CAN DISTURB INDIAN GRAVES.
Lyda B. Conley, Kansas City, Kas.,
Woman, Loses Lawsuit.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 31. -- The fight of Lyda B. Conley, the Indian woman lawyer, to prevent the sale of the burial ground in Kansas City, Kas., where lie the bodies of her ancestors, came to an end adversely to her in the supreme court of the United States today.
The court affirmed the judgment of the lower courts that her bill to enjoin those who proposed to disturb the burial ground be dismissed.
The court ameliorated the decree by directing that the suit be dismissed without cost to Miss Conley. Miss Conley, who is one-sixteenth Wyandotte and a lawyer, claimed the burial ground of Huron cemetery in Kansas City, Kas., was reserved in perpetuity as a burial ground by a treaty in 1855 between the United States and the Indians.
Congress recently authorized the sale of the land and the removal of the bodies. Miss Conley objected to the removal of the bodies of her ancestors to the burial ground of a Methodist church. She asked for an injunction in the case, but the circuit court dismissed her petition for want of jurisdiction. She argued her own case before the supreme court.
"No court decision or legal technicality will avail in any manner to change my firm determination to prevent the desecration of the graves of my ancestors. I will resist even to the death, any attempt to remove the bodies from the old Indian burial ground and if by force of arms they succeed in killing me, my sisters will see to it that my dead body lies with my father and mother in the Huron cemetery."
This was the statement made last night to a representative of the Journal, by Miss Lyda Conley at her home, 1712 North Third street, Kansas City, Kas.
"The public burying place of the Wyandotte Indians, used by them for that purpose as early as 1814, was by the treaty between the United States and the Indians, in 1855, set aside to the Indians and their descendants as a perpetual burying ground. now by what right does the government claim ownership of this ground or the right to dispose of it? I am not a ward of the government but a citizen of the United States. I am not in rebellion as an Indian ward of the government, but am standing up for my rights as a citizen and as a descendant of the Wyandotte Indians."
