Porter, getting one question answered and then having two more crop up tells me you are doing something right. That's the hook on this type of research. Back when I started, whenever I would receive a copy of a document from an archival repository I had to train myself to make a xerox of it before I could even start reading it. That was because whenever I started reading, before I knew it notes of further lines of research would be everywhere on it and suddenly I wouldn't have a clean copy anymore.

Regarding moving graves, I don't know that it was too common. I do know that those little cemeteries were everywhere in Missouri. Many of them have long disappeared from sight, and memory, with the headstones having been cast aside and the remains still resting in place. My own great great grandfather and great great grandmother rest in an abandoned cemetery not very far from you. That graveyard is overgrown with trees every few feet. Interspersed in that thick jungle of roots and branches are a couple of dozen very striking headstones, with the most recent dating to the 1870s. That graveyard survives only because of the tangle of trees, and it wasn't feasible for some farmer in the past to make use of the ground. As I recall, earlier in this decade the state of Missouri passed legislation protecting these cemeteries that are situated on private property. Before that, with no protections, the cemeteries disappeared. The Missouri Historical Society and/or the State Historical Society of Missouri can probably shed further light on this issue.

And while further research in the 1884 newspapers might yet reveal that bodies rest beneath the Louisiana monument, I feel your pain regarding facts bucking local lore and bursting bubbles. The debunked lore in my own home county out here in the wild west was that once upon a time there was a great cavalry fort here, which was an intermediary point between Fort Hays and Fort Kearny. Supposedly the area was overrun with hostiles and the local troops cleared them out and made the area safe for settlement, with the troops later coming into town and bellying up to the bar for a cold brew. Only problem is, when you actually go into the historical archives and pull out the dusty reports, the cavalry troop was only here for 20 days, five years before there was any permanent settlers at all. During their sojourn here, patrols were sent out in all directions. With no renegades being located within a hundred miles or so in any direction, the detachment moved on, never to return. Two years later a few dozen Buffalo Soldiers out of Hays got into a huge scrap with thousand or so Cheyenne, Kiowa and Arapaho in the northern part of the county. Somehow, that incident seems to have been interwoven into the local fabric and the myth of Fort Kirwan was born. In publishing the facts of the matter, the words "get of rope" have never been uttered to me directly, but the undercurrent was there, including among one or two close relatives.