January 31, 2002

Plains Folk: Rainy Mountain

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

"Can you tell me the way to Rainy Mountain?" I asked a farm woman through the screen door. She came out and pointed, over the corral, to "that little knoll." The woman and I talked a minute about her son, who this day was hauling a drilling rig to western North Dakota, and then my companion and I departed, to loop around and approach Rainy Mountain from the north.

To my knowledge, from conversations with Kiowas and readings of cultural studies, Rainy Mountain has no general tribal significance of ritual or belief. For these people of the northern plains moved south, however, it is a landmark of identity, providing a sense of place to a community conquered and confined to a reservation in southwest Oklahoma. That’s why it’s in the title of the classic by N. Scott Momaday, "The Way to Rainy Mountain."

Rainy Mountain also has personal and family significance to many Kiowas because just off its shoulder to the southeast stood the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, now in ruins. The purpose of this Indian boarding school, as recorded in the title of Clyde Ellis’s book about it, was "to change them forever"–to make Kiowa kids into Anglo-Americans.

The school did change them forever, but not quite as planned.

The children learned to read and write, they learned Christian doctrines, they were mass-baptized in Rainy Mountain Creek. They just did not become Anglo-Americans. They became 20th-century Kiowa Baptists, with a sort of school spirit based on the common experience of endurance. Over east at Doke’s store (an impressive poured-concrete ruin today), their parents waited for them open-armed.

So the climbing of Rainy Mountain is not freighted with awesome religious consequence, as is, say, Devil’s Tower, or Uluru. Instead it is a matter of many smaller, stiller, personal significances.

The slopes, steep only near the top, are chert-littered and sparsely vegetated. Succulent and prickly things abound–yucca, hen-and-chicks, prickly pear–so watch where you sit. Watch where you step, too, for spaced here and there on the summit are little cairns and prayer circles of stone, markers of personal pilgrimage.

This must be the center of the world. To the southwest look upstream to the headwaters of Rainy Mountain Creek; beyond are the Quartz Mountains. To the northeast look downstream to where the creek enters the Washita River, at Mountain View. Just up the Washita from that juncture the Kiowa held their last Sun Dance before the U.S. Army suppressed their traditional religion.

To the southeast, on the other side of a scattered cow herd, the multiple ruins of the school campus are clearly visible. The walk down is gentle and quiet. So is the stroll among the foundations and remains of walls. Most prominent are the stone walls of the boys’ dormitory.

Studying old photos, I remain unable to match the other ruins with the buildings once extant. It isn’t necessary I do so.

Today quite a bit of serious literature, and most of our popular culture, seeks to disconnect with particular places. To a Great Plains Lutheran expatriate in Seattle, or an Asian Indian computer programmer in Dallas, it may be necessary to sever or dilute ties of place in order to lessen heartache.

There are things in literature and culture and life, though, that you cannot begin to understand without standing on the ground and embracing the particular place. I cannot know what it is to be a Kiowa. I do know something now, though, of this place, Rainy Mountain.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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