The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969). Content and Description

Published just one year after his Pulitzer Prizewinning novel House Made of Dawn, Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain is widely regarded as his greatest work. Thematically, both works deal with alienation, personal identity, place, and the oral tradition; however, the texts differ in two important ways. First, unlike House Made of Dawn, which is set in the American Southwest and incorporates aspects of Navajo culture, The Way to Rainy Mountain is set on the southern Plains and focuses on the Kiowa culture.

Second, The Way to Rainy Mountain is not a novel. Part myth, part ethnographic commentary, part autobiography, and experimental in form, The Way to Rainy Mountain defies the categories we usually use for literary works. Part of the work’s originality derives from its unusual style; however, its reexamination of both Euro-American and Native American culture marks its uniqueness.

Encouraged to excel in the U.S. educational system, Momaday had, until his early thirties, focused his intellectual energy on learning Western history and poetic forms. In 1963, having just completed a Ph.D. in a traditional English literature program, Momaday suddenly realized that, by spending his formative years studying Western cultural forms, he had ignored the Kiowa legacy. Grounded in a rich history of tradition and myth, the Kiowa culture was decimated not only by the U.S. military assault on Native Americans in the decades after the Civil War but also by a century of forced assimilation.

Upon leaving Stanford, Momaday followed the advice of his graduate school mentor, Yvor Winters, who stressed the importance of grasping one’s personal history. For Momaday, this meant uncovering his Kiowa roots. The Way to Rainy Mountain is Momaday’s attempt to learn this background, to understand how it has shaped him, and to probe its potential for exposing his readers to an alternate way of conceiving reality.

As with House Made of Dawn, Momaday began writing The Way to Rainy Mountain several years prior to publishing it. In this case, the work took shape over the course of six years, beginning in 1963, when Aho, Momaday’s grandmother, told him that the most sacred Kiowa relic, Tai-me, was still in existence. With Aho and his father, Al, Momaday set out for Oklahoma to view the Tai-me bundle. He would later describe the incident as “the most intensely religious experience” he had ever had.

Shortly thereafter, Aho died, prompting Momaday to return to Oklahoma, where he visited the Rainy Mountain cemetery near Lawton, the final resting place for many Kiowa elders. Together, these experiences instilled in Momaday a passion to learn about his tribal forebears. As part of his research, he retraced the early 18th-century Kiowa migration route from the mountains of southern Montana to the plains of western Oklahoma. The more he delved into his cultural past, the more he felt compelled to write about it.

While the decision to recover the Kiowa story was easy, the actual recovery proved difficult. Bound up in a web of oral myths and legends, the history of the Kiowa has not been well preserved. Such is the nature of oral traditions: Without storytellers, the stories fade. Through education, the U.S. government encouraged American Indians to speak English instead of their native tongue, to believe scientific explanations of natural phenomena instead of mythical ones, and to accept the Euro-American version of history instead of their tribe’s. By the time Momaday undertook the recuperation project, little material, written or spoken, remained. Further complicating matters, Momaday did not speak Kiowa.

This meant he had to rely on a translator for conducting interviews and deciphering the few remaining written records, a responsibility that fell to Momaday’s father, Al, who not only collaborated with Momaday throughout the research and composition process but also drew several illustrations included in The Way to Rainy Mountain.

Although the language and subject matter present no major difficulties to the reader, the text’s intricate and stylized structure can be daunting. Because the work lacks a conventional form, the structure is key to understanding how the many fragments unify into a cohesive whole. The prose portion of the text begins with a prologue and introduction, proceeds in three chapterlike movements, and concludes with an epilogue. Two short poems, “Headwaters” and “Rainy Mountain Cemetery,” bookend the work, capturing several themes Momaday explores in the middle.

Describing a primordial energy, “Headwaters” evokes a creative beginning. Using the imagery of silence and death, “Rainy Mountain Cemetery” evokes a destructive end. The first quatrain of “Headwaters” depicts a marshy woodland in which a hollow, weather-stained log lies on the forest floor. In the second quatrain, Momaday employs a rhythmic cadence to portray an unknown “archaic force,” which disrupts the scene’s peacefulness. We are not told what the force is or what it signifies.

The poem asks, “What moves?” The prologue answers, “The Kiowas.” Their existence, Momaday writes, began and ended with two struggles: the first to escape a hollow log, where, according to their creation myth, they entered the world; the second to survive in a world turned upside down by white hunters and soldiers. When, between 1874 and 1886, hide hunters reduced the buffalo population from 30 million to less than 1,000, hunters destroyed not only the Kiowas’ principal source of food and shelter but also its cultural identity.

