..
~~~
N. SCOTT MOMADAY
One of the country's most respected writers about Native Americans'
traditions) myths) and landscapes, Navarre Scott Momaday was born
in 1934 on the KioWa Indian Reservation in Oklahoma. He attended
the University of New Mexico (BA, 1958) ahd Stal1ford University
(PhD, 1963), and since then has earned his living as a teacher
and writer. The son of a Kiotva father and a mother descended from
white pioneers, Momaday often writes about characters who navi
gate similar multicultural backgrounds. His novel House Made of
Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, and his other works include
the memoir The Names (1976) lind numerous collections of stories,
essays, poetry, and artwork. Most recently, Momaday published the
collection In the Bear's House (1999) and the children's book Circle
of Wonder (2001).
The Way to Rainy Mountain
The introduction to Momaday's book of the same title, published in
1961, "The Way to Rainy Mountain" describes the writer's trek to his
grandmother's grave. Along the way, he visits sites of great signifi
cance to his Kiowa heritage.
A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of
the Wichita Range.! Fot my people, the Kiowas, it is an old land
mark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. The hardest
weather in the world is there. Winter brings blizzards, hot tornadic
wirids arise in the spring, and in summer the prairie is an anvil's
edge. The grass turns brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your
feet. There are green belts along the rivers and creeks, linear groves
of hickory and pecan, willow and witch hazel. At a distance in July
or August the steaming foliage seems almost to writhe in fire. Great
green and yellow grasshoppers ate everywhere in the tall grass, pop
ping up like com to sting the flesh, and tortoises crawl about on the
red earth, going nowhere in the plenty of time. Loneliness is an aspect
of the land. All things in the plain ate isolate; there is no confusion of
lThe Wichita Mountains are southwest of Oklahoma City. [Editor's note.]
50
MOMADAY / THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN 51
objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon
that landscape in the early morning, with the' sun at your back, is to
lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and
this, you think, is where Creation was begun.
I returned to Rainy Mountain in July. My grandmother had died 2
in the spring, and I wanted to be at her grave. She had lived to be
very old and at last infirm. Her only living daughter was with her
when she died, and I was told that in death her face was that of a
child.
I like to think of her as a child. When she was born, the Kiowas 3
were living that last great moment of their history. For more than a
hundred years they had controlled the open range from the Smoky
Hill River to the Red, from the headwaters of the Canadian to the
fork of the Arkansas and Cimarron. 2 In alliance with the Comanches,
they had ruled the whole of the southern plains. War was their sacred
business, and they were among the finest horsemen the world has
ever known. But warfare for the Kiowas was preeminently a matter
of disposition rather than of survival, and they never understood the
grim, unrelenting advance of the US Cavalry. When at last, divided
and ill-provisioned, they were driven onto the Staked Plains in the
cold rains of autumn, they fell into panic. In Palo Duro Canyon they
abandoned their crucial stores to pillage and had nothing then but
their lives. In order to save themselves, they surrendered to the sol
diers at Fort Sill and were imprisoned in the old stone corral that
now stands as a military museum. My grandmother was spared
the humiliation of those high gray walls by eight or ten years, but she
must have known from birth the affliction of defeat, the dark brood
ing of old warriors. .
Her name was Aho, and she belonged to the last culture to evolve 4
in North America. Her forebears came down from the high country
in western Montana nearly three centuries ago. They were a moun
tain people, a mysterious tribe of hunters whose language has never
been positively classified in any major group. In the late seventeenth
century they began a long migration to the south and east. It was a
journey toward the dawn, and it led to a golden age. Along the way
the Kiowas were befriended by the Crows, who gave them the cul
ture and religion of the Plains. They acquired horses, and their
2Momaday describes an area covering much of present-day Kansas and
Oklahoma as well as the Texas Panhandle and parts of Colorado and New Mexico.
Later in this paragraph, Palo Duro Canyon is south of Amarillo, Texas, and Fort
Sill is southwest of Oklahoma City, near the Wichita Mountains. [Editor's note.]

52 DESCRIPTION
ancient nomadic spirit was suddenly free of the ground. They
acquired Tai-me, the sacred Sun Dance doll, from that moment the
object and symbol of their worship, and so shared in the divinity of
the sun. Not least, they acquired the sense of destiny, therefore
~ c()Urage allirpride. When they entered upon the southern Plains they
? ~ Ir had been transformed. N.2longer were they slaves to the simple neces
.~\ ",sity of survival; the were a lordly and dangerous society of fi hters
.;)( ~nd thieves, h~.mters an~J)ries~. 0 t e sun. Accor ing to their origin
\' .\~yth, they"~_nteI~~t~e worldthrough a hollow log. From oM..JlQi..nt
l ,~ oIVleW, fIieir migratio,~ was the fruit of ,an oLd prophecy, for inQ@ed
. t1ieY-~Cf.JIQm.a..s1J.ril~,~~~orld.
