The Man Beneath The Stone Eagle<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Beneath it, according to the official record, rests Goyahkla \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
Or does he rest there?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 to his descendants, to the Apache people, and to American history \u2014 that those questions remain unresolved after more than a century.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
That test has not been done.<\/p>\n
The mystery remains open.<\/p>\n
This is the story of why.<\/p>\n
Goyahkla: The One Who Yawns<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
His birth name, Goyahkla, translates roughly as “one who yawns” \u2014 not a name that would have predicted the life that followed.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Apache world in the early nineteenth century was organized around extended kinship groups \u2014 the local group, the band, and the larger tribal division \u2014 with leadership coming through demonstrated ability rather than strict hereditary succession.<\/p>\n
Apache men became leaders by proving themselves as hunters, warriors, and providers for their communities.<\/p>\n
Goyahkla grew up in this world, learning the specific skills \u2014 the geography of the mountains, the techniques of desert travel and survival, the protocols of Apache warfare and raiding \u2014 that defined competence in the life he was entering.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He married young and began a family.<\/p>\n
In 1851, Mexican soldiers attacked his village while the men were in town trading.<\/p>\n
His mother, wife, and three children were killed.<\/p>\n
This event is described in his own autobiography \u2014 dictated through an interpreter in 1905 and published in 1906 \u2014 as the turning point of his life.<\/p>\n
The grief and rage it produced were permanent.<\/p>\n
He devoted himself to raiding and fighting the Mexicans, and eventually the Americans, with an intensity that became legendary.<\/p>\n
The Spanish name Geronimo \u2014 a version of the name Jerome \u2014 was reportedly applied to him by Mexican soldiers during raids, possibly because they called on Saint Jerome (San Ger\u00f3nimo) in fear or prayer during his attacks.<\/p>\n
The etymology is not perfectly documented, and other explanations have been offered, but the Mexican soldiers connection is the most commonly cited account.<\/p>\n
Whatever its origin, the name followed him into American documents, history books, and popular consciousness.<\/p>\n
Over the following decades, Goyahkla \u2014 Geronimo \u2014 became one of the most tenacious and elusive fighters on the Southern Apache frontier.<\/p>\n
He was not a hereditary chief in the formal sense; his status came from his effectiveness as a war leader and from the spiritual powers he claimed to possess.<\/p>\n
Apache oral tradition describes Geronimo as having specific abilities: the power to walk without leaving tracks, to predict the future, to render himself and his followers invisible to enemies.<\/p>\n
Whether these were literal beliefs or metaphorical descriptions of practical skills \u2014 uncanny reading of terrain, extraordinary situational awareness, the ability to move through country in ways that trained soldiers could not replicate \u2014 they expressed something real about his effectiveness.<\/p>\n
He was never easy to catch.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The terrain he knew \u2014 the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico, the Apache homeland of Arizona and New Mexico \u2014 was vast, rugged, and difficult for armies carrying supply trains and artillery.<\/p>\n
Geronimo and his followers moved differently than armies moved.<\/p>\n
They could travel days without stopping, endure conditions that broke horses and men, and find water where soldiers died of thirst.<\/p>\n
His resistance extended over three decades, through multiple agreements that he made and broke and multiple agreements that the U.S. government made and broke.<\/p>\n
He surrendered to General George Crook in 1886 \u2014 and then escaped, leading Crook’s replacement, General Nelson Miles, on a final pursuit through the borderlands that captured the imagination of newspaper readers across the country.<\/p>\n
His final surrender to Miles in September 1886 came with specific terms: he and his followers would be held in the east for two years and then returned to Arizona.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The government did not honor those terms.<\/p>\n
He and the other Apache prisoners were sent to Florida \u2014 first to Fort Pickens in Pensacola, then to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama \u2014 where the climate was so foreign to people from the desert Southwest that many died from respiratory illness and tuberculosis.<\/p>\n
A Prisoner In His Own Land<\/p>\n
By the time Geronimo was transferred to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1894, he had been a prisoner of war for eight years.<\/p>\n
He would remain one for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Fort Sill, in the Lawton area of what is now southwestern Oklahoma, was not a comfortable exile.<\/p>\n
The Oklahoma climate was closer to the Apache homeland than Florida or Alabama had been, and the land was more familiar in some ways.<\/p>\n
But it was still confinement.<\/p>\n
The Apache prisoners of war at Fort Sill were not permitted to return to Arizona.<\/p>\n
Geronimo would petition, through various intermediaries and through his own public appearances, for the rest of his life, seeking permission to return to the Chiricahua homeland.<\/p>\n
That permission was never granted.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Fort Sill years produced the paradox that defined the last chapter of Geronimo’s life: he was simultaneously the government’s prisoner and a celebrity.<\/p>\n
American popular culture had developed a fascination with him that coexisted uneasily with the government’s classification of him as a dangerous enemy.<\/p>\n
He appeared at the St.<\/p>\n
Louis World’s Fair in 1904, selling his photograph and his autograph.<\/p>\n
He rode in Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration parade in 1905 \u2014 though Roosevelt privately found the invitation controversial and resisted allowing it.<\/p>\n
He dictated his autobiography in 1905.<\/p>\n
He also continued to ask to go home.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The answer was always no.<\/p>\n
On February 11, 1909, Geronimo fell from his horse on a cold night and lay in the field for hours before being found.<\/p>\n
He was taken to the fort hospital with pneumonia.<\/p>\n
He died on February 17, 1909.<\/p>\n
He was about 79 or 80 years old.<\/p>\n
He had been a prisoner of war for 23 years.<\/p>\n
He was buried at Fort Sill, in the military cemetery section that held other Apache prisoners.<\/p>\n
The grave was marked.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A monument was later erected: the cobblestone pyramid, the eagle.<\/p>\n
That should have been the end of the story.<\/p>\n
It was not.<\/p>\n
Skull And Bones: What It Is And Why It Matters Here<\/p>\n
Yale University’s Skull and Bones is the oldest and most storied of American university secret societies.<\/p>\n
Founded in 1832, it selects approximately fifteen seniors per year \u2014 known as “tapping” \u2014 from Yale’s graduating class.<\/p>\n
Its membership over the years has included an extraordinary concentration of American political and economic power: senators, cabinet members, CIA directors, and two presidents among its alumni.<\/p>\n
Prescott Bush, William Howard Taft, George H.W.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Bush, and George W.<\/p>\n
Bush were all Skull and Bones members.<\/p>\n
The society operates from a building on the Yale campus known as the Tomb \u2014 a windowless, vault-like stone structure that non-members are not permitted to enter.<\/p>\n
The society maintains strict secrecy about its internal practices, and members traditionally decline to discuss what happens inside the Tomb.<\/p>\n
Various investigations and reports over the years have described the society’s initiation rituals and internal practices in general terms, often drawing on accounts from former members or people who claimed to have observed or learned about the proceedings.<\/p>\n
Among the most persistent elements of Skull and Bones lore is the collection of human skulls and bones said to be displayed within the Tomb.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The very name of the society evokes this: the skull and crossed bones is an ancient symbol of mortality, secret knowledge, and power over death.<\/p>\n
Various accounts over the decades have described displays of skulls and bones inside the Tomb, some specifically named.<\/p>\n
One skull, in multiple accounts, was said to be identified as belonging to Geronimo.<\/p>\n
This is where the Skull and Bones story intersects with the history of one of the most famous Apache people in American history, and where a piece of campus lore becomes a question about the dignity of human remains and the rights of Indigenous descendants.<\/p>\n
The 1918 Allegation: What Was Said And By Whom<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The specific account of Skull and Bones members digging up Geronimo’s grave emerged from a document prepared by the society itself in 1933, for the centennial celebration of Skull and Bones.<\/p>\n
The “Continuation of the History of Our Order for the Century Celebration” reportedly described the theft.<\/p>\n
The account names specific individuals who were allegedly involved: Prescott Bush, Henry Neil Mallon, and Ellery James, all of whom were stationed at Fort Sill in 1918 as part of Army artillery training during World War I.<\/p>\n
According to this account, Bush and his companions dug up what they believed to be Geronimo’s grave at Fort Sill in May 1918 \u2014 nine years after Geronimo’s death \u2014 and removed the skull, some bones, and personal items.<\/p>\n
These remains were allegedly taken back to Yale and installed in the Tomb.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This account remained internal to Skull and Bones until various researchers and journalists began investigating it, and it gained significant public attention through the work of various writers including Alexandra Robbins, whose 2002 book “Secrets of the Tomb” discussed the Geronimo legend in the context of the society’s broader practices.<\/p>\n
But the account might have remained entirely in the realm of legend and speculation if not for a discovery made in 2005 by historian Marc Wortman.<\/p>\n
Wortman was at Yale’s Sterling Library, researching a book about Yale men who became pilots in World War I, when he came across a letter in the university’s archives that he had not been looking for.<\/p>\n
The Letter<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The letter is dated June 7, 1918 \u2014 written within weeks of the alleged grave robbery.<\/p>\n
It was written by Winter Mead, a member of Skull and Bones in the class of 1919, to F.<\/p>\n
Trubee Davison, a Skull and Bones member of the class of 1918.<\/p>\n
Davison was an important figure in Yale’s World War I aviation program and later became a trustee of the university.<\/p>\n
The relevant portion of the letter, as it has been published and quoted in multiple sources, reads:<\/p>\n
“The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club and Knight Haffuer, is now safe inside the T\u2014 together with his well-worn femurs, bit and saddle horn.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The “T\u2014” is a reference to the Tomb, the Skull and Bones clubhouse on the Yale campus.<\/p>\n
Mead’s letter is a remarkable document.<\/p>\n
Written within months of the alleged theft, by a person who was at Yale rather than Fort Sill, it represents the reaction of a fellow Skull and Bones member to news of what his compatriots had done.<\/p>\n
The letter names specific individuals: “your club and Knight Haffuer” \u2014 Knight Haffuer being the Yale class of 1920 member Charles C.<\/p>\n
Haffner Jr., who was at Fort Sill in 1918.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The letter describes what was allegedly removed: the skull, femur bones, and personal items including what sounds like horse tack.<\/p>\n
Wortman discovered this letter while not looking for it, which lends credibility to his account of the discovery.<\/p>\n
He has stated that while the letter supports the legend’s general outline, he is skeptical that the bones described in the letter are actually Geronimo’s.<\/p>\n
A night-time grave robbery in 1918, conducted by men who were not familiar with the specific grave’s exact location, might easily have disturbed the wrong grave.<\/p>\n
The letter is, as the History Blog analysis noted, circumstantial evidence \u2014 written by someone who was not present at Fort Sill, reporting what he had been told by others.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is evidence that Skull and Bones members in 1918 believed they had Geronimo’s remains.<\/p>\n
