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 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2, Stories XII-XVIII Summary: “The Going On”
Story XII. The ancestral voice tells the story of a couple who send their child outside with a ball of meat to eat. He comes in and asks for more three times, and then returns with an enemy. The enemy says the family is surrounded, but offers to spare them if they feed all his men. Not believing him, the father sneaks out and leads their horses away while his wife cooks. At his signal, she sets fire to the fat she’s been cooking and throws it on the enemies, enabling the family to get away. The historical voice shares an incident in which a ceremonial tipi painted with battle scenes was accidentally lost to fire in the winter of 1872-1873. The personal reflection is of a walk at sunset in the Rainy Mountain Cemetery.
Story XIII. The ancestral voice tells the story of an arrowmaker who catches sight of an enemy outside the tipi. Speaking calmly to his wife, he straightens an arrow with his teeth and then draws it to the bow, as if to check the straightness, all while asking the stranger to say his name if he understands the Kiowa language. Hearing no reply, he shoots the enemy. The historical voice claims that old men are the best arrowmakers because they have patience. The personal reflection discusses Momaday’s father’s memory of an arrowmaker named Cheney who used to visit him and pray to the sunrise.
Story XIV. The ancestral voice tells how the Kiowas made a horse from clay. As the horse “began to be” (48), it made a great storm and commotion. This storm spirit, with the head of a horse and the tail of a fish, understands the Kiowas when they speak to it and say, “Pass over me” (48). The historical voice notes that the plains are subject to sudden and violent storms. The personal reflection recalls the storm cellar near Momaday’s grandmother’s house, noting how common these shelters were in the area.
Story XV. The ancestral voice tells how a wife of Many Bears falls in love with a great young warrior called Quoetotai. Many Bears shoots Quoetotai, but Quoetotai survives, and the woman announces that she is leaving. She and Quoetotai travel among the Comanches for 15 years. When they return home, Many Bears welcomes Quoetotai as a brother and gives him six horses. The historical voice shares artist George Catlin’s 1834 assessment of the Kiowas as “superior to the Comanches and Wichitas in appearance” (53). The personal reflection describes a Catlin portrait of a man named Kotsatoah, who was famous for his strength and hunting prowess. Momaday longs to have seen Kotsatoah.
Story XVI. The ancestral voice tells the story of a hunter who comes upon a steel buffalo that cannot be pierced by arrows. After the buffalo kills his hunting horse, the hunter climbs a tree, but the buffalo knocks it down as he jumps to a second one, and then a third. He finally kills it by shooting it in the cleft of the hoof as it prepares to charge. The historical voice recounts a moment in the 1930s when the town of Carnegie, Oklahoma, hosted a mockery of a buffalo hunt, with two old Kiowa men, two work horses, and a sad, confused, tame buffalo. The men chased the buffalo down and killed it with arrows. The personal reflection describes the thrill of running from a buffalo mother in Medicine Park, Oklahoma.
Story XVII. The ancestral voice tells of a “bad woman” who abandons her blind husband after he kills two buffalo (58). The man is found by a band of Kiowas, and he hears his wife by the fire explaining, falsely, how her husband was killed. The group expels her for her deception. The historical voice uses evidence from Kiowa calendars to explore the low social status of women and the violence and cruelty to which they were subjected in Kiowa society, as when one woman is made to wait outside in the cold until her feet freeze. The personal reflection shares the story of Kau-au-ointy, Mammedaty’s grandmother, a Mexican captive who carved out a role for herself outside the expectations of a typical Kiowa woman.
Story XVIII. The ancestral voice tells of a group of young men who ride south in the fall to find out where the summer goes. After months, they see small men with tails [monkeys] in the trees and decide to go home. The historical voice is a passage from Mooney describing how the arrival of the horse transformed the Plains people into “daring buffalo hunter[s]” (61). In the personal voice, Momaday recalls his feeling of freedom and far-seeing during the summers he spent living outdoors in the arbor at his grandmother’s house, as opposed to the confinement and depression of moving back into the house for winter.
Chapter 2 Analysis
The ancestral stories in “The Going On” depict the golden age of Kiowa culture. The stories of triumph over enemies speak to their military prowess, and Story XIV marks the arrival of the horse. The speed and power of the horse allow the Kiowa to take up a new way of life hunting buffalo on the plains, and this transformation is explored in Stories XVI and XVIII, with the ancestral voice narrating the killing of the metal buffalo and young men’s long journeys, respectively, while the personal reflection in XVIII, involving Momaday’s childhood love of living outdoors in the arbor at Aho’s house, speaks to the presence of this glorious cultural history in Momaday’s modern-day psyche. Other aspects of The Survivance of Kiowa Culture are explored as the Kiowas continue to make arrows and live with the storms of the Great Plains.
Momaday’s portrait of this period is at times measured, however. Though the ancestral stories are often treated with reverence as sources of wisdom and positive values, Story XVII uses the historical voice to offer subtle verbal criticism of the ancestral story’s idea that it is appropriate to throw “bad women” away. This story shows how Momaday uses the technique of polyphony to establish a complex interconnection between ancestral, historical, and personal memory, as the three voices critique and respond to one another. The quotation marks here are Momaday’s, as he speaks in direct answer to the ancestral story. The section also recruits the primary historical record of Kiowa calendars to document incidents of cruelty toward women, while his reflection on his great-great-grandmother Kau-au-ointy enacts a feminist recovery of an incident of female resistance to a narrow role.
At times, the historical voice also demonstrates its own inadequacy. In the section summarizing George Catlin’s description of the Kiowas, Catlin’s desire to catalog Indigenous peoples into racialized hierarchies according to his own racist beauty standards is on full display (53). Momaday admires the portrait that Catlin made of Kotsatoah but wishes “to have seen the man, as Catlin saw him” (53). In this case, Momaday’s personal voice longs to take back for itself something that now belongs only to the historical record. Momaday cannot know the extent to which Catlin’s image of Kotsatoah may have been altered by the painter’s own prejudices. The painting is now a historical document, and the only surviving image of this legendary figure. In wishing he could have seen the man for himself, Momaday wishes for a direct experience to counter the unearned authority of Catlin’s portrait.
