Bearskin's Gamble

In 1842, the tribe signed another treaty, giving up all its land in Ohio and Michigan in exchange for 148,000 acres west of the Mississippi, an annuity of $17,500 and relocation costs and money to start a school. The tribe moved out, traveling to Cincinnati and then boarding two steamboats for Kansas City. The Wyandots were the last tribe to leave Ohio.

They arrived in what is now Kansas City, Kansas, in July 1843. Court records show that the government failed to provide the land it had promised, then offered land that the tribe rejected because it was too far from civilization. Because the Wyandots had once given the Delaware tribe a place to stay in Ohio when that tribe had been displaced from the East Coast, the Delaware returned the favor in Kansas, selling 36 parcels to the Wyandots. They built homes in the lowlands near the junction of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers and within the year had established a Methodist church.

For today's residents of Kansas City, Kansas -- more than 1,000 homeowners and the employees of the companies being sued; city residents who might find jobs or win money at a casino; even nongamblers whose sidewalks might be fixed with the county's portion of gaming revenues -- the future depends on the legal interpretation of a treaty signed by the Wyandots and the United States in January 1855.

The tribe gave up the land it had purchased from the Delaware, except for a few pieces that would be held in trust by the federal government. In exchange, the Wyandots became U.S. citizens. The tribe was dissolved, and its land was sold at auction, with the proceeds going to the now-former members of the tribe.

Part of the land that remained in the trust was the Huron Indian Cemetery in downtown Kansas City, Kansas. Wyandots were buried there, along with Union soldiers, and the plot was set aside permanently for use as a "public burying ground."

But many members of the tribe had difficulty adjusting to their new way of life, and in 1857 Wyandot Chief Matthew Mudeater led a group of 200 disillusioned Wyandots to Oklahoma, where, two years later, the Seneca gave them 20,000 acres. The Wyandots who moved to Oklahoma became the Wyandotte tribe of Oklahoma in 1937.

And the Wyandottes and the Wyandots started battling over the cemetery.

Leaford Bearskin grew up just outside the reservation in Wyandotte, Oklahoma, a small town about 30 miles southwest of Joplin, Missouri. Today it's a one-street town, four or five blocks long, its biggest building the local high school.

Bearskin's parents were both farmers. His father was Wyandotte, his mother German Irish. He went to pow wows growing up, and he remembers his father telling old tales and passing on a few words of the native language.

But his father died when Bearskin was only seven, and Bearskin lost his main connection to his native heritage. Bearskin never rejected his Indian identity, but he tells the Pitch he didn't think much about it, either.

What he wanted to do was fly. Ever since he was a boy, hunting rabbits and squirrels with a single-shot .22, he had watched planes zoom overhead. After finishing high school in 1939, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps and trained at its base in Riverside, California. He finished flight school in 1943 and was sent to Tucson, Arizona, where he hoped to fly the Air Force's premier fighter, the P-38 Lightning, a twin-tailed aircraft known as the fork-tailed devil.

"[It was] the hottest plane in the air," Bearskin remembers. "I wanted to fly it so bad I could taste it." But there were nothing but big bombers in Tucson, and after an unsuccessful appeal to the base commander for a transfer, Bearskin accepted his fate and began training to deliver the big plane's payload.

When he finished, his superiors asked him to stay on as an instructor, but he says the warpath called. Bearskin jokes about the decision. "The damn Zeros were firing real bullets. I could have been back in Arizona, chasing pretty girls around the pool."

Instead, Bearskin distinguished himself during the war, trained other heavy-bomber crews and helped with airlifts during the 1948 blockade of Berlin. He retired from the Air Force in 1960 as a lieutenant colonel, then began a second career in the civil service at Vandenburg Air Force Base in California, testing missile-handling equipment.

Bearskin says he's never suffered discrimination. "Not personally," he says. "Not against me, Bearskin." As an Indian, being the odd man out in mainstream America provided as much pleasure as it did discomfort. "I knew I was in the limelight. I wanted to do everything better than anyone else."

In 1979 Bearskin retired for the second time and left California, ready to enjoy the slower pace of his native Oklahoma with his second wife, an Irishwoman named Barbara.