Whether what they actually dug up was Geronimo’s grave is a separate question.<\/p>\n
Ned Anderson And The Meeting That Raised More Questions<\/p>\n
The story of the possible Skull and Bones theft of Geronimo’s remains might have remained a matter of legend and a single letter if not for events in the 1980s.<\/p>\n
Ned Anderson was the tribal chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona in 1986.<\/p>\n
His specific Apache tribal affiliation is noted because it is relevant: the San Carlos Apache and the Chiricahua Apache \u2014 the group to which Geronimo belonged \u2014 are related but distinct Apache communities.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Anderson was attempting to secure the repatriation of Geronimo’s remains to Arizona, where the Chiricahua homeland is.<\/p>\n
Anderson had obtained a document \u2014 a one-page account that he said described the Skull and Bones theft in specific detail \u2014 and a photograph that he said showed a skull in a glass case inside the Tomb.<\/p>\n
These materials came to him through channels that he has not fully described, and the provenance of the document and photograph has been a persistent source of uncertainty in assessing the overall evidence.<\/p>\n
Anderson contacted Yale and the Bush family and eventually arranged a meeting in Washington, D.C., or New York \u2014 accounts of the meeting’s location vary \u2014 with Jonathan Bush, the son of Prescott Bush, and other Skull and Bones representatives.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
At the meeting, Anderson says, he was shown a glass case containing what appeared to be a skull.<\/p>\n
But Anderson concluded that the skull he was shown was not the same one depicted in the photograph he had brought \u2014 specifically, he said the skull looked like that of a child, not an adult.<\/p>\n
The Skull and Bones representatives, by Anderson’s account, urged him to sign a statement acknowledging that the organization did not possess Geronimo’s remains.<\/p>\n
Anderson refused.<\/p>\n
He says he was also asked to return the photograph, and that when he declined, Skull and Bones threatened legal action.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Anderson later said that he believed the skull he was shown was a substitute \u2014 that Skull and Bones had presented a different skull to him, perhaps hoping he would accept it as Geronimo’s and sign the statement clearing the organization.<\/p>\n
This account \u2014 a meeting at which possible human remains were produced, possibly substituted, and accompanied by requests to sign exculpatory statements \u2014 raised the stakes of the controversy considerably.<\/p>\n
Skull and Bones has consistently denied possessing Geronimo’s remains.<\/p>\n
The 2009 Lawsuit And Its Outcome<\/p>\n
In 2009, Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo and other descendants filed a federal lawsuit seeking to compel the return of Geronimo’s remains from Skull and Bones, the U.S.<\/p>\n
Army, and the federal government.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The lawsuit was filed under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act \u2014 NAGPRA \u2014 the 1990 federal law that requires federal agencies and institutions receiving federal funding to inventory their holdings of Native American human remains and associated objects and to return them to affiliated tribes upon request.<\/p>\n
The case involved significant questions about NAGPRA’s applicability.<\/p>\n
NAGPRA applies to federal agencies and institutions receiving federal funding; Skull and Bones, as a private organization, arguably falls outside its scope.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit named multiple defendants, including the federal government, because Geronimo’s original grave at Fort Sill is on federal property.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit was represented by Ramsey Clark, who had served as Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson, and who stated the goal clearly: “In this lawsuit, we’re going to find out if the bones are there or not.”<\/p>\n
The federal lawsuit was ultimately dismissed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The court ruled that it was filed too late under the applicable statute of limitations \u2014 NAGPRA requires that lawsuits be filed within a certain period of the discovery of the claimed violation, and the court found that the applicable period had run.<\/p>\n
The dismissal did not resolve the underlying question of where Geronimo’s remains are.<\/p>\n
It resolved only the specific legal mechanism through which the descendants sought to answer that question.<\/p>\n
The mystery remained open.<\/p>\n
Geronimo’s Life And The Apache Resistance: Historical Context<\/p>\n
To understand why the question of Geronimo’s remains matters as much as it does, you have to understand what Geronimo represented \u2014 and what the Apache resistance of the late nineteenth century was about.<\/p>\n
The Chiricahua Apache had lived in the mountain country of what is now southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, and the adjacent areas of northern Mexico for generations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Their traditional territory was not flat, accessible country \u2014 it was the rugged terrain of the Dragoon Mountains, the Chiricahua Mountains, the Dos Cabezas Mountains, the Sierra Madre of Mexico.<\/p>\n
This geography was home country for the Chiricahua; it was difficult, hostile terrain for everyone else.<\/p>\n
The Apache world was organized around small, mobile groups \u2014 extended family units called local groups \u2014 that moved through this terrain following seasonal resources and conducting raiding activities against the more settled peoples to the south.<\/p>\n
Raiding was not the same as warfare in Apache culture; it was a method of economic acquisition, distinct from warring, which was conducted for purposes of revenge or protection.<\/p>\n
The distinction mattered in Apache practice but was not well understood by Spanish, Mexican, or American authorities, who typically experienced both as simply “Apache attacks.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The relationship between the Apache and both Mexico and the United States was defined by cycles of conflict, tentative peace, and renewed conflict throughout the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n
The influx of American settlers into the Arizona and New Mexico territories after the Civil War, the discovery of silver at Tombstone in 1877 and the resulting boom in Anglo settlement, and the policy decisions of Army commanders who varied enormously in their approaches to Apache communities produced a situation of chronic instability.<\/p>\n
The Cochise years \u2014 the period when the Chiricahua chief Cochise maintained a period of relative peace after the disaster of the Bascom Affair in 1861 \u2014 showed that agreements were possible.<\/p>\n
Cochise’s death in 1874 and the dissolution of the Chiricahua Reservation in 1876, which concentrated the Chiricahua at the hated San Carlos Reservation in Arizona’s hot lowland desert country, re-ignited the conflict.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Geronimo was not always the central figure.<\/p>\n
There were other leaders \u2014 Cochise, Victorio, Nana, Naiche \u2014 who played important roles in different phases of the Apache resistance.<\/p>\n
But Geronimo’s tenacity, his ability to evade capture, and his willingness to continue fighting long after most of the Chiricahua had settled on reservations made him the enduring symbol of that resistance in the American imagination.<\/p>\n
What Geronimo Himself Said<\/p>\n
Geronimo’s autobiography, dictated to Asa Daklugie through an interpreter and published in 1906 as “Geronimo: His Own Story,” provides a first-person account of his life that is valuable not as a straightforward factual record \u2014 like all autobiographies, it reflects the perspective and concerns of its subject \u2014 but as evidence of how he understood his own experience.<\/p>\n
The autobiography describes the events of his life in terms that are direct and specific: the attack on his village, the death of his family, the specific engagements of the various campaigns.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He describes his spiritual practices and the powers he claimed to possess without apology.<\/p>\n
He describes the process of the various surrenders and the negotiations around them.<\/p>\n
He also describes the experience of captivity with clarity.<\/p>\n
He was an old man by 1905, with years of experience trying to persuade the American public and government of the injustice of continued captivity.<\/p>\n
The autobiography was partly an appeal for sympathy and partly an act of historical documentation.<\/p>\n
He remained, to the end of his life, someone who had not accepted the permanent justice of what had been done to him and his people.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The request to return to Arizona, repeated through multiple petitions and public statements, reflected something more than nostalgia.<\/p>\n
He understood the Apache homeland \u2014 the specific mountains, the specific rivers, the specific sacred places \u2014 as the context within which life and death had proper meaning.<\/p>\n
He wanted to be buried there.<\/p>\n
He was not permitted to be.<\/p>\n
Fort Sill And The Apache Prisoners<\/p>\n
The Apache who were held as prisoners of war at Fort Sill after their transfer from Alabama in 1894 were not just Geronimo’s band.<\/p>\n
They were a larger group of Chiricahua Apache, including people who had not been active participants in the resistance \u2014 people who had been living peacefully on the reservation in Arizona when the government decided to remove all Chiricahua as a consequence of the actions of Geronimo’s band.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The prisoner-of-war status of the Fort Sill Apache is a specific historical category that matters.<\/p>\n
These were not people who had been convicted of crimes.<\/p>\n
They were people who had been designated as military prisoners because of their ethnic identity \u2014 because they were Chiricahua Apache \u2014 and held under military authority at Fort Sill for twenty-seven years, from 1894 to 1913.<\/p>\n
During those years, they established communities, built houses, farmed, and attempted to maintain their cultural practices under the constraints of military supervision.<\/p>\n
They also died in significant numbers: the Fort Sill Apache prisoners buried at the Apache Village cemetery represent people who died in government captivity far from their homeland.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This matters for the Skull and Bones story because it means that the Fort Sill Apache cemetery in 1918 contained multiple Apache graves, all in an area where a grave-robbing party might have been confused about which grave belonged to which person.<\/p>\n
The grave of Geronimo was presumably marked, but the quality of grave markers in military cemeteries of that period was not uniform, and night-time operations by people who were artillery students rather than professional grave robbers might have disturbed the wrong grave.<\/p>\n
Marc Wortman, who discovered the 1918 letter, has stated his own skepticism that the grave disturbed in 1918 was actually Geronimo’s.<\/p>\n
Others have been less skeptical.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Landscape Of Evidence: What We Know And Don’t Know<\/p>\n
It is important to be precise about what the evidence in this case actually establishes, because the story has been told with different degrees of precision in different contexts.<\/p>\n
What is established:<\/p>\n
Geronimo died at Fort Sill on February 17, 1909, and was buried in the Apache Village cemetery.<\/p>\n
A letter dated June 7, 1918, written by Winter Mead and found in Yale’s Sterling Library archives, describes the alleged removal of remains identified as Geronimo’s from Fort Sill and their transportation to the Skull and Bones Tomb at Yale.<\/p>\n
The letter is addressed to F.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Trubee Davison and names other individuals, including “Knight Haffuer” (Charles C.<\/p>\n
Haffner Jr.).<\/p>\n
Marc Wortman found this letter in 2005 while researching an unrelated subject.<\/p>\n
The letter is contemporaneous \u2014 written within months of the alleged events it describes \u2014 but is written by someone who was at Yale, not Fort Sill.<\/p>\n
Skull and Bones, as an organization, has denied possessing Geronimo’s remains.<\/p>\n
Yale University, as an institution, has stated that it does not possess Geronimo’s remains and does not own the Skull and Bones building or property.<\/p>\n
What is not established:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Whether the remains described in the 1918 letter are actually Geronimo’s, or the remains of another Apache person buried at Fort Sill.<\/p>\n
