The Way to Rainy Mountain

“When the wild herds were destroyed, so too was the will of the Kiowa people; there was nothing to sustain them in spirit. But these are idle recollections, the mean and ordinary agonies of human history. The interim was a time of great adventure and nobility and fulfillment.

The dramatic polysyndeton that finishes this passage (“great adventure and nobility and fulfillment”) emphasizes the importance of the Kiowas’ century on the plains over the cultural and actual genocide that brought it to a close. Momaday takes away some of the power of that genocide when he refuses to center it in this story. Instead, he disparages it with his diction, dismissing it as a small, stingy, and uninteresting story by calling it “the mean and ordinary agonies of human history,” particularly when compared to the glorious days on the plains.

“Their nomadic soul was set free. In alliance with the Comanches they held dominion in the southern Plains for a hundred years. In the course of that long migration they had come of age as a people. They had conceived a good idea of themselves; they had dared to imagine and determine who they were.”

Momaday here describes the spiritual and cultural impact of the Kiowas’ move from the mountains to the plains as an act of self-creation. He uses the word “conceived,” often used to describe biological reproduction, to describe how in creating an idea of themselves, the Kiowa people became that idea. They “imagine and determine” who they are, pointing to the importance of both thought and action in creating this people. The latter word, “determine,” also alludes to the political right of self-determination, which Indigenous communities like the Kiowas still assert and defend to this day.

“In one sense, then, the way to Rainy Mountain is preeminently the history of an idea, man’s idea of himself, and it has old and essential being in language.”

Momaday introduces his journey, or his road to Rainy Mountain, as a metaphor for Kiowa self-creation through ideas and language: The way is the history. The way to Rainy Mountain also refers to the centuries of history that led the Kiowas from their place of emergence in the northern mountains near Yellowstone to the foot of Devil’s Tower and finally out onto the plains before their imprisonment in Fort Sill in Oklahoma. The end of this journey, at his grandmother’s home near Rainy Mountain, is less than 50 miles away from Fort Sill.

“Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountain, the immense landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood. She could tell of Crows, whom she had never seen, and of the Black Hills, where she had never been.”

This simile (the landscape lay like memory) compares Momaday’s grandmother’s mental map of the plains to a memory. Even though she never saw those places, her knowledge of the oral tradition makes it as if she saw and remembered them. It is also significant that the landscape is “in her blood,” thus inextricable from her being. Blood is also associated with bloodlines and genetics; this oral tradition, and the spiritual and actual claim on the land that it implies, is an inheritance from her ancestors.

“There is perfect freedom in the mountains, but it belongs to the eagle and the elk, the badger and the bear. The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see, and they were bent and blind in the wilderness.”

Momaday uses figurative language to describe the Kiowas as being “bent and blind” while living in the mountains during the centuries before their move to the plains. This metaphor depicts the plains as a place of far-seeing, both visual and spiritual. The description clearly comes from a plains perspective, as the Kiowa ancestors who lived near Yellowstone would likely not have self-identified with the language of disability or frailty that Momaday uses to describe them.

“From that moment, and so long as the legend lives, the Kiowas have kinsmen in the night sky.”

In this moment, Momaday’s voice returns to offer meta-commentary on his grandmother’s telling of the legend of Devil’s Tower. His and his grandmother’s act of telling and retelling demonstrates that the “legend lives” still, and by living it creates (as opposed to merely illuminating or asserting) the kinship between the Kiowas and the stars. To tell the story makes it so.

“Forbidden without cause the essential act of their faith, having seen the wild herds slaughtered and left to rot upon the ground, the Kiowas backed away forever from the medicine tree. That was July 20, 1890, at the great bend of the Washita. My grandmother was there. Without bitterness, and for as long as she lived, she bore a vision of deicide.”

Momaday uses his grandmother’s lifespan to point out that the last Sun Dance was not so long ago. He chooses the word “deicide,” the killing of a god, to describe the soldiers’ actions when they dispersed the dance and caused the Kiowas to cease worshipping Tai-me in order to emphasize the profound loss from within a Kiowa religious context. He also notes the geographic location of this event, connecting the story to the place of its occurrence.

“There, where it ought to be, at the end of a long and legendary way, was my grandmother’s grave.”

