Fred Dakota Opens the First Native American Casino
On the last day of 1983, New Year’s Eve, Fred Dakota was ready to open the doors of The Pines, a casino and bar. Thinking back to the tribe’s success in marketing bingo with flyers, he had taken the same approach with his casino. He pinned flyers on bulletin boards, tucked them under car windshield wipers in grocery store parking lots. But as the opening moment neared, he recalls, “I was afraid, scared to death,” thinking about getting raided by the police. “I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen, but when you have five children to feed, you get innovative.”
Leading up to opening night, Dakota and his wife, Sybil, had been practicing how to deal blackjack. “We had a book that told how to do it,” he says. But come opening night, his wife was too nervous about dealing, so she tended bar, and Dakota did all the dealing at one table. And the people came to play. Cars parked in the driveway, on the shoulder of the road and in the trailer park next door.
Speaking of the bar, a shot of whiskey cost 70 cents; the good stuff 20 cents more.
“We must have had about 40 people in that two-car garage, and no law enforcement came,” Dakota says. “I thought, Well this is all right.”
The Pines casino opened every night from then on, just Dakota and his wife running the place. For a couple of weeks that was okay, but word spread fast, and soon people were standing around, waiting too long for seats at the table. Dakota built more blackjack tables and hired more dealers, eventually squeezing six tables into the garage.
“I started making decent deposits at the bank,” he says. “The bank was happy. I was happy. And there was no government interference whatsoever.”
Brad Dakota, Fred’s son who was in college then, remembers the first time his dad made $1,000 in a night at the casino. “He was standing in the kitchen, and he counted the money, and then he just threw it all up in the air.”
Eventually, a $1,000-night was not such a big deal. Brad recalls closing up in the middle of the night and carrying out lock-boxes with $10,000 in them. “I’d just take them to Dad’s house—it was a different time,” he says.
So, how was it that the state police didn’t raid the place and shut it right down? Here’s Fred Dakota’s reasoning for why he was legal. The state of Michigan already allowed casino gambling for something called Millionaire Nights. Nonprofit groups were allowed to hold Millionaire Nights three times a year, and customers could take part in limited gambling. With state policy allowing gambling in certain situations, it was certifying the activity as legal but regulated, like, say, distributing alcohol—it’s legal to do it, but you have to abide by certain rules. And since Indian reservations had the right to regulate legal activities, and since the tribe had written regulations for casino gambling, and since Dakota had a casino license based on those regulations, he was legal. This line of reasoning was ultimately rejected by the courts on various grounds, but Dakota ran with it.
Dakota’s garage quickly became too packed, standing room only. Within a few months he knew he needed a bigger place, so he leased some land from the tribe in Baraga, right along U.S. 41, and hired the tribal construction company to build a 3,200-square-foot casino, intending to open July 4, 1984.
“We gave the government vast tracts of land in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota when we signed that treaty in 1854,” Dakota told The New York Times in 1984. “And what did we get in return? We got the government to agree not to kill us. Well, now it’s time we got something more. Gambling is going to make a lot of Indians rich.”
Note : Fred Dakota was a member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, Lake Superior Band of Chippewa Indians (Baraga)
Source : Jeff Smith, “Fred Dakota Founded Native American Casinos — In a U.P. Garage“, MyNorth, February 17, 2014.
“Fred Dakota, Native American casino pioneer in UP, dies at 84“, Detroit News, September 18, 2021.