Bearskin's Gamble

World War II's B-24 Liberator bomber was most vulnerable when it was dropping its explosive cargo. During the eleven seconds it took the giant plane's doors to open, then the five minutes that might have passed while it dropped a dozen 500-pound bombs and pulled out, the B-24 had to survive the lightning attacks of Japanese Zero fighter planes and a barrage of anti-aircraft fire.On one run, pilot Leaford Bearskin had just started to pull the nose of his aircraft up and away when a 40-millimeter shell from a Japanese gun shot into the bomb bay and blew a hole the size of a trash-can lid through the top of the plane. The shell narrowly missed the B-24's just-dropped last bomb. A direct hit would have detonated it, blowing the plane out of the sky.

But during the 46 missions he flew during World War II, Bearskin would suffer no direct hits. Other pilots often lost members of their crews even if their planes weren't shot down, but none of Bearskin's men were ever hurt. Bearskin had such a reputation for good fortune that, before each mission, Air Force photographers who went along on bombing runs to document the damage flipped coins to see who got to fly with him.

It was, Bearskin says now, the Great Spirit looking after them.

The comment seems ironic. Although Leaford Bearskin was born a Wyandotte Indian, he spent much of his life away from Indian country, surrounded by whites. Bearskin's achievements in the armed forces reveal a life of happy assimilation. If anything, triumph in the Pacific Theater might more readily suggest the patronage of the Judeo-Christian God -- or the supremacy of American military might -- than protection from the Great Spirit.

But flying bombers during the war was just one of Bearskin's many lives. Now, at 81 the chief of the Wyandotte tribe of Oklahoma, he's on what's probably his last life. Having helped save the world as a young man, he's on one final mission to save his tribe.

He's using everything he learned from decades in the military -- leadership, management, vision and backbone. Yet he's alienated his cousins, the Wyandot Nation of Kansas, and he's dragged thousands of people in Wyandotte County who'd harbored no ill will against his tribe into a paralyzing legal battle.

Bearskin has tried to drop a casino right in the middle of downtown Kansas City, Kansas, next to an old cemetery that belongs to his tribe. And he's audaciously sued Wyandotte County's Unified Government, along with major companies operating in the Fairfax District (such as International Paper and General Motors) and 1,000 homeowners, for 1,900 acres of land.

To his tribe, he is a revered figure who has turned around his people's fortunes and is poised to deliver an unprecedented surge of prosperity. To tribes in northeastern Kansas, he is an interloper with a tenuous historic claim, a man of great ego who's most interested in his own legacy.

It was such a simple idea. Build a casino and use the profits to improve the welfare of the more than 4,000 Wyandottes across the country. By tribal estimates, a casino would draw about $100 million a year.The only problem was, the tribe members wanted to build where they didn't live.

Inside the tribal offices in Wyandotte, Oklahoma, a map of the United States shows the migration of some of the most-traveled Indians in North America.

According to a tribal history, the Wyandots, as they were then known, originated around Quebec. In 1535, conflict with the Senecas pushed them south to Niagra Falls, then around the western curve of Lake Ontario to the present site of Toronto. The Wyandots later moved north to the small isthmus between Lake Simcoe and the Georgian Bay, a large body of water to the east of Lake Huron. This was Huron country, and the tribe became a part of the Huron Confederacy.

A century later, in 1649, the Hurons were defeated in a war with the Iroquois Confederacy, and the Iroquois hounded the losers, including the Wyandots, to tiny Mackinac Island, between the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. The relentless Iroquois chased the tribe to Wisconsin, then to Illinois, where the tribe met another strong opponent, the Sioux, near the Mississippi. The Wyandots turned north to the Apostle Islands, off the northern coast of Wisconsin. In 1671, the Sioux chased the Wyandots back to Mackinac Island.

Caught between the Iroquois on the east and the Sioux on the west, the Wyandots moved south, and by the 1740s they had settled in Ohio. But by the close of the eighteenth century, the Wyandots had signed the first of nineteen treaties with the United States, gradually giving up their land in Ohio for white settlement. Though they had assimilated easily and many had become Methodists, by the 1830s the U.S. government had pressured the indigenous tribes to move farther west to unsettled areas. In 1839, the tribe sent two expeditions to what is now eastern Kansas to scout for a new home.

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.