One fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Another cast spells on her foes.
 
And Neither Elisa nor Helena Conley was afraid to use force to defend the Huron Indian Cemetery against intruders soon after the turn of the century.

     The Conley sisters, now buried in that cemetery beside their parents, spent much of their lives battling Congress, vandals, drunks, city officials, the Wyandotte Indian tribe in Oklahoma and even Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

     Today, 80 years after the Conleys defeated those who saw only dollar signs in the sacred cemetery in downtown Kansas City, Kansas, history is being replayed.  Tribal leaders in Oklahoma want to exhume the 400 bodies in the cemetery and build a high-stakes bingo palace on 2 acres of sacred ground.

     Again, the forces of Wyandotte’s Indian descendants are being marshaled against the tribe.  Forty area residents voted unanimously 10 days ago to but Wyandotte Chief Leadford Berskin on notice: If he persists, the will fight.

     “Do you think if we got ourselves a shotgun and sat up in a little white shack,” said Richard A Yunghans of Kansas City, Kansas, invoking the memory of the Conleys, “we could keep people away?”

     Founded in 1843, Huron Cemetery has long aroused competing interests, including private and government efforts to move the graves and develop the land.

     Although the official Wyandotte tribe, which moved to Oklahoma in 1866, still calls it tribal land, descendants of those who stayed have been the most vocal in opposing development.

    “It is historic place, and in it lies the dust of Christian people, pioneers…who were driven from their happy homes in the east came here and re-established homes, schools and churches,” Kansas City, Kansas resident B.A. Armstrong wrote in a letter to the editor of the Kansas City Star in 1899.

     “Damned be the villain that would rob them of their peaceful graves for gain.”

     Nobody fought those efforts harder than Eliza and Helena Conley.

     A third sister, Ida, Supported their efforts, but was not a leader.  A fourth sister, Sarah, died as a teenager.  The sisters were one-eighth Wyandotte Indian.

    The sisters, preoccupied with saving the cemetery, never married.  Their behavior, one historian later wrote, ‘was not ladylike under the concepts of feminine deportment in the early 1900’s.

     An early photograph of Eliza shows a well-dressed woman in a white dress.  In later years she and her sisters dressed in outdated styles and bore the signs of poverty.

     The sisters were strict Methodists. Eliza taught Sunday school for 50 years at the Seventh Street Methodist Church.
Marcella LeTourneau, 69, of Wyandotte Indian descendent, said she recalled visiting the Conley sisters’ home on Third Street in Kansas City, Kansas when she was a little girl.

     It was like they didn’t take good care of themselves.” LeTourneau said.  “They were disheveled, but they were very nice people.”

     Madelyn Fotovich, 67, of Kansas City, Kansas accompanied her grandmother on cemetery vigils with the Conleys.  She remembered the sisters as “tall, gangling-looking women who spoke with authority