The Way to Rainy Mountain N. Scott Momaday returned to the old landmark called Rainy Mountain for the burial of his grandmother. He begins to relate stories that his grandmother used to tell when the Kiowas were living through the last great moment in their history. “For more than a hundred years they had controlled the open range from the Smokey Hill River to the Red River, from the headwaters of the Canadian to the fork of the Arkansas and the Cimarron.” The Kiowas were a strange people whose culture was the last to evolve in North America. His grandmother's forebears came from western Montana into the plains of Oklahoma nearly three centuries ago. They were mysterious hunters whose language had never been positively classified in any