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. he could tell of the Cr~he
ad never seen, and of the Black Hills, 3 w er she had never been.~
wante to se~iIL~~~t~~__ ad seen more perfectly in the mind's
eye, and traveled fifteen hundred miles to begin my pilgrimage.
"'-Yellowstone,'it seemed'io-me,was the top of theworld, a region
of deep lakes and dark timber, canyons and waterfalls. But, beauti
ful as it is, one might have the sense of confinement there. The sky
line in all directions is close at hand, the high wall of the woods and
deep cleavages of shade. There is a perfect freedom in the moun
tains, 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.
Descending eastward, the highland meadows are a stairway to the
plain. In July the inland slope of the Rockies is lUXUriant with flax
and buckwheat, stonecrop and larkspur. The earth unfolds and the
limit of the land recedes. Clusters of trees, and animals grazing far
in the distance, cause the vision to reach away and wonder to build
upon the mind. The sun follows a longer course in the day, and the
sky is immense beyond all comparison. The great billowing clouds
that ,sail upon it are shadows that move upon the grain like water,
dividing light. Farther down, in the land of the Crows and Blackfeet,
the plain is yellow. Sweet clover takes hold of the hills and bends
upon itself to cover and seal the soil. There the Kiowas paused on
their way; they had come to the place where they must change their
lives. The sun is at home on the plains. Precisely there does it have
3The Black Hills are in western South Dakota: Yellowstone (next paragraph) is
in northwestern Wyoming. In paragraphs 7-8, Momaday describes movement
eastward across the top of Wyoming. [Editor's note.]
I
-""'~~~
MOMADAY ITHE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN 53
the certain character of a god. When the Kiowas came to the land of
the Crows, they could see the dark lees of the hills at dawn across the
Bighorn River, the profusion of light on the grain shelves, the oldest
deity ranging after the solstices. Not yet would they veer southward
to the caldron of the land that lay below; they must wean their blood
from the northern winter and hold the mountains a while longer in
their view. They bore Tai-me in procession to the east.
A dark mist layover the Black Hills, and the land was like iron. At
8
the top of a ridge I caught sight of Devil's Tower 4 upthrust against the
gray sky as if in the birth of time the core of the earth had broken
through its crust and the motion of the world was begun. There are
5
things in nature that engender an awful g)JJet in the..h.e.a.rLQtm..~;
Devil~Iow_~LLs_QJl.e...of....th.em.Two centuries ago, because they could
not do otherwise, the Kiowas made a legend at the base of the rock.
My grandmother said:
Eight children were there at play, seven sisters and their brother.
6
Suddenly the boy was struck dumb; he trembled and began to run upon
his hands and feet. His fingers became claws, and his body was covered
with fur. Directly there was a bear where the boy had been. The sisters
~" were terrified; they ran, and the bear after them. They came to the
stump of a great tree, and the tree spoke to them. It bade them climb
upon it, and as they did so it began to rise into the air. The bear came to
kill them, but they were just beyond its reach. It reared against the tree
and scored the bark all around with its claws. The seven sisters were
7 borne into the sky, and they became the stars of the Big Dipper.
From that moment, and so long as the legend lives, the Kiowas have
kinsmen in the night sky. Whatever they were in the mountains, they
could be no more. However tenuous their well-being, however much
they had suffered and would suffer again, they had found a way out
of the wilderness.
My grandmother had a reverence for the sun, a holy regard that 9
.I!-o~iSaIrbUtgqneoUiofmankin~-TIlerewasawannesslnher; and
an ancient awe. She was a Christian in her later years, but she had
come a long way about, and she never forgot her birthright. As a
child she had been to the Sun Dances; she had taken part in those
annual rites, and by them she had learned the restoration of her peo
ple in the presence of Tai-me. She was about seven when the last
4An 865-foot stone outcropping in northeastern Wyoming, now a national
monument. [Editor's note.]
