History Forum / General / British History / May 2006

"Whose Skull and Bones?"

May/June 2006

Yale Alumni Magazine

by Kathrin Day Lassila '81 and Mark Alden Branch '86

Click here to download a PDF of this article as it appeared in the May/June 2006 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine.

"Did Skull and Bones rob the grave of Geronimo during World War I?

For decades, it has been the most controversial and sordid of all the mysteries surrounding Yale's best-known secret society. The story was widely rumored but, despite the efforts of reporters and historians and the public complaints of Apache leaders in the 1980s, never verified.  An internal history of Skull and Bones, written in the 1930s and leaked to the Apache 50 years later, mentioned the theft.  But Bones spokesmen have always dismissed the story as a hoax.

       "The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club, is now safe inside the T --."
   
A former senior editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine has now discovered the only known contemporary evidence: a reference in private correspondence from one senior Bonesman to another. The letter was written on June 7, 1918, by Winter Mead '19 to F. Trubee Davison '18.  It announces that the remains dug up at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, by a group that included Charles C. Haffner Jr. '19 (a new member, or "Knight"), have been deposited in the society's headquarters (the "Tomb"): "The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club & the K -- t [Knight] Haffner, is now safe inside the T -- [Tomb] together with his well worn femurs[,] bit & saddle horn."

Mead was not at Fort Sill, so his letter is not proof. And if the Bonesmen did rob a grave, there's reason to think it may have been the wrong one. But the letter shows that the story was no after-the-fact rumor. Senior Bonesmen at the time believed it. "It adds to the seriousness of the belief [that the theft took place], certainly," says Judith Schiff, the chief research archivist at Sterling Memorial Library, who has written extensively on Yale history. "It has a very strong likelihood of being true, since it was written so close to the time." Members of a secret society, she points out, were required to be honest with each other about its affairs.

Moreover, the yearbook entries for Haffner, Mead, and Davison confirm that they were all Bonesmen. (The membership of the societies was routinely published in newspapers and yearbooks until the 1970s.) Haffner's entry confirms that he was at the artillery school at Fort Sill some time between August 1917 and July 1918."...

The Geronimo rumor first came to wide public attention in 1986. At the time, Ned Anderson, then chair of the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona, was campaigning to have Geronimo's remains moved from Fort Sill -- where he died a prisoner of war in 1909 -- to Apache land in Arizona. Anderson received an anonymous letter from someone who claimed to be a member of Skull and Bones, alleging that the society had Geronimo's skull. The writer included a photograph of a skull in a display case and a copy of what is apparently a centennial history of Skull and Bones, written by the literary critic F. O. Matthiessen '23, a Skull and Bones member. In Matthiessen's account, which quotes a Skull and Bones log book from 1919, the skull had been unearthed by six Bonesmen -- identified by their Bones nicknames, including "Hellbender," who apparently was Haffner. Matthiessen mentions the real names of three of the robbers, all of whom were at Fort Sill in early 1918: Ellery James '17, Henry Neil Mallon '17, and Prescott Bush '17, the father and grandfather of the U.S. presidents."

Fascinating!

http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2006_05/notebook.html

D. Spencer Hines

Lux et Veritas et Libertas

Vires et Honor