They Did Dig Something Up. It Cannot Have Been Him.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Start with the ground, not the building.

Geronimo died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill in 1909 and was buried in the prisoner-of-war cemetery there. Our correspondent asked the post's history office a simple question: in 1918, standing in that cemetery, could you tell which grave was his?

The answer was one word.

No.

The graves had nothing on them

The prisoner graves on that ground were not individually identified in any way a visitor could read. The stone that marks his grave now — the pyramid of field stones that people photograph — was built later, in the years after, when the post set out to fix exactly that.

Ignatius Sowande-Petrova of the post history office made the point without any drama in it. People were buried, the ground was recorded in a register held in an office, and the ground itself said nothing.

A party of officers with shovels and a night to themselves could have dug in that cemetery in 1918. What they could not have done is know whose grave they were in.

The letter

Everything else in this story is one sentence in one private letter, written on 7 June 1918 by one member of the society to another.

It reports that the skull, "exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club," is now safe inside the building on High Street, along with some other bones and a bit and a saddle horn.

It is a real letter. A historian found it in 2005 in a university library, in an open collection, on a shelf reachable by anybody with a reader's card. Our correspondent requested it and it came out in eleven minutes.

Who was in the room

Neither of them.

The man who wrote it was not at Fort Sill. The man he wrote it to was not at Fort Sill. It is a letter between two people in Connecticut about something they had been told that friends of theirs had done in Oklahoma.

Professor Delphine Ackerman-Oyibo, who studies these societies and belongs to none of them, has read it and thinks it is exactly what it appears to be: a young man delightedly repeating a story he believes.

That belief may well have been sincere. It may even have been founded on somebody really having dug somewhere. Neither of those makes the skull his.

1986

In the eighties a member wrote, in correspondence about whether the society ought to hand the thing back, that the skull in the building is a child's.

The society did not hand anything back. It has never said what it holds, and it did not say so to us: we put written questions three times across four months, to the alumni association and to the university, and received no reply of any kind. Our questions are printed at the foot of this story so you can see they were reasonable ones.

The lawsuit

Twenty descendants sued in 2009 for the return of the remains, from the society, the university, and the federal government.

It was dismissed in 2010, and this newspaper wants to be exact about how, because both sides have described the dismissal as a finding and it was not one.

The judge did not decide whether there is a skull, or whose it is. He decided that the statute the plaintiffs relied on applies to items excavated or discovered after 1990, and that the federal government had not waived its immunity from being sued in the way the claim required.

That is a ruling about who may be sued under which act. It leaves the question exactly where it was, and it left the families exactly where they were, which is the part of this story with a person in it.

What provenance actually asks

This newspaper's document desk applies three questions to everything that comes through the door. Who says so. Were they there. Could what they describe have happened where they say it did.

The letter answers the first and fails the second. The burial register in Oklahoma answers the third, and the answer is no.

That is not a debunking and this newspaper is not claiming one. Something may be in that building. Somebody may have dug in that cemetery.

But the specific claim — that the man in the Tomb is the man from Fort Sill — requires a party of amateurs on a night in 1918 to have identified a grave that the United States Army could not identify for another decade.