Stories from Saddle Mountain: Autobiographies of a Kiowa Family

2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Stories from Saddle Mountain recounts family stories that connected the Tongkeamhas, a Kiowa family, to the Saddle Mountain community for more than a century. Henrietta Apayyat (1912-93) grew up and married near Saddle Mountain, where she and her husband raised five sons and five daughters. She began penning her memoirs in 1968, including accounts about a Peyote meeting, revivals and Christmas encampments at Saddle Mountain Church, subsistence activities, and attending boarding schools and public schools.

When not in school, Henrietta spent much of her childhood and adolescence close to home, working and occasionally traveling to neighboring towns with her grandparents, whereas her son Raymond Tongkeamha left frequently and wandered farther. Both experienced the transformation from having no indoor plumbing or electricity to having radios, televisions, and JCPenney. Together, their autobiographies illuminate dynamic changes and steadfast traditions in twentieth-century Kiowa life in the Saddle Mountain countryside.


About the Author
Henrietta Tongkeamha (1912-93) lived and documented her experiences raising a family in southwestern Oklahoma. Raymond Tongkeamha left home in the 1960s and encountered the world beyond southwestern Oklahoma through military service and jobs in Oklahoma City, Dallas, and elsewhere before returning to the homestead. Benjamin R. Kracht is a professor of anthropology at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. He is the author of Religious Revitalization among the Kiowas: The Ghost Dance, Peyote, and Christianity (Nebraska, 2018), among other books.