The Searchers by Glenn Frankel Page B

could take a little more thought and make some better plans.”
    The army eventually came up with a plan. Anne Powell made the first approach, offering to rebury Cynthia Ann and Quanah at Fort Sill’s main cemetery. After several visits, Mrs. Birdsong agreed to meet with de Shazo. She came along with a half-dozen family members to his office and inspected the proposed site. They agreed to the reinterment with full military honors, which took place in a public ceremony in August 1957.
    New monuments of Wichita red granite were erected. The Parkers were given pride of place, in front of the graves for Santanta and other celebrated warriors in a spot now known as the Chiefs’ Knoll. It is the only military cemetery in the United States where whites and Indians are buried side by side.
    But the new grave site was not yet complete. In 1965, Prairie Flower’s remains purportedly were disinterred and reburied at Fort Sill alongside those of her mother and her older brother. Nothing about the event was straightforward. Quanah’s son-in-law Aubrey Birdsong, now eighty-seven, insisted he had dug up Prairie Flower’s remains in Cynthia Ann’s grave site in 1910 when he had found her bones and those of a small child in the Fosterville Cemetery, and other accounts from that era supported his claim. But the disinterment permit from the Texas State Department of Health claimed Prairie Flower had died on or about December 15, 1863, of “influenza-pneumonia” and had been buried in the Asbury Cemetery near Edom in Van Zandt County, Texas. Where the date came from no one could say, and when the Rangers went to dig up and remove the remains, they found only a few strands of hair and sand, which they dropped into a cloth sack and carried off to Oklahoma.

    The gravestones of Wichita red granite for Quanah Parker, Cynthia Ann, and Prairie Flower on the Chief’s Knoll at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. It is reputedly the only U.S. military cemetery where whites and Indians are buried side by side.
    â€œ To tell the truth, Captain ,” wrote Stan Redding, a Ranger historian who was part of the reburial detail, to his commanding officer, “I didn’t really deliver no body, just some east Texas sand and a legend. The sand and some bits of wood that might have been part of her coffin was all that was left when we dug her up …”
    The army had no solution for the slowly rotting Star House. The Corps of Engineers offered to buy it for demolition, or to move it. Mrs. Birdsong and the family chose the latter. Engineers divided it into two sections, jacked it up onto two flatbed trucks, and deposited it on the main road. They left it there for a winter, then moved it to a vacant lot in Cache. The house caught fire twice during the next two years, and volunteer firemen rushed out to save it. But with no concrete foundation to provide stability, it seemed doomed to collapse. Then, on Easter Sunday, 1958, Mrs. Birdsong drove to the house of a local businessman named Herbert Woesner, whom she had known for many years. She did not get out of her car, just honked until he came out to greet her. “She told him, ‘Son, if this house is to be saved, it looks like it’s going to be up to you,’ “ recalled Woesner’s sister Kathy. He agreed to buy it from her in trade for the house of the high school basketball coach, who was leaving town for another job. They drew up the papers the following day. Woesner’s men jacked up the house again and moved it a half mile to a large lot in the back of his property, just a few dozen feet from Cache Creek. “ It was one of the happiest moments in my life,” Herbert Woesner said at the time.
    Like the Star House and the remains of the principals themselves, the legend of Cynthia Ann and Quanah was transplanted to fresher soil and reconsecrated. She remained the tragic figure, unable to bridge the gap between two warring civilizations. But her