Reply #3: Others doubt it is Geronimo's skull, too - but we can't know for sure [View All]

unless it is returned to the tribe for study and burial.

Skeleton in the Bush family cupboard

By Alec Russell in Washington
Last Updated: 2:04am BST 09/05/2006

One of America's great historical controversies intensifed yesterday with the publication of fresh evidence that members of an elite secret society may have dug up the remains of the Indian leader Geronimo and displayed his skull in their headquarters.

<snip>

Now contemporary evidence has been unearthed backing the theory that a group of young Bonesmen, based at an artillery school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, desecrated Geronimo's grave.

The Apache leader had died while in custody at Fort Sill in 1909, 23 years after he finally surrendered to US troops.

In a letter written in 1918, one society member tells another that Geronimo's skull had been exhumed and was being kept in the "Tomb" - the society's headquarters in New Haven, Connecticut.

"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."

The letter was unearthed in Yale University archives by a historian writing about First World War Yale pilots, and published in the Yale Alumni Magazine.

The letter names only one member of the alleged raiding party, a Charles Haffner, and makes no mention of Prescott Bush, who become a senator and is seen as the founder of the Bush political dynasty.

He was first linked to the saga in 1986, 14 years after his death, when documents from the society's archives were leaked purportedly showing that six Bonesmen - identifiable by their nicknames and including Prescott Bush - unearthed Geronimo's skull.

Some historians insist that the grave was never disturbed and that if there is a skull in the Tomb it is not the Apache leader's.

More: http://tinyurl.com/emfzl

David Miller, a history professor from Cameron University, Oklahoma, said that until 1920 Geronimo's grave was unmarked. "My assumption is that they did dig up somebody at Fort Sill," he told the Yale Alumni Magazine. "But it probably wasn't Geronimo."