Geronimo and the Graverobbers

Posted response to histarch (message link) forum citing Yale Alumni Magazine from last summer: Whose Skull and Bones?

by Kathrin Day Lassila '81 and Mark Alden Branch '86 May/June 2006 Comment: It has been in and out of the media (some of it carried in "Time" magazine, especially when they found on campus a lost cache of medical specimens in a basement room feeding speculation) and there is a petition on behalf of the Apache, his grandson a spokesperson, to further investigate it. Perhaps it should be a NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) issue, which "ironically" was signed into law by then President ("Poppy") George H.W. Bush whose father, Prescott Bush was allegedly part of it.

The Yale men used to have a flight training base on the Great South Bay on Long Island with a cannon they used to fire into Fire Island and the Great South Bay according to a historian online leaving what the writer said were deadly swirling holes in the water in the Great South Bay. It was in Mastic, NY, near the William Floyd Manor (signer of the "Declaration of Independence" today Mastic/Shirley) part of the Fire Island National Seashore now, where I worked with the NPS in getting it ready for the public with clearance archaeology, and also attended a public hearing on presenting the Suffolk County Archaeological Association for the creation of the National Seashore. It was in the 1930's in the nation's "Cradle of Aviation". Perhaps another reason for creation of New York State's only "Federal wilderness" ordnance had elsewhere been found on the barrier islands, and more recently in the news in redeposited replenishment dredging in New Jersey. The Suffolk County Archaeology Association used to meet then at the Hoyt Farm Nature Center (Town of Smithtown Department of Parks, Smithtown, NY). The Hoyt Farm complex was once owned by a judge I recall. In the vestibule as one walked in (perhaps the same as the "Tomb" mentioned) were two broken US Calvary sabres that allegedly were used by the Apache as "pikes" in a glass cabinet.

George Myers (Not meant for legal fodder, anthropological)