The Way to Rainy Mountain by Navarre Scott Momaday was first published in 1969. Momaday is a member of the Kiowa nation, a PhD-holding literary scholar, and a prominent American writer largely credited with initiating the Native American Literary Renaissance. On his father’s side, Momaday traces his family to Guipahgo (Lone Wolf), the last Principal Chief of the Kiowas, and this lineage features prominently in the book’s storytelling. The book is a work of creative nonfiction that tells the story of the Kiowa nation from its emergence into the world in the Rocky Mountains to its migration onto the northern and later the central Great Plains, and then, eventually, the 1875 surrender at Fort Sill in Oklahoma and submission to reservation life. The work mourns the way of life that was lost when the Kiowas were defeated, but it also speaks to the enduring connection of the Kiowa people to the lands of their history. In this way, the book is both a testimony and a contribution to the Kiowa culture, whose storytelling tradition persists into the present day. This study guide uses the 1994 paperback edition from the University of New Mexico Press, which includes a 25th-anniversary preface by the author.

Plot Summary

The Way to Rainy Mountain is innovatively structured in 24 two-page “stories,” each of which is told in three typographically distinguished voices: that of ancestral story, historiography, and personal memoir. The stories are further divided into three chapters or sections, “The Setting Out,” “The Going On,” and “The Closing In.” The Introduction prior to the chapters focuses largely on Momaday’s grandmother, Aho, whose stories of the Kiowa migration inspired Momaday to go see those places for himself and then to write this book. He recounts Aho’s story of the origin of Devil’s Tower, recounts that she watched in 1890 as troops from Fort Sill disrupted the last Sun Dance, and describes watching her as she prays in the Kiowa language. As the book opens, Momaday has been called home for Aho’s funeral.

“The Setting Out” contains the first 11 stories, beginning with the story of the Kiowas’ entrance into the world through a hollow log and tracing their emergence onto the Great Plains and their acquisition of Tai-me, the sacred Sun Dance doll. Other ancestral stories trace the adventures of the twin sons of the Sun. This section’s historical notes and memoir paragraphs also introduce Momaday’s grandfather, Mammedaty—a farmer, horseman, and peyote man.

In “The Going On,” the next seven stories focus on the glorious decades on the Great Plains and explore the Kiowas’ relationship with the horse more fully. The section includes the story of how the horse was created from clay by the Kiowas and born amidst lightning and storm. Other stories detail exploits in hunting and warfare that the horse enabled. The last of these describes how some youths rode their horses into the south to find out where the sun went during the winter. They rode so far that they saw monkeys.

In “The Closing In,” the final six stories deal with the suffering of the Kiowas as they were hard pressed by the advancing forces of settler colonialism. The stories in this section narrate such miserable events as a smallpox epidemic, the famine that followed the extermination of the buffalo, and the eventual surrender at Fort Sill. This section also begins to interweave stories of Mammedaty’s and Aho’s lives into the ancestral stories.

The work concludes with an epilogue that describes how the Kiowas began keeping calendars around 1833, three years past the end of what Momaday calls the “golden age” of Kiowa culture. He next introduces a final new character: a 100-year-old woman named Ko-sahn who came to Aho’s house after her passing. Ko-sahn had seen a sun dance, and Momaday shares her recollection of it. The work then concludes with Momaday at Rainy Mountain Cemetery, addressing a poem to a relative whose name is carved upon a headstone there and reflecting on the finality of death.