The allegation relies on a letter written by a senior Bonesman in 1918 in which he informs a colleague, “The skull of the worthy Geronimo The Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club … is now safe inside the T together with his well worn femurs, bit & saddle horn.” One of the alleged conspirators was Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of presidents.Įxperts on this claim are divided. And it’s mostly speculation at this point that the hush-hush club kept the Apache warrior’s cranium in a trophy case in The Tomb, their hangout at Yale.
The case is a little bit of a fishing expedition because nobody has convincing evidence that any part of Geronimo’s skeleton was removed from Fort Sill. “It has been claimed and widely repeated,” argues the suit, “that in 1918 or 1919 a group of Yale University students, members of a campus organization called the Order of Skull and Bones… opened the tomb of Geronimo and removed his skull, other bones and items buried with the body and took them to the Order’s premises on the Yale campus.”
The suit seeks to “free Geronimo, his remains, funerary objects and spirit from one hundred years of imprisonment at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the Yale University campus at New Haven, Connecticut, and wherever else they may be found.”Īccording to Harlyn Geronimo, the defendants are in violation of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), under which any institution receiving federal funds is required to acknowledge and repatriate skeletal remains and artifacts derived from Indian graves. On February 17th – the centennial of Geronimo’s death – his great-grandson and nineteen other lineal descendants filed a suit in federal court against Yale University, Yale’s Order of Skull and Bones, and – for maximum impact – the President, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of the Army. But the current location of his skull and where his remains should be buried are matters of a longtime and acrimonious dispute, and now a lawsuit that pits tribe against tribe, and the descendants of the man whom Teddy Roosevelt showed off in his 1905 Inaugural Parade against Yale’s most exclusive private club. This fact about his death is generally agreed upon. The Indian leader Goyathlay, popularly known as Geronimo, died in captivity and was buried at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1909.
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