The Searchers by Glenn Frankel Page A

University library in Waco. It’s easy to sense from her answers just how naïve Elsie’s questions were—and how by 1952 the perceptual gap between whites and Indians could often be far larger than the cultural one:
    Dear Mrs. Hamill ,
    First I will begin by telling you that the Comanche Indians and most all Oklahoma Indians live and have practically the same customs of their white friends. Many of them have modern homes, drive good automobiles, and most of the young Indians are well-educated.
    We do have a few “very few” of the older Indians who still clings to some of the old customs & beliefs, but they are passing away at a rapid pace and within a very short time we will not have a Comanche Indian who cannot understand and talk the English language.
    According to my father he was about 12 years old when he last saw his mother.
    I cannot tell you what was the cause of Cynthia Ann baby girls death.
    I do not know but we have heard many times that Cynthia Ann died of a broken heart longing to be back with the Indians again.
    You can almost hear the walls of ignorance and prejudice crumbling as Wanada writes her amused and commonsense answers to Elsie’s questions. Elsie clearly isn’t certain whom she is dealing with; she asks in her letter whether Wanada might feel anxious about meeting with white people. “I’m not afraid of white people,” Wanada responds. “After all, I’ve been married to one for forty years.”
    Wanada’s letter is a ringing antidote to the myths of prejudice and ignorance concerning Native Americans. “Yes Indians are very affectionate to their children,” she tells Elsie, putting to rest the old saw that Indians were anything but.
    Elsie proved to be ready and willing to learn. She and her husband drove up to Cache that summer, visited Wanada, and stayed at her home. The two women put together a two-day family reunion for Indians and whites at the replica of Old Fort Parker in July 1953.
    Since then, the two families have sent representatives to attend each other’s annual family events. Someone on the Texan side commissioned a silver bowl with the Texas and Oklahoma state flags and the legend “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” inscribed over a peace pipe. The bowl has been passed back and forth each year from one side to the other.
    EVEN THE BODIES of Cynthia Ann, Quanah, and Prairie Flower, buried side by side in the modest cemetery at the Post Oak Mission near the Star House, were not allowed to rest in peace. A few years after the first reunion, the army decided it needed the land to build a firing range for its new atomic cannon and it seized a seven-square-mile strip on the west side of Fort Sill, a patch that included the Star House, the Post Oak Mission, several ranches, and the Craterville amusement park. It proposed jacking up the houses and relocating them to nearby Cache, and digging up and reburying the graves as well. The Parker family and the Comanche community in general were torn. Many had fought in World War Two, and they felt a deep sense of pride and respect for the military. At the same time, they revered the burial places of their tribal elders. General Thomas E. de Shazo, commander of Fort Sill, enlisted Gillett Griswold, director of the fort’s history museum, and Anne Powell, acivilian employee of the information office, to campaign among the Comanches for the reburial.
    Neda Birdsong, one of Quanah’s surviving daughters, was the closest thing to a family leader. Educated at the Carlisle Indian School, she had composed the epitaph on Quanah’s granite gravestone, and she was deeply disturbed at the prospect of digging up her father’s and his mother’s remains. “If we were in a war … and I were asked to give my father’s house, I would walk out of this door without one word,” she told an interviewer at the time. “But in a time of peace it seems to me they