Synopses & Reviews
These are chapters in the story of a people whose way has been the Homeric way, marked by adventure, forays, and battle, by human situations that are as homely and imperishable as mankind itself, and by a spiritual understanding of the mysteries that have surrounded them.
The Kiowas have lived, not as you and I, but as an elemental race in a vast prairie world, yet their hopes and aspirations reveal their fundamental unity with peoples everywhere. Of human types among them, there are analogues to be found on Main Street and on Fifth Avenue; the proud parents, the eloping lovers, the nagging wife, the hero returned from battle, the bereaved father,
thoughtless children, the stern patriarch, the heedless drunk, and the temperamental artist.
To their enemies, both red and white, the Kiowas were not a lovely people. They were fierce and unrelenting in conflict, they moved with prodigious speed over the flat prairies of the Southwest, and they could live from the land. To their friends, they were known as staunch allies, a trustworthy folk, whose courtesy and hospitality were good to experience. Among themselves, they exhibited all of those homely virtues that one expects of a close-knit society anywhere. Over and above them always have been the Ten Grandmothers, sacred "medicine" bundles surrounded by legends, superstitions, and power from generations without beginning in the past.
Review
"It is one of the most accurate and sustained accounts of the transition from Indian ways to half-white ways that I have seen." Chicago Tribune
Review
"A history of the Kiowa tribe and of their transformation from a nomadic plains tribe to a settled agricultural people...told with the stark simplicity and economy of line of a Chinese brush-drawing." Saturday Review of Literature
Review
"This is a distinguished book." New York Times