SOURCE: "John Joseph Mathews's Talking to the Moon: Literary and Osage Contexts," in Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives, edited by James Robert Payne, The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1992, pp. 1-31.

[An American educator and critic who specializes in Native American studies, Ruoff is the author of American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography (1990). In the following excerpt, she offers a stylistic and thematic analysis of Talking to the Moon, examining its relationship to other Native American autobiographies, its focus on Osage culture, and its similarities to Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854) and John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra (1911).]

American scholars have increasingly emphasized the importance of American autobiographies to the study of American culture. In "Autobiography and the Making of America," Robert F. Sayre attributes this to American autobiographers having "generally connected their own lives to the national life or to national ideas" [Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney, 1980]. Like their white and African-American counterparts, Native Americans have emphasized the connection between their lives and the larger community. Although their life histories emphasize the interrelationship between the individual and the tribe more than that with the United States as a nation, they also stress the impact of Indian-white relations on Indian life. Recognizing that life histories constitute one of the major genres of American-Indian literatures, scholars such as H. David Brumble III, Arnold Krupat, Gretchen Bataille, Kathleen Mullen Sands, Lynne O'Brien, and Ruoff have increasingly turned their attention to the study of life histories and autobiographies. Because American-Indian written autobiographies reflect not only the personal and tribal history of the author but trends in popular literature and in Indian-white relations, they form a rich resource. This essay will focus on John Joseph Mathews's Talking to the Moon (1945), a highly sophisticated literary autobiography, and will discuss its place in the history of American-Indian autobiography. It will also examine the extent to which the form and content of Mathews's Talking to the Moon were influenced by Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854) and John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) as well as by Osage traditions and history.

Full-length confessions or autobiographies in the Western European literary mode are not part of American-Indian oral literary tradition. However, Brumble indicates in American Indian Autobiography that Native-American preliterate autobiographical narratives include a variety of forms designed to convey specific information or achieve a particular purpose. Among these are coup tales, which describe feats of bravery; tales of warfare and hunting; self examinations, which might consist of confessions required for participation in rituals or accounts of misfortunes and illnesses; self-vindications; educational narratives; and tales of acquisition of powers. Even today some Indians may decline to write or narrate full-length autobiographies because their tribes consider it inappropriate for individuals to speak about themselves in an extended fashion until after they have achieved a status acknowledged by the tribe.

American-Indian life histories and autobiographies often blend a mixture of tribal myth, ethnohistory, and personal experience. This mixed form was congenial to Indian narrators and authors accustomed to viewing their lives within the history of their family, clan, band, or tribe. In her introduction to Life Lived like a Story, Julie Cruikshank provides a contemporary example of this perspective. To her questions about secular events, three Athabaskan/Tlingit women responded by telling traditional stories because "these narratives were important to record as part of" their life stories. Their accounts included not only the personal reminiscences we associate with autobiography but also detailed narratives elaborating mythological themes, genealogies and lists of personal and place names that had both metaphoric and mnemonic value. She notes that these women talked about their lives using an oral tradition grounded in local idiom and a mutually shared body of knowledge.

In the early nineteenth century, publication of full-length American-Indian life histories was stimulated by the popularity of captivity and slave narratives. In the East and Midwest, it also resulted from renewed interest in "the noble savages," who no longer threatened whites because the Indians had been pacified or, under the provisions of the 1830 Indian Removal Bill, forcibly relocated to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, and other areas west of the Mississippi. As Indians were removed, whites increasingly wanted to read about the vanished "noble savages" or about assimilated Indian converts to Christianity. Published in response to this interest, nineteenth-century American-Indian autobiographies became forceful weapons in Native Americans' never-ending battles against white injustice.

In 1833, the narrated American-Indian autobiography, a major literary form in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was introduced with the publication of The Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak or Black Hawk. Narrated by Black Hawk (Sauk) to translator Antoine Le Claire and revised for publication by John B. Patterson, this popular book went through five editions by 1847. The earliest published full-life autobiographies written by American Indians were A Son of the Forest (1829) by William Apes (Pequot, b. 1798) and The Life, History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847) by George Copway (Ojibwa, 1818–69). Like the slave narrators, Apes and Copway consciously modeled their autobiographies on the spiritual confessions and missionary reminiscences popular with white readers. The spiritual confessions linked Indian autobiographers to Protestant literary traditions and identified these authors as civilized Christians whose experiences were as legitimate subjects of written analysis as the experiences of other Christians. Apes, Copway, and later American-Indian autobiographers, like the slave narrators, used personal and family experiences to illustrate the suffering their people endured at the hands of white Christians.

Because he was apprenticed to whites after age four and was not raised in a traditional Indian culture, Apes, unlike later autobiographers, does not include a tribal ethnohistory in A Son of the Forest. This book is primarily devoted to Apes's spiritual journey toward salvation and to strong statements about white injustice to Indians. More representative of the evolving form of American-Indian written autobiographies than Apes's self-published A Son of the Forest was Copway's The Life, History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847). This popular autobiography went through six editions in one year. Although Copway used the structure of the spiritual confession and missionary reminiscence, he blended these with Ojibwa myth, ethnohistory, and personal experience. Copway also introduced descriptions of childhood experiences and portraits of family life designed to counteract the stereotype of Indians as "red devils" intent on killing as many innocent whites as possible.

