When Apache prisoners of war died at Fort Sill, they were buried with the attention that their community could provide.

The graves were marked.

The community maintained connection to its dead.

Geronimo’s grave, within this cemetery, was not simply the burial of an individual.

It was the grave of a community leader, the most famous of the Fort Sill Apache, and the person who had become, in the broader American imagination, the symbol of the Apache resistance.

The cobblestone pyramid and eagle monument that marks his grave today was reportedly built by Apache hands — the surviving prisoners who outlived him expressing their regard for a man who had been, in different ways, a representative of what they had lost.

When Skull and Bones members dug in this cemetery in 1918 — if they did — they were not digging in an anonymous military graveyard.