Jones Early Life Events
A boyhood of lecture tours, a lost mother and a stolen cross that gave him his fedora.
This period is defined by a distant relationship with his father, a professor of medieval literature at Princeton devoted to research into the Holy Grail. As a teenager he fought graverobbers over the Cross of Coronado, stealing it and escaping on his Boy Scout horse.
Quick Facts
- Subject
- Henry Walton Jones Jr. (Indiana Jones)
- Role
- Archaeologist; Professor of Archaeology
Lore & Background
Indiana's father, Henry Jones Sr., published a successful book on chivalry in 1909 and was invited to speak at schools and universities around the world; he took his wife Anna and their son along and hired his own former tutor, Helen Seymour, to teach the boy during the tour of 1908 to 1910. After Anna died of influenza in 1912, the gulf between father and son grew until they rarely spoke, and Indy embraced his father's friend Marcus Brody as a father figure.
In 1912 Boy Scout Indiana Jones, living with his father in Moab, Utah, took the Cross of Coronado from a gang of graverobbers led by Garth; Garth and the sheriff made him give it back, but Garth admired him and gave him his fedora. In 1916 Indy enlisted in the Belgian Army without his father's consent, and the two went three years without seeing each other. Henry later revealed that the nickname "Indiana" was the name of the family dog.
Reader's Guide
The television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles tells his childhood and youth: Corey Carrier and Sean Patrick Flanery play the young Jones, and in The Last Crusade River Phoenix plays him at 13. Spielberg and Ford, an Eagle Scout and a Life Scout in their youth, made the young Indiana a Life Scout.
More in Production & Legacy
Elsewhere in Indiana Jones
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