![]() The text says the Geronimo "crook" was carefully planned, because "six Army captains robbing a grave wouldn't look good in the papers." This account continues: "The ring of pick on stone and thud of earth on earth alone disturbs the peace of the prairie. Even though some have called it a hoax, this history keeps popping up in published sources, including Alexandra Robbins' 2002 book, Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power. The Skull and Bones theft account stems from a document titled "Continuation of the History of Our Order for the Century Celebration," prepared by the Order itself, in 1933, to mark its 100th anniversary. ![]() With the exception of his family and a few historians, no one knows a thing about him. According to the best evidence, the "one who yawns"-the translation of Geronimo's Apache name, Goyathlay-rests right where he should, in the ground at Sill, beneath a cobblestone pyramid topped by a soaring eagle.īut out there somewhere, lost for 146 years, there really is the head of a great Apache leader, taken in the most violent and ignominious means imaginable. Only one problem: The theft of Geronimo's remains almost certainly didn't happen. It's the journalistic equivalent of shooting buffalo from a slow-moving train on the Kansas prairie in 1869. It has the unforgettable Geronimo at its center, the Bush family connection, Harlyn posing for Eastern media in his clean cowboy hat and beads, and a weirdo college club about which wild rumors abound-like members dining with Hitler's silverware and initiates kissing Geronimo's skull as a rite of entry. News of the lawsuit went worldwide, predictably so. He wants the remains returned to Geronimo's birthplace at the headwaters of the Gila River in southwest New Mexico, "for burial in the manner of his fathers." He also wants a 12-foot bronze statue placed at the site. Harlyn Geronimo, of Mescalero, NM, a great-grandson, in February filed a suit to free Geronimo's remains and spirit "from 100 years of imprisonment at Fort Sill, Okla., the Yale University campus at New Haven, Conn., and wherever else they may be found." The bones were allegedly taken to Yale, where some believe they're used to this day as ritualistic props by an elite student society called the Order of Skull and Bones. It has long been rumored that several Yale students-among them Prescott Bush, father of former President George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of former President George W Bush-dug up Geronimo's remains in 1918 while taking artillery training at Fort Sill. The question now is whether his skull and two femurs sit inside a spooky gothic stone building known as the Tomb, on High Street in New Haven, Conn. He's too much fun to say goodbye to-and far too useful. Many of the same reports also noted his intelligence, his genius at warfare and how, in 1886, pursued by one-third of the US Army, plus 4,000 Mexican soldiers, he melted into the landscape, ghost-like, there one moment and gone the next.īut as with other great Western figures-Billy the Kid, Custer, Wyatt, Hickok-Geronimo's death wasn't an end, but a beginning. In covering his passing, The New York Times called him "the worst type of aboriginal American savage," whose life proved "the proverb that a good Indian is a dead Indian." News of his death made telegraph wires crackle worldwide and, in those reports, the same split can be seen between Geronimo the man and Geronimo the monster. ![]() This was Geronimo, too, the worried father, the family man. As his nephew Asa Daklugie held his hand that night in 1909, at the Fort Sill hospital in Oklahoma, Geronimo begged Daklugie to care for his daughter, Eva Geronimo, as if she were his own.Īfter a bout of unconsciousness, his eyes-those narrow, burning, paralyzing eyes-would open and fix on Daklugie. ![]() ![]() This was the warrior Geronimo, the man American settlers knew, the blood lover, the killer.īut he also talked about his love for his children. He spoke of his regret at having surrendered, saying he should've died fighting his enemies-the Mexicans, for whom he harbored a lifelong hatred, and the white eyes who'd taken over his homeland. He was moments from death, and his final mutterings would be familiar to those who knew him in life. By Leo W Banks Geronimo lay in bed, delirious. ![]()
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