December 13, 2019
Hello ,
I discovered another burial ground story.
Well, today it's an Indian burial ground, and the woman who used both her law degree and a double barreled shotgun to stall developers and save the remains of her people.
How Far Would You Go
to Save the Graves of Your Family?
Wyandot Burial Ground, a National Historic Landmark, is a 1.9 acre postage stamp of grass and trees in the middle of downtown Kansas City.
It's off Minnesota Avenue, near the city court building, across the street from Security Bank, right next to Taqueria El Camino Real.
Developers first tried to get their hands on this piece of high ground near the junction of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers in the late 1890's.
They underestimated the resolve of three women, Ida, Lyda and Helena Conley who endured ridicule and arrest to protect the sanctity of the graves of their ancestors.
According to the sisters, "We were fighting for the grave of our mother, and what could anyone do, in a case like that, but die rather than surrender?"
It's a story both shameful and heartening.
Originally know as the Huron Indian Cemetery, it is the final resting place for an unknown number of Native Huron. [So called by the French]. The Huron Nation was one of the three branches of the Iroquois federation prior to colonization, with a twelve-million acre homeland where these days you'll find Ontario, Canada.
How did these people come to be buried so far from home?
Let's take a more scrupulous look at something we all learned in school,
westward expansion.
That, plus a series of unfair treaties, coerced the Huron Nation to pick up and move from one place to another for more than 1500-miles and 400-years.
Colonists drove the Huron from their homeland in Canada to Wisconsin, then Michigan and southwest to the Ohio Valley. Along the way these native peoples became known as the Wyandot Nation. Their numbers
slashed from 20,000 to 2000.
Check out the sign in Ohio marking the Wyandot's "departure" after the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
A generation prior, when the U.S. opened most of Ohio to white settlement, tribal leaders had negotiated a treaty gaining them a large tract of land along the upper Sandusky River.
Some of the acreage was payment to tribal members for aiding George Washington's army during the Revolutionary War.
Now, the same legislation that sent federal troops to march the Cherokee down the Trail of Tears, uprooted the small, remaining Wyandot tribe, moving them thousands of miles from their forested homeland to the wide, unfamiliar prairie.
Above, the removal of the Cherokee Nation to the West in 1838. Oil on canvas, 1942, by Robert Lindneux.
The burial ground in what's now Kansas City would be the final resting place for Wyandots who did not survive the move.
But this only partly explains the courage and fortitude of the women who guarded the cemetery from profit-seeking businessmen for a full forty-years!
On their treaty lands in Ohio, the Wyandots had established homes, schools, farms and businesses. They were well-educated and prosperous. Some had become entrepreneurs, lawyers, abolitionists and suffragists.
Through marriage and adoption, the Wyandots had assimilated members of other Indian nations, whites and African Americans. Still, they maintained their cultural traditions and political practices. Most continued to speak their native language.
The Wyandots resisted removal from their Ohio lands for 13-years, the longest of any group of natives. Then in July of 1843, six hundred tribal members were put aboard steamers, taken down the Mississippi and deposited on shore at the eastern edge of the land designated "Indian Country."
Soon, they were digging graves.
Camped on the riverbank, the Wyandots waited for the land and compensation they had been promised. They waited through relentless summer, fall and winter.
They waited through relentless flooding, winter cold and disease. They died from sickness, exposure and hunger.
The oldest marked grave in the cemetery today is that of Chief Ron-ton-dee, who died on November 17, 1843, but there were almost certainly burials before that. There's no way of knowing how many perished. At least one hundred of the 600 were gone by spring.
For the next fifty years, the graves gres in number as the living population multiplied around them.
Elizabeth Zane had been a four-year-old child on the exodus from Ohio. In 1855, at age seventeen, she received an land allotment. She and her husband Andrew Conley farmed the 64-acres and raised three daughters.
Eventually, the family's land eroded into the Mississippi River. The daughters,
however, would hold their ground.
The middle daughter, Lyda Conley, is shown in this 1902 picture at her graduation from law school.
She became the first woman admitted to the Kansas and Missouri Bar, and the first female Native American lawyer.
Even more amazing, Lyda was one of the first women ever to take a case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Prior to this, her mother had died and been buried in the Huron cemetery.