Whether those remains are still at the Skull and Bones Tomb, or were moved at some point in the more than a century since 1918.<\/p>\n
Whether the skull shown to Ned Anderson in the 1980s was genuinely connected to any 1918 grave robbery, or whether the entire encounter was a performance designed to produce the statement Anderson was asked to sign.<\/p>\n
Whether Geronimo’s actual remains are fully intact at Fort Sill or were disturbed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The gap between what is established and what is not established is large.<\/p>\n
The 1918 letter is evidence that Skull and Bones members in 1918 believed they had Geronimo’s skull.<\/p>\n
It is not evidence that they actually had it.<\/p>\n
And it is not evidence about where anything is today.<\/p>\n
CT Insider’s 2023 Investigation<\/p>\n
In 2023, the CT Insider \u2014 the Connecticut Insider, a Hearst publication \u2014 published an investigation that added new documentary evidence to the story.<\/p>\n
The investigation, by reporter Ben Lambert, uncovered additional unpublished letters from the same collection at Yale’s archives that contained the 2006 Wortman letter.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
These additional letters, according to the CT Insider report, corroborate aspects of the original account and suggest that multiple Skull and Bones members in the 1918 period believed their fellow members had stolen Geronimo’s skull and brought it to the Tomb.<\/p>\n
The CT Insider report also included interviews with two descendants of Geronimo who stated that any skulls and other human remains that Skull and Bones took from Fort Sill should be subjected to DNA testing \u2014 a process they said they would be willing to participate in.<\/p>\n
This was a significant development in the public discussion of the case.<\/p>\n
The descendants were not just asserting that the remains should be returned; they were proposing a specific scientific mechanism for resolving the factual question of identification.<\/p>\n
Their willingness to provide DNA for comparative testing changes the nature of the mystery.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If Skull and Bones, or any other party, were to allow DNA extraction from the skull or other remains alleged to be Geronimo’s, that material could be compared to DNA from known descendants.<\/p>\n
If the remains are Geronimo’s, the comparison would show a match with what geneticists call matrilineal or patrilineal ancestry markers.<\/p>\n
If they are not Geronimo’s, the comparison would show no match \u2014 but might still identify whose remains they are, if the DNA could be compared to a broader database of Apache genetic profiles.<\/p>\n
The technology to do this accurately exists.<\/p>\n
The willingness of descendants to participate in the testing has been stated publicly.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The question is whether anyone with access to the relevant remains will allow the testing to proceed.<\/p>\n
DNA Testing: The Science Behind The Possibility<\/p>\n
The prospect of DNA testing in this case deserves careful explanation, because the promise of such testing is real but also limited in specific ways.<\/p>\n
Ancient DNA analysis \u2014 the extraction and sequencing of genetic material from old biological samples \u2014 has advanced dramatically in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n
Samples that would have yielded nothing useful to 1990s-era laboratory techniques can now produce readable genetic information.<\/p>\n
The key factors are the condition of the sample (cold, dry conditions preserve DNA best), the type of material (tooth enamel and dense bone preserve DNA better than soft tissue), and the sophistication of the laboratory work.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Human remains from 1909 to 1918 are not “ancient” in the sense that archaeologists usually use the term \u2014 they are relatively recent by the standards of ancient DNA work.<\/p>\n
Under favorable preservation conditions, remains of this age would very likely contain extractable DNA.<\/p>\n
The specific comparison needed in this case is between the genetic profile of the remains in question and the genetic profiles of known descendants of Geronimo.<\/p>\n
For this comparison to be definitive, geneticists would need to choose the appropriate genetic markers.<\/p>\n
The most useful markers for this purpose would be:<\/p>\n
Y-chromosome analysis, if the remains are male and if the DNA from the Y chromosome is preserved.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Y chromosome passes from father to son with little change across generations.<\/p>\n
If Geronimo’s Y chromosome profile could be determined, it could be compared to the Y chromosome profiles of his known male-line descendants.<\/p>\n
Mitochondrial DNA, which passes from mother to children.<\/p>\n
Mitochondrial DNA can be used to trace matrilineal ancestry.<\/p>\n
If Geronimo had grandchildren or great-grandchildren through his daughters, their mitochondrial DNA would match his own mitochondrial DNA, which would in turn match that of his mother and his matrilineal ancestors.<\/p>\n
The limitations of this comparison are important to understand:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A positive match would provide strong evidence but not absolute certainty.<\/p>\n
Geronimo had relatives \u2014 members of his extended family, members of the same Apache lineage group \u2014 whose DNA would overlap with his in certain markers.<\/p>\n
A match would indicate that the remains are from someone closely related to his known descendants; determining whether that person is specifically Geronimo would require additional analysis and the assessment of historical context.<\/p>\n
A negative match \u2014 if the DNA from the remains does not match the DNA of Geronimo’s descendants \u2014 would be more definitively informative.<\/p>\n
It would establish that the remains are not Geronimo’s, though they might still belong to another member of the Fort Sill Apache community.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The DNA testing scenario also assumes that extractable DNA remains in whatever sample is available.<\/p>\n
This cannot be guaranteed without laboratory analysis.<\/p>\n
The Harlyn Geronimo Perspective<\/p>\n
Harlyn Geronimo is one of the most prominent descendants of Geronimo to have publicly engaged with the skull mystery.<\/p>\n
As Geronimo’s great-grandson, he has been involved in the advocacy for return of remains and the advocacy for DNA testing.<\/p>\n
Harlyn Geronimo has stated in multiple contexts that his family and Apache descendants are willing to participate in DNA testing to resolve the identity question.<\/p>\n
He has also expressed the view that if the remains at Yale or elsewhere are not Geronimo’s, they likely belong to another Apache prisoner who died at Fort Sill \u2014 which would make them equally deserving of return and proper treatment under NAGPRA and basic principles of human dignity.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“I believe it’s a good cause because indigenous people over the century have been annihilated, removed from their homeland,” he said at a press conference in Washington.<\/p>\n
His perspective reflects the dual concern that animates the descendants’ position: the specific question of what happened to Geronimo’s remains, and the broader question of how any Apache remains came to be in the possession of a private elite organization.<\/p>\n
Even if the skull at Skull and Bones is not Geronimo’s \u2014 even if it belongs to an unknown Apache soldier or prisoner \u2014 the question of its return and proper treatment would remain.<\/p>\n
NAGPRA was designed to address exactly this category of situation: Indigenous human remains held by institutions or organizations, separated from their communities of origin.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The skull mystery is, from this perspective, one particular and high-profile instance of a broader problem that affects thousands of Native American individuals whose remains are held in institutional collections across the country.<\/p>\n
The Prescott Bush Connection: What It Adds<\/p>\n
The involvement of Prescott Bush in the alleged 1918 grave robbery has given the story a political dimension that has both helped and complicated the historical inquiry.<\/p>\n
Prescott Bush was a United States Senator from Connecticut from 1952 to 1963.<\/p>\n
His son George Herbert Walker Bush was the forty-first President of the United States.<\/p>\n
His grandson George W.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Bush was the forty-third President.<\/p>\n
The Bush family’s association with one of the most powerful and secretive of American elite institutions is a fact, and the alleged involvement of Prescott Bush in the grave robbery is part of the account that multiple sources reference.<\/p>\n
The Bush family has not addressed the Geronimo skull allegation directly in detail.<\/p>\n
Skull and Bones has denied possessing Geronimo’s remains.<\/p>\n
The political dimension of the story has made it attractive to a certain kind of investigative journalism but has also, arguably, complicated the historical inquiry by attaching it to family political controversies that are separate from the specific factual question of where Geronimo’s remains are.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The historical question \u2014 what happened at Fort Sill in 1918, and where are the removed remains now \u2014 would be equally important if the people allegedly involved were entirely anonymous rather than connected to prominent political families.<\/p>\n
The family connection is historically interesting but should not be allowed to distract from the underlying question about the dignity of Apache remains.<\/p>\n
Fort Sill Today: The Apache Prisoners Of War<\/p>\n
Fort Sill, Oklahoma, remains an active military installation \u2014 one of the oldest continuously active Army posts in the United States.<\/p>\n
The Apache prisoner-of-war cemetery, called Apache Village, is located within the installation.<\/p>\n
The Fort Sill Apache Tribe \u2014 the descendants of the Fort Sill Apache prisoners of war who remained in Oklahoma after the release of the POW status in 1913 \u2014 is a federally recognized tribe headquartered at Lawton, Oklahoma.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Their history is directly connected to the Fort Sill cemetery and the remains of the people buried there.<\/p>\n
The Chiricahua Apache who were eventually allowed to return to the Southwest settled in New Mexico, in the area of the Mescalero Apache Reservation, becoming part of what is now the Fort Sill Apache Tribe of Oklahoma (those who remained) and contributing to the Mescalero Apache Tribe in New Mexico (those who returned west).<\/p>\n
The specific question of jurisdiction over Geronimo’s remains is complicated by this history.<\/p>\n
Geronimo was Chiricahua Apache.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The descendants who have been most publicly involved in the skull controversy \u2014 Harlyn Geronimo and his family \u2014 are members of the Mescalero Apache Tribe in New Mexico.<\/p>\n
The San Carlos Apache, from whom Ned Anderson came, are a separate Apache tribe.<\/p>\n
The Fort Sill Apache Tribe has its own interest in the matter.<\/p>\n
This complexity is not unusual in NAGPRA cases involving very old remains; the question of which contemporary tribal community is most closely affiliated with specific historical individuals often requires careful genealogical and historical analysis.<\/p>\n
Apache Spiritual Perspectives On Remains<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Any honest account of the Geronimo skull mystery must include the fact that Apache perspectives on the proper treatment of the dead are specific and important, and that those perspectives complicate the question of what the optimal resolution of this situation would look like.<\/p>\n
The Apache approach to death and burial, across various Apache communities, traditionally emphasizes minimal disturbance of the dead.<\/p>\n
Various Apache communities have described traditional practices that include not returning to a person’s grave after burial, not speaking the name of the deceased, and treating everything associated with the dead as potentially dangerous or spiritually significant.<\/p>\n
Craig Houser, identified in one published account as an Apache cultural expert, is quoted as saying: “Apaches were nomadic people.<\/p>\n
When somebody is buried we traditionally do not revisit the grave.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We don’t make a big deal out of it.”<\/p>\n
This perspective matters in two ways for the skull mystery.<\/p>\n
First, it suggests that for some Apache people, the appropriate response to the uncertainty about Geronimo’s remains might be to leave them undisturbed rather than to excavate, test, and rebury.<\/p>\n
