![]() ![]() ![]() The Bush family stayed silent when the Geronimo question arose during presidential campaigns. Recent officers and directors either refused to comment for this story or did not return calls. Trubee Davison - did deny that its members had taken part in a purported plot to steal the skull of Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary. Davison, a lawyer and society member - and son of F. In a 1988 interview with the Arizona Republic, the late Endicott P. Through the years, Skull and Bones leaders have never responded in any detail to the Geronimo story. It features a society long associated with the nation's elite - including both President Bush and his adversary in the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry - and a frontier icon revered among Native Americans for being the last man to muster effective resistance to white expansion. Such debunking is unlikely to defuse the long-running dispute. Spivey, an archaeologist, says the same photo appeared in a publication after Geronimo's death with a caption indicating that the skull belonged to the Apache warrior. One piece of evidence he has gathered is an 1878 photograph showing several members of Skull and Bones standing around a skull on a pedestal. Towana Spivey, director of the Fort Sill museum, has researched the story for 20 years and thinks it's a hoax. "I don't think Prescott Bush dug up the bones," he says, "because I don't think he could have found the grave." Miller, a history professor at Cameron University, in Lawton, Okla., says Fort Sill records indicate that until 1920 - two years after the purported robbery - Geronimo's grave was unmarked and covered by thick brush. Many historians maintain that, if there is a skull at The Tomb, it is unlikely to be Geronimo's since there is no evidence that his grave was ever disturbed.ĭavid H. Trubee Davison - who went on to become director of personnel at the CIA and who died in 1974 - took part in any grave robbery. "And it is the first evidence from the very time that the grave robbery apparently occurred."Įven so, there is no indication the letter writer or the recipient, F. ![]() "The letter is the first genuine evidence that Skull and Bones members believed they had Geronimo's skull," says Kathrin Day Lassila, the magazine's editor. The document was discovered in the Yale archives by Marc Wortman, a former writer and editor for the alumni magazine who was researching a book about World War I fliers from Yale. "The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club.is now safe inside" the Tomb, wrote Winter Mead, who would graduate from Yale the next year and go on to become an insurance salesman. In the 1918 letter, one senior Bonesman, as society members are known, tells another about the robbery. When the great Sioux warrior Crazy Horse was killed in 1877, his people buried him in a place that remains hidden, expressly to prevent grave robbing. "I guess it's the way my elders used to explain to me that white people are," he adds. "Who in the hell would do such a thing?" asksĪ former council member for the San Carlos Apache Tribe who has taken part in efforts to bring Geronimo's remains to its Arizona reservation. ![]()
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