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other Knights of Skull and Bones, Fort Sill looked like a cornucopia for crooking, especially the Old Post Corral with its frontier relics and the Apache Cemetery that contained the grave of Geronimo, the Indian warrior who had led sensational campaigns against the white man. The chieftain had taken forty-nine scalps before the Army troops at Fort Sill finally captured him. He had escaped so many times before that he was lionized as a hero by both sides.
    At the time of his death in 1909, Geronimo was the most famous Indian warrior in the world. As a result, the Apaches were afraid that white men might dig up his body and exhibit it in a traveling show or vandalize his grave, looking for gold and silver, not realizing that there would be nothing of value within because the Apaches were poor and did not bury valuables with their dead. Actually, Apaches were afraid of the dead and believed the spirits might contaminate them. They looked upon grave tampering with horror. So when the grave of a Comanche leader was desecrated, the Apaches, to prevent further tampering, spread the story that they had removed Geronimo’s bones. National magazines and newspapers published stories in 1914 stating that Geronimo’s remains were no longer at Fort Sill.
    When the Knights of Skull and Bones arrived at the Army fort in 1918, they found all the graves unmarked and the cemetery overgrown with weeds and thorny vines. Available records failed to designate the burial site, and nine years after Geronimo’s death men on the post could not recall the spot, and Apaches professed ignorance. Despite all that, the Knights claimed that they had unearthed the secret grave and had snatched Geronimo’s skull in a midnight raid, along with his stirrups and a horse bit, all of which they carried back to the tomb in New Haven to be proudly displayed as the most prized of all “crooks.”
    These false claims proved to be another example of Prescott Bush’s predilection for “pernicious . . . fooling.” The actual location of the Indian chieftain’s grave remained secret for many years until U.S. Master Sergeant Morris Swett, Fort Sill librarian from 1915 to 1954, shared his knowledge. He had become close to the Apaches during his many years at Fort Sill, and Nah-thle-tla, Geronimo’s first cousin, had trusted Swett enough to show him the unmarked grave. Swett’s story, “The Secret of Geronimo’s Grave,” confirmed by Apache leaders and tribal elders in Lawton, Oklahoma, was written by Paul McClung in 1964 in
The Lawton Constitution
, where it received little circulation. By then the 1918 myth of Prescott Bush and his Knights had taken hold as legend among decades of Bonesmen. The nonexistent exploit was so beguiling that F. O. Matthiessen, literary critic from Yale’s class of 1923, wrote it up for a Skull and Bones history titled “Continuation of the History of Our Order for the Century Celebration, 17 June 1933”:
    From the war days also sprang the mad expedition from the School of Fire at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, that brought to the T [tomb] its most spectacular “crook,” the skull of Geronimo the terrible, the Indian Chief who had taken forty-nine white scalps. An expedition in late May 1918 by members . . . planned with great caution since in the words of one of them: “Six army captains robbing a grave wouldn’t look good in the papers.” The stirring climax was recorded by Hellbender in the Black Book of D. 117 . . . “The ring of pick on stone and thud of earth on earth alone disturbs the peace of the prairie. An axe pried open the iron door of the tomb, and Pat. [Patriarch] Bush entered and started to dig. We dug in turn, each on relief taking a turn on the road as guards . . . Finally Pat. [Patriarch] Ellery James turned up a bridle, soon a saddle horn and rotten leathers followed, then wood and then, at the exact bottom of the small round hole, Pat. [Patriarch] James dug deep and pried out the trophy itself . . . we quickly