If Geronimo’s remains are at Fort Sill and largely intact, disturbing them for DNA testing might itself be considered inappropriate from a traditional perspective.<\/p>\n
Second, it suggests that the question of what the “right” resolution of the Geronimo skull controversy would look like is not a simple matter that can be answered by pointing to NAGPRA requirements or DNA testing procedures.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The wishes and perspectives of the diverse Apache communities connected to this history must be part of any genuine consultation process.<\/p>\n
Different descendants and community members have expressed different views.<\/p>\n
Some have actively called for DNA testing and repatriation.<\/p>\n
Others have expressed the view that the dead should be left in peace.<\/p>\n
Both perspectives reflect genuine Apache traditions and genuine concerns for the dignity of the deceased.<\/p>\n
The Broader Context: Native American Remains In Collections<\/p>\n
The Geronimo skull mystery is extraordinary in its specifics \u2014 the famous name, the elite secret society, the presidential family connection, the federal lawsuit \u2014 but it reflects a broader situation that is not extraordinary at all.<\/p>\n
Thousands of Native American individuals’ remains are held in museum collections, university collections, and private collections across the United States.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This accumulation happened for various reasons over many decades: scientific collecting during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when physical anthropology was a major field that studied human populations partly by collecting skeletal material; grave robbing motivated by curiosity, tradition (as in the Skull and Bones case), or profit; the excavation of archaeological sites that disturbed burials; and the collection of remains from battlefields and conflict sites.<\/p>\n
NAGPRA, passed in 1990, was a major step toward addressing this situation.<\/p>\n
The law requires federal agencies and federally funded institutions to inventory their holdings and work with affiliated tribes toward repatriation.<\/p>\n
Significant progress has been made: thousands of individuals’ remains have been returned to their communities of origin.<\/p>\n
But the NAGPRA process has also been slow, contentious, and in some cases effectively stalled.<\/p>\n
Institutions have sometimes been resistant to the requirements of the law.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The determination of cultural affiliation \u2014 which tribe has the strongest claim to particular remains \u2014 has sometimes been genuinely difficult and sometimes been made in ways that serving institutional convenience rather than the interests of the most closely connected communities.<\/p>\n
The Geronimo case involves a private organization \u2014 Skull and Bones \u2014 that may or may not be covered by NAGPRA depending on whether it can be demonstrated to receive federal funding.<\/p>\n
This ambiguity is itself part of why the federal lawsuit was complicated and ultimately unsuccessful.<\/p>\n
The Archaeology Of Geronimo’s Grave<\/p>\n
One approach to resolving the mystery that has been discussed but not definitively pursued is a careful archaeological examination of Geronimo’s actual grave at Fort Sill.<\/p>\n
If the grave could be examined \u2014 using ground-penetrating radar or other non-invasive techniques \u2014 and if the examination confirmed that the grave is undisturbed and contains the complete remains of an adult male, that would provide significant evidence that the 1918 grave robbery, if it occurred at all, disturbed a different grave.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This approach would require the cooperation of Fort Sill, which maintains the cemetery, and ideally the consultation of the Apache communities connected to the site.<\/p>\n
It would also raise the same questions about the appropriateness of disturbing the dead that any examination of the grave would raise.<\/p>\n
Ground-penetrating radar and similar technologies can detect the presence of buried remains without excavation.<\/p>\n
Such technology has been used at other historical sites to assess the condition and extent of burials without the more disruptive process of actual excavation.<\/p>\n
Whether this approach has been formally proposed to Fort Sill authorities, and what the response has been, is not fully documented in the public record.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Question Of What Skull And Bones Actually Has<\/p>\n
The most direct path to resolving the mystery would be for Skull and Bones to allow an examination of whatever human remains they possess and to allow DNA testing of any skulls associated with the Geronimo legend.<\/p>\n
This has not happened.<\/p>\n
The organization has denied possessing Geronimo’s remains and has not, as far as the public record shows, offered to submit any of its holdings to examination or testing.<\/p>\n
The reasons for this refusal could be multiple.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The organization’s fundamental commitment to secrecy makes any external examination of its holdings inconsistent with its identity as an institution.<\/p>\n
If the organization truly does not possess Geronimo’s remains, there may be other reasons not to invite examination \u2014 the presence of other human remains that might raise their own questions.<\/p>\n
If the organization does possess remains associated with the 1918 grave robbery, the decision about what to do with those remains is complicated by the uncertainty about whose remains they are and by the legal and reputational implications of any acknowledgment.<\/p>\n
Alexandra Robbins, author of “Secrets of the Tomb,” has noted another consideration: even if Skull and Bones possessed Geronimo’s skull at some point, the skull might not be there now.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
With approximately 800 living Skull and Bones members at any given time, any of them could have moved the skull at any point in the past century.<\/p>\n
The trail, if there was one, might be cold.<\/p>\n
The skull shown to Ned Anderson in the 1980s \u2014 which Anderson concluded was either the wrong skull or a substitute \u2014 may or may not have been connected to the 1918 grave robbery.<\/p>\n
The meeting itself, and the request that Anderson sign a statement clearing Skull and Bones, suggests that the organization was managing a sensitive situation \u2014 though whether that sensitivity was about actual possession of Apache remains or about reputational concerns related to the legend is not clear.<\/p>\n
Geronimo As Historical Figure: Beyond The Mystery<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The skull mystery, dramatic as it is, risks reducing Geronimo to a mystery rather than a historical figure.<\/p>\n
He was one of the most significant Indigenous leaders of the nineteenth century, and his life and the history of the Apache resistance deserve to be understood on their own terms.<\/p>\n
Geronimo’s significance is not primarily military.<\/p>\n
He was an important war leader, but there were other Apache war leaders of comparable or greater military significance.<\/p>\n
His significance is partly symbolic: he became, in American culture, the emblem of Indigenous resistance, the face that appeared on trading cards and in newspaper illustrations and eventually on postage stamps and in popular culture references so numerous that his name became a word \u2014 a word shouted by paratroopers jumping from planes, a word that entered multiple languages as a general exclamation.<\/p>\n
That symbolism has complex dimensions.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The same American culture that made Geronimo famous had also imprisoned him for twenty-three years without trial, violated the terms of his surrender, and denied him the right to return to his homeland.<\/p>\n
The celebrity it extended to him as an old man \u2014 the World’s Fair appearances, the inauguration parade \u2014 coexisted with the continued refusal to grant the specific request he kept making: go home.<\/p>\n
Understanding Geronimo as a historical figure rather than merely a symbol requires engaging with the specific history of Chiricahua Apache sovereignty, the specific failures of U.S. policy in the Southwest, and the specific experience of the Apache prisoners at Fort Sill \u2014 a community that maintained their identity and culture through more than two decades of captivity.<\/p>\n
His autobiography provides a starting point.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The oral histories and scholarship of Apache historians and community members provide additional depth.<\/p>\n
The work of historians like Karl Jacoby and others who have engaged seriously with the Apache side of the nineteenth-century Southwest conflict offers the kind of perspective that balances the military and political history with the human experience.<\/p>\n
The Apache Community Today: Descendants And Living History<\/p>\n
The Apache people \u2014 the various Apache communities that include the descendants of the nineteenth-century Apache leaders and the Fort Sill prisoners \u2014 are living communities in the twenty-first century, with their own governments, their own cultural programs, and their own ongoing relationships with the history of the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n
The Mescalero Apache Tribe in New Mexico includes descendants of the Chiricahua Apache who were allowed to return to the Southwest after the end of the Fort Sill prisoner-of-war period.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The tribe is federally recognized and maintains its own government at Mescalero, New Mexico, near Ruidoso.<\/p>\n
The Fort Sill Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, headquartered in Lawton, represents the descendants of the Fort Sill prisoners who remained in Oklahoma.<\/p>\n
It is also federally recognized.<\/p>\n
The White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona, the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona, the Jicarilla Apache Nation in New Mexico, and the Tonto Apache Tribe in Arizona are other federally recognized Apache communities, each with their own histories and their own relationships to the Apache past.<\/p>\n
These communities have their own perspectives on Geronimo, on the skull mystery, and on the appropriate resolution.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Those perspectives are not uniform.<\/p>\n
Some members prioritize the return of remains and see DNA testing as a necessary tool.<\/p>\n
Others, as noted, prioritize leaving the dead in peace.<\/p>\n
Some see the skull mystery as a high-profile case that could draw attention to broader NAGPRA issues affecting many Apache individuals’ remains.<\/p>\n
Others see it as a distraction from more pressing concerns.<\/p>\n
Consulting the perspectives of these communities \u2014 rather than treating the skull mystery primarily as a story about Yale’s secret societies or presidential family connections \u2014 is essential to understanding what the resolution of this question would actually mean.<\/p>\n
What NAGPRA Requires And What It Cannot Do<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 provides a federal legal framework for the repatriation of Native American human remains and cultural items from institutions receiving federal funding.<\/p>\n
NAGPRA’s requirements are specific:<\/p>\n
Federal agencies and institutions receiving federal funding must inventory their holdings of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.<\/p>\n
They must consult with culturally affiliated tribes and lineal descendants.<\/p>\n
Upon request from affiliated tribes or descendants, they must return the remains and items.<\/p>\n
NAGPRA also applies to graves on federal and tribal lands, prohibiting excavation without appropriate permissions and requiring that remains discovered on federal land be handled in consultation with affiliated tribes.<\/p>\n
The Geronimo skull controversy sits in an uncomfortable relationship with NAGPRA for several reasons.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Skull and Bones, as a private organization, is not clearly covered by NAGPRA unless it can be demonstrated to receive federal funding or fall within another NAGPRA category.<\/p>\n
The federal government’s obligation under NAGPRA relates primarily to the grave at Fort Sill \u2014 which is on federal property \u2014 rather than to whatever may or may not be at Yale.<\/p>\n
If bones were removed from Geronimo’s grave at Fort Sill in 1918, that removal was a violation of the grave \u2014 but NAGPRA was not enacted until 1990, and the question of whether its remedial provisions apply to the 1918 removal is legally complex.<\/p>\n