The Way to Rainy Mountain focuses on the interim period between the Kiowa tribe’s mythic beginning and its historical end, a period of “great adventure and nobility and fulfillment.” As its title indicates, the book concerns a journey, or more precisely, several journeys. Some of these journeys are physical: the Kiowa migration in the early 18th century to Rainy Mountain, a knoll that rises out of the Oklahoma plain; Momaday’s own trips to see the Tai-me bundle, to interview Kiowa elders, and to retrace the original Kiowa southern route. Other journeys are metaphorical.

An important Kiowa landmark, Rainy Mountain symbolizes the culture and knowledge Momaday wants to recover. By writing the book, he begins an odyssey of self-exploration, seeking a personal identity in the traditions Rainy Mountain represents. This journey, however, is not merely personal. As Momaday writes, The way to Rainy Mountain is preeminently the history of an idea, man’s idea of himself. . . . The verbal tradition by which it has been preserved has suffered a deterioration in time. What remains is fragmentary: mythology, legend, lore, and hearsay—and of course the idea itself, as crucial and complete as it ever was. That is the miracle.

For Momaday, the erosion of Kiowa culture is part of a broader decay of human imagination, which Western society deemphasizes in favor of scientific and historical fact. Part of what makes us human, part of what makes life worth living, resides in our common need to tell stories about the world and ourselves in order to make sense of both. Thus, The Way to Rainy Mountain becomes the very thing it triumphs: The work is an act of imagination, one that synthesizes Western and Kiowa forms of knowledge into a cohesive worldview.

For Momaday, imagination and storytelling link people with the land they inhabit. Understanding a culture requires understanding the culture’s relationship to its surroundings. Momaday establishes these ideas in the introduction. Combining his grandmother’s traditional Kiowa stories with his own imaginative interpretation of the land between Montana and Oklahoma, Momaday sketches the relationship between the southern Plains and Kiowa tribal identity.

It was not until they migrated from the Yellowstone Mountains to the areas in northern Texas, western Oklahoma, southern Kansas, and eastern Colorado that the Kiowa became Kiowa. Leaving behind the confinement of the mountains, where they were “bent and blind in the wilderness,” they developed a talent for horse riding and a reverence for the Sun and buffalo, the central emblems of the Kiowa religion. “The sun,” Momaday writes, “is at home on the plains. Precisely there does it have the certain character of a god.”

The holy regard the Kiowa held for the Sun, now “all but gone out of mankind,” occupied the central place in their ceremonies, the most important of which was the sacred Sun Dance. Calling for a buffalo sacrifice, the ritual was last performed in 1887, when the U.S. government outlawed it as an act of barbarism. By then the buffalo, the animal representation of the Sun, were nearly extinct. The only personal link Momaday had with the Sun Dance died with his grandmother; Aho was seven when she attended the ceremony. Although the Kiowa still have the Tai-me bundle, the sacred Sun Dance fetish, Momaday confesses that his grandmother’s house and the culture it embodied for him have grown silent.

Only imagination and memory can break the silence, a task Momaday undertakes in the text’s central section, which he divides into three movements—“The Setting Out,” “The Going On,” and “The Closing In.” Taken together, these movements pay homage to the past while building hope for the future. Momaday separates each movement into several units of three paragraphs, or triads. Although the thematic content of the triads varies, they share a formulaic structure. The first paragraph is mythological and employs the cadence and diction of oral storytelling. The second is anthropological or historical; its style is precise and impersonal. The third paragraph is biographical and lyrical.

Each paragraph reflects upon the other two, sometimes in ways the reader may struggle to discern. The Way to Rainy Mountain forces readers to make their own connections, compelling them to use their own imagination. The first paragraph in each triad reestablishes myth, legend, and lore as legitimate explanations for reality. Rather than oppose the first paragraph, the second paragraph complements it, augmenting each myth or legend with a historical fact about the Kiowa. Momaday culled many of these facts from white anthropologists such as James Mooney and Alice Marriott. The third paragraph synthesizes the first two. Poetically crafted and rendered in the first person, the third paragraph integrates two different ways of seeing the world. The result is a book that reflects Momaday’s Native American and non-Native American experiences, memories, and identity.