When the idea was first floated in 1906, to move the graves and develop the land for profit, the three Conley sisters staged their own occupy movement.
Town residents woke one morning to see grave sites marked with signs bearing a warning. "Trespassers, Beware." The women built a tiny hut near the center of the cemetery and moved in. Small windows gave them a view in all four directions.
Below, Painting by local artist Don Ballou shows two Conley sister and Huron Indian Cemetery. Courtesy the Kansas City Star, December 15, 1961.
The women refused to leave, promising not to give in, even if federal troops arrived to force them, which was not far-fetched considering Wyandot history.
"We had two large American flags in the shack," Lyda explained later, "and in the event of troops putting in an appearance, we had decided to wrap the folds of the flag around us, and tell the boys in blue to shoot-for they would have to do that before they could disturb those graves."
Forward-thinking Kansas women of all nationalities and classes supported this brave stance, swaying public opinion against sale of the cemetery. The project fell through. But according to historian Kim Dayton, "Conley was a pragmatic woman, and she knew the limits of her ability to prevent the execution of a federal statute with only some hand-painted signs and a double-barreled shotgun."
Attorney Lyda Conley filed a petition in
U.S. Circuit Court to try and stop the sale of the property.
She argued that as a Wyandot, she had a legal right to the Huron Cemetery land derived specifically from the 1855 Treaty. And that selling the land would violate
Article VI of the Constitution stating all treaties were "the supreme Law of the Land."
Over the next three years, Lyda battled to keep her case alive until finally, it reached
the Supreme Court. She went to Washington D.C. to plead her case, becoming the first woman of Native American descent to appear and argue before Supreme Court Justices of the United States, the second woman attorney and the only the third woman to do so.
According to Kim Dayton, the judges were moved by Lyda's argument. "She spoke with eloquence of the history of the Wyandots, of their loyalty to the colonial forces during the Revolutionary War, and of the consistent failure of the federal government to honor its treaties with them."
Conley appealed to the Justices' sense that the graves of the great Wyandot leaders interred at Huron Place, no less than the grave "of Washington at Mt. Vernon," were deserving of federal protection and respect."
Even so, Lyda lost her case. The high court found there was no basis for federal jurisdiction over her petition.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote the opinion, stating that, if the Treaty of 1855 created any rights at all, they were tribal rights, not individual ones, and that words of the treaty
rested on the good faith of the United States to provide for the welfare of the Indians.
Federal marshals immediately went to the cemetery and destroyed the Conley sister's shack.
The women refused to give up. They rebuilt the 6’ by 8’ cemetery hut, and when it was torn down again, the put if back up, at least three times before federal officials gave up the fight.
A few years later, there was another attempt to sell the cemetery land. But Kansas Senator Charles Curtis, a multi-racial member of the Kaw tribe and future Vice President of the United States, pushed a bill through Congress to stop the sale and protect the Huron Indian Cemetery as a city park.
The Conley sisters remained vigilant. When city officials made changes without regard to unmarked graves in 1918, Lyda went to court to stope them. Lyda and Helena were arrested several times for interfering when they believed city officials were desecrating Wyandot graves. In the 1930s, Lyda served 10 days in jail for trespass, rather than pay a $10 fine. Until their deaths, Lyda in 1946, the sisters continued to
guard their ancestors' graves.
In 1971, the cemetery was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, though it appears even now it may not be safe from development. In the 1990s and early 2000s an Oklahoma branch of the Wyandots proposed building a bingo parlor on the property.
Today, there are estimates of four-hundred to one-thousand bodies buried in the Huron Indian Cemetery, though few of the graves are marked. One of the reasons Lyda Conley went to such lengths to guard her family and tribal graves is that moving them would be almost impossible.
Would-be developers think they can just go in and dig up the bodies and move them. However, those who died before 1900 were not put in coffins, but given the traditional Wyandot burial. Bodies wrapped simply in blankets of beaver skin so long ago could not be exhumed with any pretense of respect.
Sources:
https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1110&context=yjlf
https://www.indigenousgoddessgang.com/matriarch-monday/2019/4/8/eliza-lyda-conley
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