The 2009 federal lawsuit attempted to use NAGPRA as the legal mechanism for compelling return, and the court’s dismissal on statute of limitations grounds left the underlying question about NAGPRA applicability unresolved.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The most straightforward application of NAGPRA’s principles to this case would involve a formal inventory by Skull and Bones of any human remains in its possession, identification of any Apache remains through archaeological or DNA analysis, and return of those remains to the most closely affiliated Apache community.<\/p>\n
Whether any of these steps can be legally compelled, absent Skull and Bones’ voluntary cooperation, is uncertain.<\/p>\n
The Photograph And The Document: Evidence Anderson Claimed To Possess<\/p>\n
Ned Anderson’s 1986 account includes two pieces of alleged documentary evidence whose current status and reliability are uncertain: a document he said described the theft in specific terms, and a photograph he said showed a skull in a glass case inside the Skull and Bones Tomb.<\/p>\n
Anderson reportedly provided the photograph to Jonathan Bush and the Skull and Bones representatives at their meeting, and the organization allegedly threatened legal action if the photograph was not returned.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The document Anderson received \u2014 the one-page account of the Skull and Bones theft \u2014 has been the subject of some analysis.<\/p>\n
The Santa Fe Reporter account of the story notes that this document’s provenance is not fully established, and that its relationship to the authenticated 1918 Wortman letter is unclear.<\/p>\n
If the photograph exists and can be located \u2014 if Anderson retained copies, or if others have access to it \u2014 it could provide visual evidence about the skull claimed to be Geronimo’s.<\/p>\n
A skull in a glass case inside the Tomb, photographed at a specific time, could potentially be compared to forensic records of what Geronimo’s skull would have looked like based on photographs taken during his lifetime.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This comparison would not be definitive \u2014 cranial morphology assessment from photographs has significant limitations \u2014 but it might provide additional circumstantial information about whether the skull in the photograph could plausibly be Geronimo’s.<\/p>\n
The photograph’s current location, and whether Anderson retained it or a copy, is not established in the public record.<\/p>\n
What DNA Testing Would Actually Look Like<\/p>\n
If DNA testing were to be conducted in the Geronimo skull case \u2014 if Skull and Bones were to allow examination of any relevant remains, or if the grave at Fort Sill were to be examined \u2014 what would the testing process actually involve?<\/p>\n
The first step would be sample collection: extracting material from the tooth or bone for genetic analysis.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
For remains of this age (1909-1918), a small sample of dense bone \u2014 typically from the petrous portion of the temporal bone, at the base of the skull, which preserves DNA particularly well \u2014 or a tooth root would be preferred.<\/p>\n
The sample would be processed in a specialized ancient DNA laboratory that takes precautions against contamination by modern human DNA.<\/p>\n
These laboratories maintain strict protocols including dedicated air filtration systems, full-body coveralls, and regular testing of surfaces and personnel to detect any modern DNA contamination.<\/p>\n
The ancient DNA from the sample would be extracted, amplified, and sequenced.<\/p>\n
The resulting genetic profile would then be compared to genetic profiles from known descendants of Geronimo \u2014 people like Harlyn Geronimo who have stated willingness to provide samples \u2014 as well as, ideally, to a broader database of Apache genetic diversity.<\/p>\n
The specific genetic markers most useful for the comparison would likely include:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Mitochondrial haplogroup \u2014 the maternal-line ancestral category that can be traced back many generations.<\/p>\n
If the remains are Geronimo’s, their mitochondrial DNA should match that of his descendants through the maternal line.<\/p>\n
Y-chromosome haplogroup, if applicable \u2014 the paternal-line ancestral category.<\/p>\n
Geronimo’s male-line descendants would share his Y-chromosome haplogroup.<\/p>\n
Autosomal DNA \u2014 the genetic material from chromosomes 1 through 22, which contains information about ancestry from all genealogical lines.<\/p>\n
This is more complex to interpret but can provide information about population of origin.<\/p>\n
A finding of match between the remains’ DNA and descendants’ DNA would be consistent with the remains being Geronimo’s, though it could not rule out that the remains belonged to another closely related individual.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A finding of mismatch would indicate that the remains are not Geronimo’s \u2014 though they might still belong to another Apache individual.<\/p>\n
The technology for this analysis is available today.<\/p>\n
The question of access to the relevant samples is the limiting factor.<\/p>\n
The Mystery In Context: Other Famous Missing Remains<\/p>\n
The Geronimo skull controversy is not unique in the history of disputes over famous people’s remains.<\/p>\n
Other historical figures have been the subject of controversies about the location, identification, or ownership of their remains.<\/p>\n
Ludwig van Beethoven’s skull was separated from his remains after exhumation in the nineteenth century and studied.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Some of it has been identified and returned, though pieces remain in other hands.<\/p>\n
Christopher Columbus’s remains are the subject of ongoing dispute between Spain, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, with DNA testing in the early twenty-first century clarifying but not fully resolving the question of which location holds his primary remains.<\/p>\n
Various historical figures have had their remains disturbed by grave robbers, phrenologists, scientists, and curiosity seekers over the centuries.<\/p>\n
The phenomenon of treating famous people’s remains as objects of curiosity or study is not limited to any particular era or culture, though the power dynamics \u2014 who collects and who is collected \u2014 have been deeply shaped by colonial relationships.<\/p>\n
What distinguishes the Geronimo case from many comparable controversies is the involvement of a living descendant community that has a specific cultural and legal claim to the remains, and the availability of DNA technology that could, in principle, resolve the factual question of identification.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The 1933 Document: Skull And Bones Acknowledges The Story<\/p>\n
The document prepared by Skull and Bones for its 1933 centennial celebration \u2014 the “Continuation of the History of Our Order for the Century Celebration” \u2014 is the earliest known documentary reference to the Geronimo legend within the organization itself.<\/p>\n
This document is significant because it suggests that the Geronimo story was part of Skull and Bones’ internal history and tradition by 1933 \u2014 fifteen years after the alleged theft, at a time when at least some of the people allegedly involved were still alive and might have corrected an inaccurate account.<\/p>\n
The content of this document has been described in various secondary sources, but the document itself has not been published in full in any source available in the public record.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Anderson reportedly received a version of or excerpt from this document.<\/p>\n
The relationship between what Anderson received and what the original 1933 document says is not established.<\/p>\n
If the 1933 document is in Yale’s archives \u2014 where the 1918 Wortman letter was found \u2014 it might be accessible to researchers.<\/p>\n
If it is in Skull and Bones’ own records, its accessibility would depend on the organization’s cooperation.<\/p>\n
The existence of this document and its content are relevant to assessing whether the Geronimo legend is genuinely part of Skull and Bones institutional history or whether it is a later accretion.<\/p>\n
If the story was documented internally in 1933, that provides stronger evidence that something happened \u2014 even if the question of whether what happened involved Geronimo’s actual skull remains open.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Geronimo’s Legacy In Apache Culture<\/p>\n
Geronimo’s significance for Apache communities is not reducible to his famous name or his skull mystery.<\/p>\n
He is a figure of specific cultural importance whose memory is maintained in specific ways by specific communities.<\/p>\n
For the Chiricahua Apache and their descendants, Geronimo is a complex figure: a war leader of great capability, a man who continued fighting long after most of the Chiricahua had accepted reservation life, a person whose actions contributed to the specific catastrophe of the 1886 removal of all Chiricahua \u2014 including those who had served as Army scouts \u2014 from Arizona.<\/p>\n
The Apache Army scouts who had helped the Army track Geronimo were themselves exiled to Florida along with Geronimo’s band when the final surrender came.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Their service to the United States did not protect them from the collective punishment applied to all Chiricahua Apache.<\/p>\n
This history complicates simple narratives about Geronimo as an unambiguous hero, though it does not diminish his significance as a leader and a symbol.<\/p>\n
Among Apache people today, attitudes toward Geronimo vary.<\/p>\n
Some see him primarily as a freedom fighter and a symbol of resistance.<\/p>\n
Others emphasize the costs his decisions imposed on the broader Apache community.<\/p>\n
Many hold both perspectives simultaneously, recognizing a figure who was neither saint nor villain but a human being making difficult decisions in impossible circumstances.<\/p>\n
The skull mystery is, from an Apache cultural perspective, not primarily about the famous name.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is about the dignity of the dead and the right of communities to maintain connection to their ancestors.<\/p>\n
Whatever skull may be in the Skull and Bones Tomb \u2014 whether it is Geronimo’s or that of another Apache person who died at Fort Sill \u2014 it is the remains of a human being who deserves to be returned to the community from which they came.<\/p>\n
The People Who Have Kept The Story Alive<\/p>\n
The Geronimo skull mystery has been kept alive through the decades by a combination of Apache descendants, journalists, historians, and researchers whose motivations and methods have been various.<\/p>\n
Ned Anderson’s 1986 campaign was driven by a specific political and cultural goal: the repatriation of Apache remains to Arizona, of which the Geronimo skull question was one dimension.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Anderson’s methods \u2014 his claim to possess documents and photographs of disputed provenance, his account of the New York meeting \u2014 have been questioned by some researchers while being taken seriously by others.<\/p>\n
Marc Wortman’s accidental discovery of the 1918 letter in 2005 brought the story to a new level of documentation.<\/p>\n
As a Yale historian, his credibility gave the letter’s publication significant weight.<\/p>\n
His own stated skepticism about whether the grave robbed in 1918 was actually Geronimo’s provides an important counterweight to the letter’s dramatic content.<\/p>\n
Harlyn Geronimo’s advocacy, and the 2009 federal lawsuit, brought the question into the legal arena and forced a public discussion of NAGPRA’s applicability to the situation.<\/p>\n
The CT Insider’s 2023 investigation added additional documentary evidence and amplified the descendants’ call for DNA testing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
None of these efforts has resolved the mystery.<\/p>\n
Each has added information and raised new questions.<\/p>\n
The Science That Changes The Question<\/p>\n
The most important way that the twenty-first century has changed the Geronimo skull mystery is not the discovery of new documents or the pursuit of new legal theories.<\/p>\n
It is the existence of technologies that could, in principle, answer a factual question that was previously unanswerable.<\/p>\n
DNA analysis was not a forensic tool when Geronimo died in 1909.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was not available when the alleged grave robbery occurred in 1918.<\/p>\n
It was not available when the 1933 Skull and Bones centennial document described the theft.<\/p>\n
It was not available when Ned Anderson arranged his 1986 meeting in New York.<\/p>\n
It is available now.<\/p>\n
If samples from any human remains held by Skull and Bones could be tested, and if known descendants of Geronimo provided comparative samples, the factual question \u2014 are these Geronimo’s remains? \u2014 could be addressed with genetic evidence.<\/p>\n