The Way to Rainy Mountain proceeds chronologically. Each of the text’s movements treats a period of Kiowa history, both factual and mythical. In 11 triads, “The Setting Out” traces Kiowa origin, beginning with the tribe’s mythic emergence from a hollow log. The myths in this section often seem thematically unrelated: One explains how dogs came to the Kiowas; another recounts the origin of Tai-me; four others proceed serially, filling out the Kiowa lineage in relation to a personified Sun god.

Many of the “Setting Out” stories (myths) attempt to explain something’s cause. As disparate from one another as these stories are, they share a common feature: Each deals with Kiowa culture before it developed the identity of its “golden age,” a period that began in the mid-18th century when the Kiowa arrived in the southern Plains and reached its peak around 1830, and then declined gradually until 1875, when tribal leaders surrendered to U.S. soldiers at Fort Mill, Oklahoma. Momaday orders the second movement, “The Going On,” around the golden age. This section depicts a fully formed, elaborate culture, one made up of brave warriors, skilled riders, expert arrow makers, and clever tricksters. Their mythological origins established, the Kiowa stories in “The Going On” portray a selfassured, powerful, and free people. Although one might expect the final movement, “The Closing

In,” to treat the Kiowa imprisonment and cultural collapse, Momaday takes a subtle tack, representing the decline as a gradual depletion of tribal memory. Beginning with the story of two courageous brothers, each story that follows is less assured than the one preceding it. They also proceed from a legendary, unspecified time to the present. The mythic and legendary give way to the personal. In the next to the last anecdote, Momaday’s grandmother, Aho, is the central figure. The last living elder Momaday knows, Aho witnesses the unexplained yet symbolic toppling of Tai-me while visiting the relic’s official keeper.

In the final triad, Momaday’s perspective takes over. He assumes responsibility for not only the third paragraph’s synthesis but also the first paragraph’s oral story and the second’s factual description. The oral tradition becomes his, and significantly, he begins the first and third paragraphs with an identical opening phrase, “East of my grandmother’s house . . .”

Although The Way to Rainy Mountain is a deeply personal work, Momaday wanted it to resonate with others. Abandoning the inward reflective style of the other biographical anecdotes, Momaday concludes “The Closing In” with an appeal:

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. . . . He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience. . . . He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season. . . . He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.

Momaday returns to several key themes in this passage: the link between imagination and the landscape, the connection between one’s personal identity and a sense of place, and the ability of memory to enliven the past. One theme, however, is new: Momaday shifts from personal recollection to moral prescription. Set off by He ought constructions, the last triad ends with several moral directives. For Momaday, a person forms an authentic sense of self only when he or she identifies with a particular place. Otherwise, the individual remains incomplete.

Momaday prevents readers from taking comfort in the idea of a simple retreat into nature. Death imagery dominates the epilogue and closing poem, “Rainy Mountain Cemetery,” in which Momaday stands silent before his grandmother’s gravestone. As somber as the closing poem is, The Way to Rainy Mountain is not a simple lamentation or yearning for the past.

The epilogue demonstrates how the Plains Indian culture, though no longer physically active, continues to thrive in his imagination. Ko-Sahn, an “old-old” woman, among the last to have experienced the 1887 Sun Dance, is probably dead. Yet, her story lives in Momaday’s mind; her memory becomes his, which he keeps alive by retelling it. In the process of recovering Kiowa culture, Momaday reveals it not as an artifact for silent viewing but as alive, adapting, changing, and carried on in his own imagination. As so many of his works do, The Way to Rainy Mountain deals with identity and the way that Momaday and we use language to understand the present, shape our future, and recover the past.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. A committed environmentalist, Momaday has written several essays in favor of conservation. Focusing on legal and political arguments, research the present-day U.S. conservation movement. Then, read Momaday’s essay “An American Land Ethic” (The Man Made of Words 1997), noting the similarities and differences in their reasoning. Are Momaday’s arguments supporting conservation more persuasive than the arguments offered by many environmentalists? How does your reading of The Way to Rainy Mountain shape your views?

2. Although myth and legend are often conflated in everyday conversation, literary scholars distinguish between the two. Myths are stories involving sacred and/or supernatural beings. They are integrated into the religious or spiritual tapestry of a community and encode the cultural worldview of a people, setting parameters for acceptable behavior. Legends, though similar, usually have a discernible factual link but a weaker connection to the divine.

Reread the first paragraph of each triad, deciding whether the story qualifies as myth, legend, or neither. Next, identify at least two myths and two legends from your own culture. Compare and contrast the similarities and differences between your own cultural myths and legends and those you encounter in The Way to Rainy Mountain. Do your own myths and legends seem more plausible? If so, would an outsider agree with you?