and Bones legend to published letter to federal lawsuit to an unresolved controversy that involves Yale’s most famous secret society, a family of presidents, a San Carlos Apache tribal chairman who says he was offered the wrong skull, and descendants of Geronimo who have publicly called for DNA testing that might finally answer what happened to the remains of one of the most famous Indigenous leaders in American history.

The story of Geronimo’s missing skull is not primarily a story about a secret society or a political family, though those elements are present.

It is a story about what happened to a man who spent his last years as a government prisoner, and what may have happened to his body after he died, and what it means — to his descendants, to the Apache people, and to American history — that those questions remain unresolved after more than a century.

It is also, as of the twenty-first century, a story about what modern science might be able to do that no previous generation could: use DNA testing to compare genetic material from whatever remains exist to genetic material from known living descendants of Geronimo, and answer the question with evidence rather than legend.

That test has not been done.

The mystery remains open.

This is the story of why.

Goyahkla: The One Who Yawns

The man known as Geronimo was born around 1829 in what is now Arizona or New Mexico, in the country of the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua Apache.

His birth name, Goyahkla, translates roughly as “one who yawns” — not a name that would have predicted the life that followed.

The Chiricahua Apache were one of the major divisions of the Apache people, themselves one of the southern Athabascan-speaking peoples who had inhabited the mountains and desert country of what is now the southwestern United States and northern Mexico for centuries.

The Apache world in the early nineteenth century was organized around extended kinship groups — the local group, the band, and the larger tribal division — with leadership coming through demonstrated ability rather than strict hereditary succession.

Apache men became leaders by proving themselves as hunters, warriors, and providers for their communities.

Goyahkla grew up in this world, learning the specific skills — the geography of the mountains, the techniques of desert travel and survival, the protocols of Apache warfare and raiding — that defined competence in the life he was entering.