40 pages • 1 hour read
N. Scott MomadayThe Way to Rainy Mountain
Nonfiction | Anthology/Varied Collection | Adult | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3, Stories XIX-XIV Summary: “The Closing In”
Story XIX. The ancestral voice tells of a warrior who, after his brother is captured in a raid on the Utes, sneaks into the camp to free him. The warrior is also captured, but the Ute chief respects his bravery and agrees to free both men if the warrior can carry his brother on his back over a row of greased buffalo heads. The warrior succeeds, and the two brothers return to the Kiowas on horseback. The historical voice describes the slaughter of 800 ponies and the dispersal of 2,000 more when the Kiowas surrendered at Fort Sill. It also includes Mooney’s account of the famine of 1879, after the extermination of the buffalo, when the Kiowa had to kill and eat their horses to survive. This event is also recounted in the Kiowa calendar. The personal voice describes how intimately Momaday, as a child, knew the land of New Mexico from traveling it on horseback.
Story XX. The ancestral voice tells of a fearless hunting horse that died of shame after its owner turned it aside during a charge. The historical voice describes two incidents in which horses are sacrificed, and in the personal reflection, Momaday imagines his way into the latter incident, in which a man named Gaapiatan sacrifices a fine, black-eared horse, whom Momaday is sure he must have loved, when asking for the lives of his family to be spared during a smallpox epidemic.
Story XXI. The ancestral voice, closer to the present day now, tells a story from the life of Mammedaty, Momaday’s father. He saw the head of a little boy in the grass, and it whistled at him, but when he went to investigate, nothing was there. The historical voice describes the only extant photo of Mammedaty, including his small, long hands with prominent veins—a family trait. The personal recollection shares the four remarkable things that Mammedaty saw in his life—the head, the tracks of the water beast, three alligators, and the way a mole blows fine dirt from its mouth at the entrance of its burrow.
Story XXII. The ancestral story is of Mammedaty, who once became angry when he couldn’t catch his horses in a large pasture. He got his bow and arrow and tried to shoot the horse that was making the trouble, but he missed and shot another horse in the neck instead. The historical voice tells of how in the winter of 1852-53, a Pawnee captive escaped with a fine hunting horse, called Little Red. The personal story shares that Mammedaty used to keep a box of horse bones in his barn from a horse, also called Little Red, who never lost a race. The bones were stolen, and Momaday concludes that he has sometimes understood how one would be moved to keep or steal the bones of a horse.
Story XXIII. The ancestral voice is a memory from Aho, who, visiting with the Tai-me keeper’s wife, heard a heavy crash. It was Tai-me, who had fallen to the floor with no clear cause, and who did not weigh enough to cause such a sound. The historical voice notes that Mammedaty wore a grandmother bundle for a time, and that Aho remembered that a medicine bundle grows heavier on the wearer if not shown proper respect. The personal reflection recalls an old, heavy iron kettle in Aho’s yard that was used to catch rainwater for washing their hair.
Story XXIV. The ancestral voice tells of an unnamed woman buried in a cabinet and wearing a beautiful, beaded dress, somewhere east of Aho’s house. The historical voice recalls Aho’s moccasins, which have an eight-pointed star beaded on each instep. The personal voice shares how the sun rises out of the plain east of Aho’s house and concludes that a man should “give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience” (83).
Chapter 3 Analysis
The stories of “The Closing In” cover the end of the Kiowas’ years of glory on the plains, while still providing hints at The Survivance of Kiowa Culture. In Story XIX, for example, it is significant that the two captured warriors return to their people “on horseback”—in the Kiowa world, to be on horseback is to have dignity (66). Horses also figure in the book’s depiction of the destruction of Kiowa Culture Under Settler Colonialism, as the Kiowa are forced to kill their horses for food and later see the remaining horses slaughtered or dispersed by US soldiers. The slaughter of the horses represents the deepest form of despair—the end of a way of life and the loss of a fundamental part of Kiowa identity. Despite the pain of this moment, Momaday’s boyhood experiences on horseback close the story by showing that there are still opportunities today to “know the living motion of a horse and the sound of hooves,” thus making an embodied connection to the warrior traditions of the past (67). This is another aspect of The Survivance of Kiowa Culture. Ancestral knowledge survives in traces, preserved in stories and in small daily practices.
The roles of the ancestral voice, the historical voice, and the personal reflection in each story begin to move closer together here. The stories throughout have been reported as told by Momaday’s father, Al Momaday, but in this section, Al Momaday’s father Mammedaty begins to figure in the stories in the oral tradition, emphasizing that the oral tradition encompasses recent history and family stories as well as the broad sweep of Kiowa history and legend. Likewise, the historical voice ceases to rely upon the anthropologist Mooney and at times includes recollections of Mammedaty and Aho, as in Stories XXIII and XXIV. Even in Story XXI, when Momaday describes a photograph of Mammedaty, he notes that the shape of Mammedaty’s hands is “a family characteristic”—a detail that only a family member would be likely to notice (73). In “The Closing In,” then, Momaday blurs the lines between ancestral story, historiography, and memoir, showing how Mammedaty, Al Momaday, and even Momaday himself are taking up a place in the voice of the ancestors, and making the case for valuing these three types of voices on equal footing.