:1 ~
 .. '._.7t=,;J~

1
f

54 DESCRIPTION
MOMADAY /THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNtAIN 55

Kiowa Sun Dance was held in 1887 on the Washita River above Rainy
5 Hduses are like sentinels in the plain, old keepers of the weather 11
Mountain Creek. The buffalo were gone. In order to consummate the
watch. There, in a very little while, wood takes on the appearance of
ancient sacrifice-to impale the head of a buffalo bull upon the med
gteat age. All colors wear soon away in the wind and rain, and then
icine tree-a delegation of old men journeyed into Texas, there to beg
the wood is burned gra.y and the grain appears and the nails tum red
and barter for an animal from the Goodnight herd. She was ten when
with rust. The windowpanes are blhck and opaque; you imagine
the Kiowas came together for the last time as a living Sun Dance
there is nothirtg within, and indeed there are many ghosts, bones
culture. They could find no buffalo; they had to hang an old hide from
given up to the land. They staIid here and there against the sky, and
the sacred tree. Before the dance could begin, a company of soldiers
you approach them for a longer time than you expect. They belong
rode out from Fort Sill under orders to disperse the tribe. Forbidden
in the distance; it is their domllin.
without cause the essential act of their faith, having seen the wild
Once there was a lot of sound in my grandmother's house, a lot Of-12
herds slaughtered and left to rot upon the ground, the Kiowas backed
coining and going, feasting and talk. The summers there were full of
away forever from the medicine tree. That was July 20, 1890, at the
excitement and reunion. The Kiowas are a summer people; they
great bend of the Washita. My grandmother was there. Without bit
abide the cold and keep to themselves, but when the season titrns
terness, and for as long as she lived, she bore a vision of deicide. 6
and the land becomes warm arid vital they cannot hold ~till; an old love
Now that I can have her only in memo.!)', I see my grandmother 10
of goiflg returns upon them. The aged visitors who came to hiy grand
in the several postures that were peculiar to her: "standing at the wood
stove on a winter morning and turning meatin a .&.r..~at ir.9D skillet;
motb~r's house when I was a child were made oflean and leather, and
they bore themselves upright. They wore great black hats and bright
sitting at the south window, bent above her beadWQrk, ~IliLqft~r
t. Ii wards, wnenner vision failed, looking down for a long tiJ:J1eJ.nto..the ample shirts that shook in the wind. They rubbed fat upon their hair
Ii\1i.!
fcjfcfof heiliaiiCfs; i?illg-OUtUpOIla-cane, very slowly a~dicLwhen and wound their braids with strips of colored cloth. Some of them
,';
.'
.. 1'.

,
~: ~
tlle ~eight 2!_ age came upon her; praying. IJemember her !!l2st
painted their faces and carried the scars of old and cherished enmi
ties. they were an old council of warlords, come to remind and be
~r. ~J-r~!!i!~!!l2[J~~~~ts~g reminded of who they were. Their wives and daughters served them
and hope, ~.seenthi~n
many~ s. ~~~:etlzat.!. . !J._~
..t.he
~ar, s<?_~~u~e ~ere they of all_!:'l2:..~~~4.~(m!paJ:l.Y. well. The women might indulge themselves; gossip was at once the
1IIIlj !lie last time I~~!!er she' ra ea st din b t ~c;l~f.l!~~ ])e~ at mark and compensation of their servitude. They made loud and
elaborate talk among themselves, full of jest and gesture, fright and
j
~~t,/~keat.<!.t.h.t..
. ~~~.~t, t~tUer~S~.!l~J!!J;!lP..p!'~Vl. .:1!g -'J1'.,2n
h:!.!a!:k~!9!1' H~r.)oEg!.~~~r, ~a.Y~Lgr@,J13nclbr:<!.id.ed in tIle
J
false alarm. They went abroad in fringed and flowered shawls, bright
Iii
~: et~!~ upon heQ~C!.~_~~againstherbt..~?.s.ts~a.sJla:wl.I do beadwork and German silver. They were at home in the kitchen, and
II! not spe~, and I never understood her prayers, but 1h~~

they prepared meals that were banquets.

There were frequertt prayer meetings, and great nocturnal feasts. 13
II something inherentl sad in the sound, some merest he~itation uRon

Wben I was a child I played with my COUsins outside where the laIIip- 1'q,l-
'I!; t e ~s es of sorrow. She egan in a .gha:llirdesce;un~-pitch,

Ili"I
II,l e~austing her breath to silence; then again and again-and always
light fell upon the ground and the singing of the old people rose lJP ~II.J vJ/
:iround us and carned away into the darkness. There were a lot of ""s... ~t
the same intensity of effort, of something that is, and is not, like
ti'ni
urgency in the human voice. Transported so in the dancing light
&ood things to eat, a lot of laughter and surprise. JWd afterwards, h~
i1l
when the quiet returned, I lay down with my andmother and co I
"rl'':1i among the shadows of her room, she seemed beyond the reach of

hear t e ogs away y t e river an feel the motion of the air.