Momaday uses heroic rather than tragic diction to describe his grandmother Aho’s final resting place near Rainy Mountain as “at the end of a long and legendary way.” He plays on the meaning of the word “way,” once again, as he does in the titular phrase. A way can be a path or road, such as the one he walks to reach the grave, but it can also refer to the path of history that led Aho and the other Kiowas to Oklahoma.

“I remember coming out upon the northern Great Plains in the late spring.”

Momaday uses the phrase “coming out” to describe this first glimpse of the northern Great Plains from the slopes of the mountains of Yellowstone. This is a repetition of the phrase he uses earlier in the first story to describe the Kiowas’ emergence from the hollow log and the translation of their name for themselves, Kwuda, or “coming out” (16). The repetition connects Momaday’s journey retracing the Kiowas’ migration with that first emergence, and recruits the Kiowa emergence into the world as a metaphor for the sense of a new vision that Momaday experiences when he looks on the Great Plains.

“There the land itself ascends into the sky. The mountains lie at the top of the continent, and they cast a long rain shadow on the grasses to the east.”

Momaday’s straightforward description of North American geography subtly evokes the Kiowa stories in which the land rises to form Devil’s Tower or a tree carries the sun’s future wife into the sky. When he writes that the land “ascends into the sky,” he shows how the presence of the mountains at the edge of the plains recalls these images and the bonds of kinship that these ascensions create with the spiritual beings in the sky.

“A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things. By means of words can a man deal with the world on equal terms. And the word is sacred.”

This passage illuminates the significance of storytelling as a way to grapple with the world. It also points to the significance of Kiowa words that are used throughout the text and invites us to see how they convey historical stories of origin as well as present-day denomination.

“I remember the sound of her glad weeping and the water-like touch of her hand.”

In one of many admiring descriptions of elders in The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday describes meeting his great-grandmother, Keahdinekeah. Her “glad weeping” stands in contrast to the grandmother spider’s mourning in the previous passage. As an honored and life-giving teacher, however, she has much in common with the grandmother spider. The “water-like touch of her hand” conveys not only the frail softness of her skin, but also her role as one who has given and still gives life to the generations who come after her.

“The man answered that the Kiowas were hungry. ‘Take me with you,’ the voice said, ‘and I will give you whatever you want.’ From that day Tai-me has belonged to the Kiowas.”

This passage in the ancestral voice describes the arrival of Tai-me in the lives of the Kiowas after their move onto the Great Plains, thus constituting the final component in the creation of the golden age Sun Dance culture whose origin, reign, and decline Momaday has set out to trace. Tai-me offers himself for the benefit of all the Kiowas—thus symbolizing strong community values.

“It is preserved in a rawhide box in charge of the hereditary keeper, and is never under any circumstances exposed to view except at the annual Sun Dance, when it is fastened to a short upright stick planted within the medicine lodge, near the western side. It was last exposed in 1888.”

This passage, a portion of the quotation from the anthropologist Mooney, constitutes the entire historical voice of the tenth story. Though anthropologists are frequently seen in Indigenous communities as untrustworthy actors who seek to exploit Indigenous cultures for their own ends, Mooney here is a tragically useful source, as Momaday himself has only seen Tai-me as a bundle. That Tai-me has not been exposed since 1888 is a direct result of the deicide Aho witnessed in 1890 when the last Sun Dance was disrupted (10).

“[There was] some awful commotion beneath the surface.”

This quotation repeats a line from the story of Mammedaty’s encounter with a strange beast on the preceding page. Although the beast is never glimpsed, the book pairs the line with an illustration by Momaday’s father, Al Momaday, depicting a lizard-like beast. The repetition of the line interacts with the illustration to advance a claim that we still live in a world containing the possibility of mystery and power. Mammedaty’s role as a peyote man connects him to that world.

“In my mind I can see that man as if he were there now. I like to watch him as he makes his prayer. I know where he stands and where his voice goes on the rolling grasses and where the sun comes up on the land.”

Due to Momaday’s father’s description of the arrowmaker Cheney, Momaday can see him in his mind’s eye. Momaday emphasizes the presence of Cheney when he shifts to present tense: “he stands […] his voice goes.” Though Momaday never saw Cheney with his own eyes, the power of the oral storytelling tradition is such that he can see him now, including positioning him in the sunrise landscape. Cheney and his prayer have been permanently attached to that landscape by Cheney’s words as well as Momaday and his father’s.

