Their fight began in 1906, when a bill authorizing the cemetery’s sale slipped through Congress.  The graves of more than 300 dead, including many of the sisters’ ancestors, were ordered moved to make for a way for a commercial development.
 
    Before that could happen, the sisters built what come to be called “Fort Conley, a 6-by-8-foot shack on their parents’ graves.  They armed themselves with at least one shotgun their father’s old double-barrel muzzle-loader.

     They began six-year occupation

     The sisters padlocked the cemetery’s Iron Gate and hung out a sign:  “Trespass at your own apparel.”

     The big shotgun worked well in chasing away intruders, although most accounts say it wasn’t loaded.

    The sisters were slender, but they apparently were not weak. Helena occupied her time farming the grounds “and felling  trees with an ax while awed bystanders admired the play her muscles,” one newspaper account reported.

    But the sisters actual feats, Eliza said in a 1911 interview, rarely matched the myths that grew up around them.

    “One great big man said that I seized him and threw him into Minnesota Avenue,” she said.  “Now I don’t look able to handle a big man like that, do I?”

     But she conceded, “I did take one young man by the coat collar one evening.  He was with some girl up there spooning. Everybody knows that a cemetery is not the place to spoon.”

     Guns weren’t their only weapons.  Eliza studied law and was admitted to the bar, but practiced mostly in defense of the cemetery.  The tombstone says she was the only woman to argue a case before the U. S. Supreme Court.

     She sued the Department of the Interior to overturn the order to move the cemetery.  She argued that the 1885 treaty decreed the cemetery ( permanently reserved and appropriated as a buryig ground.

     When it was revealed that Eliza was not technically a member of the Wyandotte tribe, she argued that the basis of her claims were her U.S. citizenship and her family being buried in the cemetery.

    As her sister fought in court, Helena Conley turned to sorcery  - or at least what many people thought was sorcery -  to chase people from the cemetery.

     In 1922, when a white man was buried in the cemetery, Helena confronted the burial party and cursed the dead man’s soul and those responsible for the internment.

     Her curse, littered with English swear words, was delivered in a low tone, most of it apparently in an Indian tongue.  While muttering the curse, she kissed the tips of his fingers.

     Perhaps it was a combination of Helena’s curses and Eliza’s highly publicized arguments before the Supreme Court, but public opinion began to swing in the favor of the sisters.

    Shortly after Eliza returned to Kansas in defeat, Sen. Charles Curtis of Kansas, himself part American Indian, pushed a bill through Congress in 1913 that reversed the 1906 law.

     The cemetery was saved and the Conley sisters had won.

     Although the crisis was averted, the sisters continued the rest of their lives to stop sporadic efforts to take over the ground.

    Every so often, newspapers brought readers up to date with the story like one dated Dec. 28, 1933: “Early last night, the biting chill of winter in the air, an elderly woman left her home a mile from the burial ground to walk to the cemetery to care for its living inhabitants, the birds and the squirrels. She replaced the blocks of ice in cans with water from the taps of the public library nearby, and scattered nuts she had brought from her home at 1712 N. Third Street.  Her task over, she went to the library to read for a hour before returning to her home.”

    Eliza Conley, age 72, died in 1946.  Ida was 80 when she died two years later.  Helena was 94 when she died in 1958.