Not answered with absolute certainty, because DNA analysis of historical remains has limits, but addressed with the kind of scientific evidence that is far more reliable than legend, disputed documents, or what one party to a meeting believed about a skull in a glass case.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This is the significant change that modern science has brought to the mystery.<\/p>\n
The question is no longer purely one of competing narratives and circumstantial evidence.<\/p>\n
There is a specific scientific method available that could provide material evidence about one of the most specific factual claims in the dispute.<\/p>\n
The obstacle to applying that method is not scientific.<\/p>\n
It is institutional.<\/p>\n
Skull and Bones has not agreed to allow examination of its holdings.<\/p>\n
The organization’s foundational commitment to secrecy is in direct tension with the kind of transparency that DNA testing would require.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Unresolved Question And What It Means<\/p>\n
The Geronimo skull mystery remains unresolved.<\/p>\n
The evidence available in 2024 is the same evidence that was available after the CT Insider’s 2023 investigation:<\/p>\n
A 1918 letter, found in Yale’s archives, written by a Skull and Bones member to another, describing the alleged removal of remains identified as Geronimo’s from Fort Sill.<\/p>\n
Additional letters, reported by CT Insider, corroborating aspects of the account.<\/p>\n
A disputed document and photograph that Ned Anderson claimed to possess in 1986.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
An account of an 1986 meeting at which possible remains were produced and Anderson was asked to sign a statement clearing Skull and Bones.<\/p>\n
Skull and Bones’ consistent denial of possessing Geronimo’s remains.<\/p>\n
A federal lawsuit, dismissed on statute of limitations grounds.<\/p>\n
Public statements by Geronimo’s descendants, including Harlyn Geronimo, expressing willingness to participate in DNA testing.<\/p>\n
This evidence does not prove that Skull and Bones possesses Geronimo’s skull.<\/p>\n
It does not prove that the 1918 grave robbery occurred, that the remains removed in 1918 \u2014 if any were removed \u2014 were Geronimo’s, or that those remains are still at Yale.<\/p>\n
What the evidence does establish is that:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Skull and Bones members in 1918 believed or claimed they had stolen Geronimo’s skull.<\/p>\n
This claim was documented in a letter found in Yale’s own archives.<\/p>\n
The story was part of Skull and Bones institutional lore by 1933.<\/p>\n
Descendants of Geronimo have made public, documented requests for DNA testing that have not been accommodated.<\/p>\n
The mystery \u2014 whether Geronimo’s remains are fully intact at Fort Sill or were disturbed in 1918 \u2014 remains open.<\/p>\n
The Permanence Of The Mystery Without Testing<\/p>\n
If DNA testing is never conducted \u2014 if Skull and Bones does not submit its holdings for examination, if the grave at Fort Sill is not examined with non-invasive technology, if the descendants’ calls for scientific investigation are never answered \u2014 the mystery will persist indefinitely.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This persistence has its own historical meaning.<\/p>\n
The mystery endures because the organization alleged to possess the remains has not cooperated with investigation, and because the legal mechanisms that might compel cooperation have not proven effective.<\/p>\n
The endurance of the mystery is, in this sense, not simply a factual gap waiting to be filled.<\/p>\n
It is a statement about the relationship between institutional power \u2014 the kind of power concentrated in Skull and Bones’ membership, with its two presidential families and its dozens of senators and CIA directors \u2014 and the dignity of the dead, specifically the dead of Indigenous communities that have historically had little legal or political power to enforce their rights.<\/p>\n
Geronimo spent the last twenty-three years of his life asking to go home.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was told no.<\/p>\n
His descendants have spent decades asking whether his remains are where they should be.<\/p>\n
They have been given no definitive answer.<\/p>\n
The skull mystery is, at its core, an extension of the same dynamic: the power to deny information and to control outcomes concentrated in an institution that has chosen to exercise that power through silence.<\/p>\n
Modern Science, Ancient Dignity<\/p>\n
The promise of DNA testing in this case is real.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The technology exists.<\/p>\n
Willing descendants exist.<\/p>\n
The specific question \u2014 are these remains Geronimo’s? \u2014 is scientifically answerable in principle.<\/p>\n
What stands between the question and the answer is not a failure of science but a failure of accountability.<\/p>\n
If the relevant remains were identified, examined, and found to be Geronimo’s, the next steps would involve consultation with the affiliated Apache communities about repatriation \u2014 the same process that NAGPRA requires for remains in institutional collections.<\/p>\n
Geronimo’s remains might ultimately be returned to Fort Sill for proper Apache burial, or to the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico, or to some other location determined by the Apache communities most closely connected to his memory.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If the remains were found to belong to another Apache person \u2014 another Fort Sill prisoner who died in captivity \u2014 the same repatriation process would apply, and the question of identification might lead to further genealogical research to determine which individual’s remains were taken in 1918.<\/p>\n
Either outcome would involve the recognition that whoever died at Fort Sill deserves the same dignity in death that the living dead of all communities deserve: a known resting place, the acknowledgment of their identity, and the presence of their community.<\/p>\n
The mystery of Geronimo’s missing skull is, at its most fundamental level, a mystery about dignity.<\/p>\n
Whether the specific skull in the Skull and Bones Tomb is Geronimo’s or not, it represents a human being whose remains were taken from their proper place by people who treated them as curiosities.<\/p>\n
Modern science has the tools to address this mystery with evidence rather than legend.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The question of whether those tools will ever be used \u2014 whether the institutional barriers to investigation will be overcome by the moral weight of the question \u2014 remains open.<\/p>\n
The mystery persists.<\/p>\n
The question of what to do about it is one for living people, in living institutions, who must decide whether the dignity of the dead \u2014 even the dead of a century ago, even the dead of a community that was dispossessed and imprisoned \u2014 is worth the accountability that answering the question would require.<\/p>\n
Geronimo was a prisoner for twenty-three years.<\/p>\n
He asked to go home and was told no.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
His descendants have asked for answers about his remains.<\/p>\n
They have not been given them.<\/p>\n
The mystery remains unresolved.<\/p>\n
But modern science has changed what questions can be asked about the past \u2014 and has given those questions a form of answer that no previous generation possessed.<\/p>\n
Whether that answer will be sought is not a scientific question.<\/p>\n
It is a moral one.<\/p>\n
A Note On Living Communities<\/p>\n
This article has described the Geronimo skull mystery primarily in historical and scientific terms.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A full account of its meaning would require something this article cannot fully provide: the perspectives of the Apache communities most directly connected to the history.<\/p>\n
The Mescalero Apache Tribe, the Fort Sill Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, the Chiricahua Apache descendants \u2014 these communities have their own processes for engaging with questions about their history and their dead.<\/p>\n
Their perspectives on the skull mystery, on DNA testing, on repatriation, and on the appropriate resolution of this situation are not uniform and are not reducible to what any single descendant has said in public.<\/p>\n
The proper response to questions about what should be done with Geronimo’s remains is not for journalists, historians, or the broader American public to decide.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is for the communities from which he came to determine, in consultation with each other and with the relevant institutions.<\/p>\n
What this article can offer is the historical and scientific context for that determination: who Geronimo was, what happened to him, what the evidence suggests about his remains, and what modern science could contribute to answering the factual questions that bear on any decision.<\/p>\n
Goyahkla \u2014 the one who yawns \u2014 died at Fort Sill on February 17, 1909.<\/p>\n
He is said to rest beneath the cobblestone pyramid and the stone eagle.<\/p>\n
Whether he does, and whether all of him is there, is the mystery that remains.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Marker At Fort Sill<\/p>\n
The grave marker at Fort Sill identifies the site as Geronimo’s.<\/p>\n
The monument \u2014 the cobblestone pyramid and the eagle \u2014 was erected by Apache prisoners who outlived him, and has been maintained as a historic site since.<\/p>\n
Visitors to Fort Sill can visit Apache Village and see the monument.<\/p>\n
The grave is real.<\/p>\n
The historical record of the burial is clear.<\/p>\n
What is less clear is whether the grave, which can be visited today, contains the complete remains of the man who was buried there in 1909 \u2014 or whether someone removed part of those remains in May 1918, in the dark, while artillery students from Yale moved through the military post.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That question has not been answered.<\/p>\n
Modern science makes the answer available, if the relevant parties choose to seek it.<\/p>\n
The mystery of Geronimo’s missing skull remains exactly what the headline of this article describes: a mystery.<\/p>\n
It is a mystery with documented evidence, named parties, living descendants, and available technology.<\/p>\n
It is a mystery that persists not because it cannot be investigated but because it has not been \u2014 fully, definitively, with the transparency that a question about human dignity demands.<\/p>\n
What happens next is not a historical question.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is a present-tense decision, waiting to be made.<\/p>\n
The Spiritual Dimension Of The Southwest<\/p>\n
Before returning to the documentary evidence, the specific geography matters.<\/p>\n
Geronimo died far from the landscape that had defined his life.<\/p>\n
The Chiricahua homeland is a specific place: the mountain ranges of southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, including the Chiricahua Mountains (now preserved partly as a national monument), the Dragoon Mountains where Cochise had his stronghold, the Peloncillo Mountains along the Arizona-New Mexico border, and the canyons of the Gila and Mimbres rivers.<\/p>\n
This country is visually dramatic: high rocky peaks rising from desert grassland and scrub, with canyons carved deep by seasonal water.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Chiricahua Mountains hold forests of pine and oak at their upper elevations \u2014 a world of juniper and oak and hoodoo rock formations at their base, giving way to open grassland as the mountains flatten into the valley.<\/p>\n
The country changes dramatically with elevation, and the Apache people of these mountains knew every canyon, every spring, every useful shelter.<\/p>\n
For a people whose traditions were embedded in this specific geography \u2014 whose sacred places, whose seasonal movements, whose understanding of the world was organized around these mountains and rivers \u2014 exile was not merely physical displacement.<\/p>\n
It was a severing of connections that organized life itself.<\/p>\n
Geronimo was born in this country.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He hunted here, raided here, fought here, and repeatedly evaded capture here.<\/p>\n
He knew places in the Sierra Madre of Mexico and in the Arizona mountains that Army officers could not find on maps.<\/p>\n
He moved through this terrain differently from the soldiers who pursued him \u2014 not because he possessed supernatural gifts, though he claimed some, but because his knowledge of the country was intimate in a way that only a lifetime of living in a place can produce.<\/p>\n
When he died at Fort Sill, he died in Oklahoma, on flat plains that bore no resemblance to the mountain country that had formed him.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He died far from every place that had meaning in the framework of Apache life and spirituality.<\/p>\n