“The artist George Catlin traveled among the Kiowas in 1834. He observes that they are superior to the Comanches and Wichitas in appearance. They are tall and straight, relaxed and graceful. They have fine, classical features, and in this respect they resemble more closely the tribes of the north than those of the south.”

In this historical section, Momaday’s summary of the painter George Catlin’s words puts Catlin’s racism on full display even though on the surface, Catlin has ostensibly flattering things to say about the Kiowas. Catlin turns a taxonomic eye on the Kiowa and their neighbors, ranking them above the Comanches and Wichitas in his racialized hierarchy. For justification, he offers their height, grace, and “fine, classical features.” This comparison to the faces of Greek antiquity is typical of early 19th-century depictions of Indigenous Americans as “noble savages.”

“She gave up after a short run, and I think we had not been in any real danger. But the spring morning was deep and beautiful and our hearts were beating fast and we knew just then what it was to be alive.”

Momaday depicts his encounter with the bison in Medicine Park as a vivid experience of the real. In juxtaposition with the metal buffalo story and the story of the mock buffalo hunt, this passage argues that, even if diminished by captivity or the end of the buffalo-hunting way of life, the buffalo remains a potent actor and potential source of knowledge about the Plains life. Particularly in light of this reminder, it becomes clear that when the old men in Carnegie “ran that animal down and killed it with arrows,” despite being mounted on workhorses, they were displaying skill and bravery and closely encountering the animal world.

“In the Kiowa calendars there is graphic proof that the lives of women were hard, whether they were ‘bad women’ or not.”

Momaday uses the historical voice to criticize the ancestral stories’ depictions of “bad women” as deserving to be thrown away, in part by utilizing scare quotes around the idea of a “bad woman,” as the stories called them. He uses as evidence the Kiowa calendars, but he declares an intention to read these accounts against their grain in order to uncover proof of the hardships of women’s lives—a purpose for which the calendar-keepers would not have intended these documents.

“Without it he was a half-starved skulker in the timber... With the horse he was transformed into the daring buffalo hunter, able to procure in a single day enough food to supply his family for a year, leaving him free then to sweep the plains with his war parties along a range of a thousand miles.”

This quotation from James Mooney’s 1898 The Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians provides the historical voice for Story XVIII. Mooney’s work contains problematic hierarchies typical of 19th-century Euro-American writings on Indigenous Americans, as when he refers to one pursuing a non-mounted hunting lifestyle as being “a half-starved skulker in the timber” (59). However, in this case, his description of the coming of the horse to the Plains aligns with the Kiowas’ self-conception of having come of age as a people at this time. Mooney’s word choices glorify the mounted lifestyle, suggesting that the horse provided not only practical assets of food and mobility but spiritual ones too: on horseback, the Kiowas became “daring” and “free.”

“I came to know that country, not in the way a traveler knows the landmarks he sees in the distance, but more truly and intimately, in every season, from a thousand points of view. I know the living motion of a horse and the sound of hooves.”

In this personal reflection, Momaday describes his boyhood experiences on horseback. The horse allows him to know the land “truly and intimately.” It emphasizes the persistence of the Kiowa way of life through his own connection to the “living motion” of a horse. This is in binary opposition to the slaughter of 800 ponies that marked the Kiowas’ surrender at Fort Sill earlier in the story.

“In his right hand there is a peyote fan. A family characteristic: the veins stand out in his hands, and his hands are small and rather long.”

This historical section describes the only existing photograph of Mammedaty. The peyote fan is symbolic of Mammedaty’s role as a peyote man. Momaday further draws upon his own family knowledge in analyzing the photograph, noting the “family characteristic” of the shape of Mammedaty’s hands. In this section, first-hand familial knowledge comes into its own as authoritative alongside other historical documents.

“There have been times when I thought I understood how it was that a man might be moved to preserve the bones of a horse—and another to steal them away.”

This passage speaks to the importance of the horse as a cultural symbol of glory and strength. Momaday’s recognition of the beauty and power of horse bones emphasizes his connection to Mammedaty, who saved the horse’s bones, and to all the Kiowas who reckoned the theft of the other Little Red as “the most important event of the winter” and preserved it on their calendar (77). At the same time, the phrase “thought I understood” shows his recognition that there is still much he doesn’t know.