WHAT HAPPENED TO GERONIMO'S SKULL?
PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE, September 23, 2000 - One expects, from a family of politicians, a certain amount of skullduggery. But that is a term of art. It should not involve the actual digging of skulls. So begins one of the odder political stories of recent years. It involves allegations that George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, late of the United States Senate by way of Connecticut, had joined a midnight foray 82 years ago into an Oklahoma graveyard whence he emerged with the mortal skull of Geronimo, the Apache warlord who spent his final years as a tourist attraction and, it would seem, part of his afterlife as a souvenir.
The story unfolded when Apache tribesmen from Arizona debated whether to have Geronimo exhumed and brought back to his native soil. They received, unsolicited, a letter advising them that Geronimo's head had taken up residence in New Haven, Conn., home to Yale University and its secret Skull and Bones Society. "He sent a photo," said Raleigh Thompson, a tribal council member. It showed a skull, remnants of a bridle and a photo of Geronimo . . . His group later obtained what purported to be an internal history of Skull and Bones that included this account: In 1918, Prescott Bush and two companions crept into the cemetery near Fort Sill and pried open the grave of Geronimo. The head was taken out, spiffed up and forwarded to New Haven, where it was given pride of place for goofy rituals that have been attended by generations of Bushes and a veritable army of powerful types . . . Thompson, two other council members and tribal attorney Joe Sparks traveled to New York three times to meet with Skull and Bones officers, their lawyer and Jonathan Bush, brother to the then-vice president. "They said 'We have a skull that we call Geronimo,'" Thompson said. Then they offered up a skull. Thompson and Sparks said it didn't look like the photo. "They said it was the remains of a young Indian child, as if that made things better," Sparks said.
Sparks said he confronted them with a Skull and Bones history, dated 1933, that purported to tell of the grave raid. "They said we were in a lot of trouble for having it," Sparks said. He suggested they might be in a bit of trouble for having a head not currently attached to a neck.