That geographical exile is part of what makes the skull mystery more than a curiosity about a secret society.<\/p>\n
Geronimo spent twenty-three years asking to go back to the land that defined him.<\/p>\n
He was denied.<\/p>\n
If his remains were then removed from their grave and taken to a room in New Haven \u2014 further from the Arizona mountains than Fort Sill itself \u2014 that removal would represent a continuation of the exile into death.<\/p>\n
The Apache concept of the proper relationship between people and the landscape of their lives is not identical across all Apache communities, and it is not fully captured in any single statement.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But the general understanding \u2014 that people and their homelands are connected in ways that have consequence beyond the physical \u2014 is relevant to understanding why the descendants have persisted in pursuing this question.<\/p>\n
The Newspapers And Geronimo: How The American Media Made Him Famous<\/p>\n
One dimension of the Geronimo story that is essential for understanding why the skull mystery carries the weight it does is the role of the American press in constructing his public image.<\/p>\n
From the early 1880s, when the telegraph allowed news of Apache raids to reach Eastern cities within hours of the events, Geronimo was a figure of intense newspaper interest.<\/p>\n
Headlines about Apache raiders were circulation builders.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Geronimo’s name appeared in newspapers across the country with a frequency that would have astonished anyone who knew him only as a specific man in a specific community dealing with specific problems.<\/p>\n
The press coverage was not accurate in the ways that concerned Geronimo’s community.<\/p>\n
Newspapers reported Apache raids as attacks by savage warriors without context, without the history of treaty violations and colonial displacement that produced the conflict, without the perspective of the Apache people.<\/p>\n
The imagery was of an alien threat, not of people defending their homeland.<\/p>\n
But the same press that covered him as a threat also created his celebrity.<\/p>\n
When Geronimo was in captivity at Fort Sill and began making public appearances, the newspapers covered those appearances with the enthusiasm that celebrity generates.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was photographed, interviewed through interpreters, described in detail.<\/p>\n
His image appeared on postcards and souvenirs.<\/p>\n
The paradox \u2014 dangerous savage and celebrity curiosity \u2014 was managed by the American press and public through a selective attention that could hold both images without resolving the contradiction.<\/p>\n
The actual person, the actual history, the actual injustice of his captivity \u2014 these were less interesting, or less convenient, than the mythologized version.<\/p>\n
The skull mystery, in its contemporary form, carries this history.<\/p>\n
Geronimo is famous enough that a question about his missing skull generates international news coverage.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Apache community whose dignity is most directly affected by the mystery is far less visible in that coverage than the Yale connection or the presidential family connection.<\/p>\n
Centering the story correctly means holding the celebrity connection and the institutional interest in their proper place \u2014 as aspects of the mystery’s visibility, not its substance.<\/p>\n
The substance is the remains of a human being and the right of his community to know where he rests.<\/p>\n
What The Army Records Say<\/p>\n
The official U.S.<\/p>\n
Army records of Geronimo’s death and burial are clear.<\/p>\n
He died on February 17, 1909, at the Fort Sill hospital.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was buried in the Apache Village cemetery at Fort Sill.<\/p>\n
The grave was marked.<\/p>\n
The Army records do not document any disturbance of the grave in 1918 or at any other time.<\/p>\n
This absence of official documentation is not surprising \u2014 a clandestine grave robbery conducted by artillery students training at the post would not be expected to appear in official Army records, unless discovered and investigated, which there is no evidence it was.<\/p>\n
The Army’s role in managing the Fort Sill Apache prisoner-of-war cemetery means that the condition of the graves was nominally the Army’s responsibility.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Whether regular inspections of the graves would have detected a disturbance from a night-time operation is uncertain.<\/p>\n
Fort Sill’s records from the relevant period \u2014 May 1918 \u2014 might contain information about the presence of Yale students at the installation, about any incidents reported in the cemetery area, or about any other relevant events.<\/p>\n
Whether these records have been systematically searched for evidence relevant to the skull mystery is not documented in the publicly available sources.<\/p>\n
The Army has jurisdiction over the Fort Sill installation and the cemetery within it.<\/p>\n
Any examination of Geronimo’s grave using non-invasive technology \u2014 ground-penetrating radar, for example \u2014 would require Army cooperation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Whether such cooperation has been formally requested, and what the Army’s response has been, is not established in the public record.<\/p>\n
The Bones: What Various Items Were Said To Have Been Taken<\/p>\n
The 1918 letter describes more than a skull.<\/p>\n
Mead’s letter mentions “his well-worn femurs, bit and saddle horn” \u2014 the femur bones, and what appears to be horse tack that was buried with Geronimo or associated with him.<\/p>\n
This detail is interesting for several reasons.<\/p>\n
First, the inclusion of personal items suggests that whoever removed the remains was attempting to take material that was associated specifically with Geronimo \u2014 not just a random skull, but items that might identify the remains as his.<\/p>\n
A saddle horn or bit buried with Geronimo would have been part of the burial goods associated with his specific grave, not something found at just any Apache grave.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Second, the inclusion of femur bones in addition to the skull is consistent with a somewhat more extensive disturbance of the grave than simply removing the skull.<\/p>\n
If the accounts are accurate, the removal involved exposing the body and taking multiple bones, not merely the skull.<\/p>\n
Third, the personal items \u2014 if they are actual items buried with Geronimo \u2014 have their own archaeological and cultural significance beyond the human remains.<\/p>\n
Personal belongings buried with the dead are treated as funerary objects under NAGPRA, with their own repatriation requirements.<\/p>\n
The question of whether Skull and Bones, if they have the skull, also has the femur bones and personal items described in the letter is a detail that has received less attention than the skull itself.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But it is relevant to a full account of what may have been taken and what would need to be returned.<\/p>\n
Geronimo’s Personal Items And Their Significance<\/p>\n
Geronimo’s military career and his decades of Apache life meant that the objects associated with him in life had specific historical significance.<\/p>\n
He was an effective horseman \u2014 the Apache raider and warrior on horseback is one of the central images of the nineteenth-century Southwest conflict.<\/p>\n
Horse-related items buried with him would have been personally significant objects, consistent with both Apache burial practice and with Geronimo’s specific life.<\/p>\n
Geronimo was photographed with weapons during his Fort Sill period \u2014 most famously, a series of photographs in which he posed with a rifle.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was also photographed in various traditional and traditional-influenced dress.<\/p>\n
The visual record of his appearance at Fort Sill is reasonably extensive.<\/p>\n
The items described in the 1918 letter \u2014 bit and saddle horn \u2014 suggest specifically equestrian objects.<\/p>\n
These would be consistent with someone who wanted to take items that could be identified as associated with a famous Apache horseman.<\/p>\n
Whether the items at Skull and Bones \u2014 if they exist \u2014 can be traced to a specific individual through material analysis is uncertain.<\/p>\n
Forensic analysis of historic objects can sometimes yield information about the materials, manufacturing techniques, and wear patterns that help establish provenance.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Whether this kind of analysis has been applied to any materials in the Skull and Bones collection is not documented in the public record.<\/p>\n
The Fort Sill Apache Prisoners And The Cemetery They Built<\/p>\n
The Apache prisoners of war who lived at Fort Sill from 1894 to 1913 were not passive residents of their confinement.<\/p>\n
They established a community within the constraints of military supervision.<\/p>\n
They built houses, farmed, maintained their cultural practices as much as permitted, and raised children.<\/p>\n
The community they created at Fort Sill was a functioning, if constrained, community \u2014 not simply a barracks of captives but a group of people making the best possible life within the worst possible circumstances.<\/p>\n
The cemetery they built for their dead \u2014 Apache Village \u2014 was an act of community care for the departed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When Apache prisoners of war died at Fort Sill, they were buried with the attention that their community could provide.<\/p>\n
The graves were marked.<\/p>\n
The community maintained connection to its dead.<\/p>\n
Geronimo’s grave, within this cemetery, was not simply the burial of an individual.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The cobblestone pyramid and eagle monument that marks his grave today was reportedly built by Apache hands \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
When Skull and Bones members dug in this cemetery in 1918 \u2014 if they did \u2014 they were not digging in an anonymous military graveyard.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They were digging in a place that had specific meaning for a specific community, maintained by people who were still alive and still present at Fort Sill when the alleged robbery occurred.<\/p>\n
The Bones Question: Physical Examination Without Excavation<\/p>\n
One possibility that deserves consideration is non-invasive physical examination of the grave at Fort Sill \u2014 using technology that can assess the condition of the burial without disturbing it.<\/p>\n
Ground-penetrating radar \u2014 GPR \u2014 is a technology that uses radio waves to detect subsurface features, including buried materials.<\/p>\n
It has been used extensively at archaeological sites to map burials and other features without excavation.<\/p>\n
It can detect disturbances in soil stratigraphy and can sometimes distinguish between areas of undisturbed soil and areas that have been excavated and refilled.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If GPR examination of Geronimo’s grave showed intact, undisturbed soil consistent with a single original burial and no subsequent disturbance, that would be significant evidence that the grave was not robbed in 1918.<\/p>\n
It would not be definitive proof \u2014 GPR has limitations and cannot detect everything \u2014 but it would provide valuable information.<\/p>\n
If GPR examination showed evidence of disturbance \u2014 soil inconsistencies consistent with a secondary excavation and refilling \u2014 that would be consistent with the grave-robbery account, though it could not prove the robbery occurred or identify what was removed.<\/p>\n
Non-invasive examination of this kind would require the cooperation of Fort Sill and the consultation of Apache communities, as any examination of the grave should.<\/p>\n
But it would not require excavation or direct handling of the remains, which would be more invasive and more culturally complicated.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The question of whether Fort Sill has been formally asked to permit GPR examination of the grave, and what the response has been, is not established in the publicly available sources.<\/p>\n
The Documents In Yale’s Archives: What Else Might Be There<\/p>\n
The 2005 discovery of the Wortman letter, and the 2023 CT Insider discovery of additional related letters, both came from Yale’s Sterling Library archives.<\/p>\n
This raises the question of what else might be in those archives.<\/p>\n
The Skull and Bones organizational records \u2014 if any exist in Yale’s archives \u2014 might contain additional documentation of the Geronimo legend, the 1918 events, or the subsequent history of whatever remains may have been brought to the Tomb.<\/p>\n
