The Solution to the Geronimo Skull and Bones 'Mystery'

It never seems to end. But, as someone who was the first to write about Skull and Bones in a major magazine (September ’77 Esquire, reprinted in my collection The Secret Parts of Fortune — see right side rail of this blog) and the first to expose — on videotape! — a key part of the pathetically childish Bones initiation ritual, I once again feel called upon to set straight one of the most persistent Skull and Bones urban legends. That would be the Geronimo’s skull theft story which according to this Times story has now morphed into a lawsuit, the product of a cross breeding of cupidity and stupidity.

The original cupidity and stupidity can be attributed — surprise — to George Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush, a member of the Yale secret society who boasted, according to a letter unearthed a few years ago, that he had, along with some other idiot Bonesmen, stolen what they were told was the skull of Geronimo.

Since it is one of the dimwit customs of this supposedly elite society that (while ruling the world of course) they commit petty thefts of license plates (with their “secret” magic number 322 in them) and unearth skulls of alleged “crooks,” it was a matter of great pride for thick-skulled Prescott and his brilliant buddies to bring home to the Bones “tomb” in New Haven a skull they had allegedly unearthed when they were stationed at an Army base near Indian territory toward the close of the First World War.

In fact, as I have reported (in The Secret Parts of Fortune), there was, for a long time, a skull reposing in a glass case on a base of turquoise chips, inside the entrance to the Bones “tomb,” a skull labeled “Geronimo.”

But that didn’t make it Geronimo’s skull! When the rumor got out in the late ’80s, the Apache tribe that claimed Geronimo as their ancestral chief even had a meeting with the slow witted brother of George H.W. Bush, who clownishly offered the Apaches the cranium of what — judging by its size — was the skull of a small dead child, not a grown Indian chieftain. He was hosing the “inferior” people (just who was inferior was pretty much established by this meeting).