i time. But that was illusion; I think I knew then that I should not see
I, her again. Now there is a funeral silence iIi the rooms, the endless wake of 14
some final word. The walls have closed in upon my grandmother's
house. When I returned to it in mourning, I saw for the first time
1;1' SThe Washita runs halfway between Oklahoma City and the Wichita in my life how small it was. It was late at night, and there was a
Mountains. [Editor's note.]
white moon, nearly full. I sat for a long time on the stone steps by
J 6The killing of a divine being or beings (from Latin words meaning "god" and
"kill"). [Editor's note.] the kitchen door. From there I could see out across the land; I could
~'I:
l,: see the long row of trees by the creek, the low light upon the rolling

'I


56 DESCRIPTION
plains, and the stars of the Big Dipper. Once I looked at the moon
and caught sight of a strange thing. A cricket had perched upon the
handrail, only a few inches away from me. My line of vision was
such that the creature filled the moon like a fossil. It had gone there,
I thought, to live and die, for there, of all places, was its small defi
nition made whole and eternal. A wann wind rose up and purled like
the longing within me.
The next morning I awoke at dawn and went out on the dirt road
to Rainy Mountain. It was already hot, and the grasshoppers began
to fill the air. Still, it was early in the morning, and the birds sang out
l1l!! of the shadows. The long yellow grass on the motlntain shone in the
ili~;~
if1 :
~' I
bright light, and a scissortail hied above the land. There, where it
Ii! ought to be, q! the end of a long and legendary way, was my grand
mother's grave. Here and there on the dark stones were ancestral
iiimes. Looking back once, I saw the mQuntain and came away.
~I\.
~~\' If:',
Meaning
?lV f0 What is the significance of Momaday's statement that the Kiowas
r1 r U "reckoned their stature by the distance they could see" (paragraph 6)?
~
HOW does this statement relate to the ultimate fate of the Kiowas?
. '2. ~emembering his grandmother, Momaday writes, "She made long,
Jambling prayers out of suffering and hope, having seen many things"
(paragraph 10). What is the key point here, and how does the concept
1"\of prayer conllect with the essay as a whole?
.f 3. )What do you think Momaday's main idea is? What thread links all the
Vessay's parts?
Purpose and Audience
1. What seems to be Momaday's purpose in writing this essay? Can we
read this as more than a personal story about a visit to his grand
mother's grave?
2. Who is Momaday's audience? Do you think he is writing for other
Kiowa descendants? for non-Indians? for others who have lost an
older relative?
Method and Structure
1. "Loneliness is an aspect of the land," Momaday writes (paragraph 1).
To what extent do you think this sentence captures the dominant
impression of the essay? If you perceive a different impression, what
is it?
....,.,..,.,.~-~
MOMADAY/TIIE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTATN
57
-----~----------
2. How does Momaday organize his essay? (It may help to plot the
structure by preparing a rough outline.) How effective do you find
this organization, and why?
3. Other Methods Besides description, Momaday relies on other
methods as well, such as narration, example, comparison and con
trast, arid cause and effect. What is the purpose of the comparison in
paragraphs 12-14?
Language
1. Momaday uses many vivid figures of speech. Locate at least one use
each of metaphor, simile, and hyperbole (review these terms under
figures ofspeech in the Glossary). What does each of these figures con
l:/JMomaday's first and last pany~~s pres~!J.t contrasting ima~J)f
(1- vey?
Ramy~UritalnanOfI1e'surrounding plain: At first, "the prairie is an
an--Vi.l's'" edge""andtIie-rrgrass ttirns15fiflIealld brown"; in the end, "the
birds sang out of the shadows" and the "long yellow grass on the moun
tain shone in the bright light." How
purpose? does this contrast serve_ Momaday's
~----, _.. _._--.,_ _ __ '
3. ~.~J~!lQID.ad~.Y__!!~..P.ro:allelism.@,j~~bing the vjsit;Qr,s..tohis
grandmother's house (paragraph 12)-for instance, "They wore.. , .
'Fb:e)'ffibbea:-:' .--: Tirey made... ." What does the parallelism convey
about t.~e people being dessrig~4} (lfnecessary~consurr-m:e"G1OSsary
._,Z for the denmuonorpcira1felism.)
Writing Topics
1. Think of somebody special to you arid a specific place that you asso
ciate with this person. Develop an essay that describes both the per
son and the place, using concrete and specific details to make the
connection between them clear to your readers.
2. Momaday writes about his ancestors and a way of life very different
from that of the present. For this assignment you may need to inves
tigate your family's history. Write an essay that describes your ances
tors' way of life. (Your ancestors may be as recent as your grandparents
or as distant as your research allOWS.) Who were these people? How
did they live? How does that way of life differ from the way you and
your family live now? Be specific in your description and comparison,
providing concrete details and examples for clarity.
3. In an essay, analyze Momaday's attitudes toward the Kiowas as revealed
in the language he uses to describe them. Support your thesis (your
idea about Momaday's attitudes) with specific quotations from the
essay.