The 1933 centennial document allegedly exists; whether it is in Yale’s archives or in Skull and Bones’ own records is not established.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Yale’s alumni records include information about many Skull and Bones members from the relevant period, including information about their service records and their presence at various locations during World War I.<\/p>\n
If records confirm that Prescott Bush and the other named individuals were at Fort Sill in May 1918, that corroborates one element of the account.<\/p>\n
The broader Yale archives related to the World War I period \u2014 which Wortman was researching when he discovered the Mead letter \u2014 likely contain additional correspondence among Skull and Bones members from that era.<\/p>\n
Systematic research through those archives, specifically looking for references to the Geronimo story, might reveal additional documentation.<\/p>\n
Whether such research has been conducted, and by whom, is not fully documented in the public record.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The CT Insider’s 2023 investigation suggests that additional letters were found beyond the Wortman letter, indicating that the relevant materials may be more extensive than the single letter that received the most public attention in 2006.<\/p>\n
Geronimo And The Concept Of Surrender<\/p>\n
One of the most persistent myths about Geronimo in the popular imagination is that he was a man who would never surrender \u2014 that his final surrender to Miles in 1886 was some kind of profound capitulation that broke something essential in him.<\/p>\n
The historical record is more complex.<\/p>\n
Geronimo surrendered multiple times before the final 1886 surrender.<\/p>\n
He made agreements with the Army on various occasions, returned to the reservation on various occasions, and broke out on various occasions when conditions on the reservation became intolerable or when his assessment of the situation changed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This pattern \u2014 agreement, return, violation, breakout \u2014 was not simply the behavior of an untrustworthy person, as some Army accounts implied.<\/p>\n
It reflected the specific conditions on the reservation, which were often genuinely intolerable: inadequate food, disease, the presence of traditional enemies, the prohibition of traditional practices, arbitrary restrictions on movement.<\/p>\n
When the conditions became bad enough, the calculation shifted: the risk of flight was preferable to the certainty of the situation on the reservation.<\/p>\n
The 1886 surrender was different from the earlier ones in that the terms \u2014 exile in the east for two years, then return to Arizona \u2014 were specific and formally agreed to, and were then violated by the government.<\/p>\n
The government’s violation of those terms, and the continued captivity that followed, produced in Geronimo’s later years a more focused awareness of what American promises meant in practice.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
His continued petitioning for return to Arizona in his later years was not nostalgic longing but practical advocacy.<\/p>\n
He understood the legal and political landscape sufficiently to know that public opinion could influence government decisions, and he worked the available channels \u2014 public appearances, autobiography, audiences with powerful people \u2014 to try to move the needle.<\/p>\n
He failed.<\/p>\n
The political coalition that wanted him kept as a prisoner, or that was indifferent to his fate, was stronger than the forces that might have returned him to Arizona.<\/p>\n
What A Resolution Would Look Like<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The resolution of the Geronimo skull mystery \u2014 if it comes \u2014 will likely not be a single dramatic moment of revelation.<\/p>\n
It will more probably be the result of a specific sequence of events: access to the relevant samples, laboratory analysis, comparison with descendant DNA, and consultation with Apache communities about the appropriate next steps.<\/p>\n
What would constitute resolution?<\/p>\n
A definitive finding that the relevant remains are not Geronimo’s \u2014 that whatever is in the Skull and Bones Tomb, if anything, does not genetically match Geronimo’s descendants \u2014 would resolve the specific mystery while raising the question of whose remains they are.<\/p>\n
A definitive finding that the remains are Geronimo’s \u2014 that they match the genetic profile of his known descendants \u2014 would confirm the legend and shift the question to repatriation: where should the remains go, and what process should govern that decision?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A finding that the grave at Fort Sill is intact and undisturbed would shift the question differently: if Geronimo’s remains are at Fort Sill and were not disturbed, then what are at Skull and Bones (if anything) must be the remains of another Apache person, whose identity and return would need to be addressed separately.<\/p>\n
Each of these outcomes would require further action, further consultation, and further engagement with the Apache communities most directly connected to the history.<\/p>\n
None of them would close the story entirely; all of them would shift it to its next phase.<\/p>\n
The mystery is not a simple puzzle with a single answer.<\/p>\n
It is an open historical and ethical question with multiple dimensions, each of which deserves the attention and respect it has not always received.<\/p>\n
The Living History<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The story of Geronimo’s missing skull is not a story that exists only in the past.<\/p>\n
It is a story that is being lived by specific communities, specific families, and specific individuals who are connected to the historical figures at its center.<\/p>\n
Harlyn Geronimo is alive.<\/p>\n
He has spoken publicly about the mystery, the lawsuit, and the need for DNA testing.<\/p>\n
His family connection to the historical figure gives him a specific perspective and a specific stake in the resolution of the question.<\/p>\n
The members of the Mescalero Apache Tribe, the Fort Sill Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, and other Apache communities are living people with their own relationships to the history and their own views on the appropriate handling of the remains question.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The members of Skull and Bones who are alive today \u2014 there are approximately 800, spread across multiple generations and multiple fields of American life \u2014 inherited a legend and, possibly, a responsibility.<\/p>\n
What they know about what their organization has or does not have, and what they believe should be done about it, is not public.<\/p>\n
The historians and journalists who have investigated the story \u2014 Marc Wortman, Alexandra Robbins, Ben Lambert of CT Insider, and others \u2014 have contributed to the public record and will continue to do so as long as the mystery remains open.<\/p>\n
The mystery is alive because the people it concerns are alive, or because living people are connected to the historical figures at its center.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That aliveness \u2014 the fact that this is not a purely academic historical question but a question with consequences for living communities \u2014 is what gives the skull mystery its moral weight.<\/p>\n
Science As A Tool Of Justice<\/p>\n
The phrase “DNA test that could finally reveal the truth” in the title of this article carries an implicit promise that deserves examination.<\/p>\n
DNA testing would not reveal the whole truth about the Geronimo skull mystery.<\/p>\n
It would answer one specific factual question: do the relevant remains have the genetic profile of Geronimo’s descendants?<\/p>\n
That answer would be significant and would change the nature of the conversation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But it would not answer the questions of how the remains came to be where they are, who bears responsibility for that situation, or what the appropriate resolution would be.<\/p>\n
Those questions require historical research, ethical deliberation, and consultation with the communities most directly affected.<\/p>\n
Treating DNA testing as a magic solution to the mystery \u2014 one that would definitively resolve everything \u2014 would be inaccurate.<\/p>\n
Treating it as a useful scientific tool that could provide material evidence about a specific factual question is accurate.<\/p>\n
The distinction matters because the DNA question is only one part of a larger set of questions about accountability, dignity, and justice that science cannot answer alone.<\/p>\n
Science can tell us what the remains are.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Law, ethics, and community deliberation must determine what to do about that finding.<\/p>\n
The history of DNA testing in other contexts \u2014 the identification of bodies from conflict and disaster, the resolution of questions about historical figures’ remains \u2014 shows both the power of the technology and its limits.<\/p>\n
DNA can identify.<\/p>\n
It cannot adjudicate.<\/p>\n
It can answer factual questions.<\/p>\n
It cannot resolve the moral and political questions that follow from those answers.<\/p>\n
What it can do is change the conversation from one based on legend and disputed documents to one based on material evidence.<\/p>\n
In a situation where legend and disputed documents are all that is currently available, that change is significant.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Ongoing Significance Of Geronimo’s Story<\/p>\n
Geronimo died in 1909 and was buried at Fort Sill.<\/p>\n
His skull \u2014 or what was claimed to be his skull \u2014 may have been removed from that grave nine years later by Yale students playing at grave-robbing as part of their secret society traditions.<\/p>\n
If true, this act would be consistent with a broader pattern in American history: the treatment of Indigenous remains and associated objects as curiosities, as trophy items, as materials available for collection by those with the power to take them.<\/p>\n
That pattern \u2014 the collection of Native American bones, skulls, and cultural items by museums, universities, private collectors, and curiosity-seekers \u2014 was widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.<\/p>\n
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The people who did this collecting operated within a framework that did not recognize Native American communities’ claims to their own dead, their own history, or their own cultural patrimony.<\/p>\n
NAGPRA, passed in 1990, represented a legal acknowledgment that this framework was wrong and that its effects needed to be addressed.<\/p>\n
The repatriation of thousands of individuals’ remains to their communities of origin is ongoing, imperfect work.<\/p>\n
The Geronimo skull mystery sits within this larger history.<\/p>\n
It is a high-profile, celebrity-connected instance of what was a widespread practice.<\/p>\n
The specific individuals alleged to have removed the remains are more famous than most \u2014 the Prescott Bush connection gives the story political dimensions that most grave robberies do not have.<\/p>\n
But the underlying dynamic \u2014 powerful people treating Indigenous remains as available for their use \u2014 was not unique.<\/p>\n
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The skull mystery matters not only because Geronimo was Geronimo, but because it illustrates a relationship between power and dignity that is still being worked out in the American context more than a century later.<\/p>\n
The Long Shadow Of Captivity<\/p>\n
Geronimo’s twenty-three years as a prisoner of war cast a long shadow over everything that came after his death, including the skull mystery.<\/p>\n
He was a prisoner who could not control where he lived, where he traveled, or where he was buried.<\/p>\n
The decisions about his life and his death were made by the U.S. government, the Army, and the political forces that shaped American Indian policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.<\/p>\n
When he died, his burial was determined by those same forces.<\/p>\n
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He was buried at Fort Sill, in the Apache prisoner-of-war cemetery, because that is where prisoners of war at Fort Sill were buried.<\/p>\n
He was not buried in Arizona because he had not been allowed to return to Arizona.<\/p>\n
If his grave was then robbed nine years after his death \u2014 if his skull was taken to Yale by young men who thought a famous Apache leader’s skull would make an amusing addition to their secret society’s collection \u2014 that would represent a continuation of the pattern: powerful people making decisions about Geronimo’s body without the consent of his community.<\/p>\n
The captivity did not end with his death, if the accounts are accurate.<\/p>\n
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It simply took a different form.<\/p>\n