From the early nineteenth century through the 1960s, more American-Indian life histories or autobiographies were published than any other genre of Native-American literature. However, subsequent Indian autobiographers abandoned the religious narrative as a model and in its place used versions of the blend of mythology, ethnohistory, and personal experience that Copway initiated. Instead of personal religious experience, Indian autobiographers emphasized tribal culture and history and Indian-white relations. Life among the Piutes (1883) by Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute, ca. 1844–91), exemplifies this shift in perspective. During most of the nineteenth century, Winnemucca was the only Indian woman writer of personal and tribal history. Her Life among the Piutes is particularly interesting for her characterization of her childhood terror of whites, her discussion of the status of women in Paiute society, and her descriptions of her role as a liaison between Indians and whites.

To the descriptions of tribal ethnohistory and growing up within a tribal culture included in earlier Indian autobiographies, later writers added accounts of Indian children's adjustment to white-run schools. The Middle Five (1900) by Francis La Flesche (Omaha, 1857–1932) exemplifies this trend. The most influential and widely read Indian autobiographer in the early twentieth century was Charles Eastman (Sioux, 1858–1939), who wrote two autobiographies. Indian Boyhood (1902), written for his children, describes his life as a traditional Sioux boy from infancy to age fifteen. From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916) is a progress autobiography that traces Eastman's struggles to succeed, from his first days in a white school to becoming a medical doctor and an internationally known spokesperson on Indian issues. It also reflects his growing sense of Indian-ness and disillusionment with white society.

Mathews's Talking to the Moon differs from most earlier Indian autobiographies because it is a spiritual autobiography of a specific period in the author's life rather than a life history of growing up Indian or of adjustment to contact with non-Indians and their institutions. Unlike Copway and later Indian autobiographers, Mathews did not grow up within a tribal culture. Consequently, Talking to the Moon is not an exploration of Mathews's ethnicity but rather a chronicle of his attempts to find himself at a crucial time in his life through rediscovering the land, animals, and people of his native Oklahoma. In the course of this rediscovery, Mathews pays tribute to the Osage, whose traditional life had undergone tremendous change. One-eighth Osage by blood, Mathews spent his youth and much of his adult life after 1932 living among and working with them. Most of his books were devoted to describing their lives, heritage, and history.

While Talking to the Moon does contain the blend of myth, history, and personal experience that characterizes American-Indian autobiographies, it is modeled not on these books but rather on the works of Thoreau and John Muir. Mrs. Elizabeth Mathews makes this clear in her foreword to the 1981 reprint of her husband's book: "this is John Joseph Mathews's Walden. It is a book that a Thoreau or a Muir might write, but it is a Walden of the plains and prairies, of the 1930s and 1940s, by a Native American." By incorporating many elements of the form and content of Thoreau's Walden and Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra, Mathews deliberately places Talking to the Moon within a received literary tradition, which he adapts to incorporate aspects of Oklahoma and Osage culture and history. The result is the most sophisticated and polished autobiography by an Indian author to be published up to 1945….

The period of his life covered by Talking to the Moon begins after the publication of Wah'Kon-Tah. Undoubtedly, Mathews's interest in what motivates humankind, his need to understand our relationship to nature, and his desire to observe nature closely led him to choose Thoreau's and Muir's works as his literary models. Like these authors, he withdrew from cities to overcome the separation he felt between himself and nature. For Mathews, this process involved restoring his relationship to his Oklahoma homeland and with the animals and humans, such as the Osage, cowboys, and ranchers, who inhabited it. Twenty-eight-year-old Thoreau settled near Walden Pond in 1845 and remained for two years. Thirty-eight-year-old Mathews settled and remained ten years in the "blackjacks" near Pawhuska, a region named for the tough oaks that covered the sandstone region. Clearly Mathews identified with Thoreau's statement of why he settled near Walden Pond: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." The influence of Thoreau's Walden is clearly reflected in Mathews's statement that he returned to the blackjack region in order to become part of the balance:

… to learn something of the moods of the little corner of the earth which had given me being; to learn something of the biological progression and mysterious urge which had inspired it, until the biological changes within myself had dimmed the romance of it. I had kept my body fit and ready, but my perceptive powers had been dulled by the artificialities and crowding and elbowing of men of Europe and America, my ears attuned to the clanging steel and strident sounds of civilization, and the range of my sight stopped by tall buildings and walls, by neat gardens and geometrical fields; and I had begun to worship these things and the men who brought them into being—impersonalized groups of magicians who never appeared to my consciousness as frail, uninspiring individuals.

Mathews had long realized that the wonders of civilization, as well as "war and unnatural crowding of men, slavery, group fanaticism, and social abnormalities, were inspired by the biological urge manifesting itself in progression, as were the dreams of the few who created beauty, comfort, and tragedy." He emphasized that he did not return to the blackjacks because of political convictions but rather to devote a few years to pleasant and undisturbed living. There Mathews felt he might come to understand the relationship between humankind's primal and creative urges: "I realized that man's artistic creations and his dreams, often resulting in beauty, as well as his fumbling toward God, must be primal, possibly the results of the biological urge which inspires the wood thrush to sing and the coyote to talk to the moon." Unlike Thoreau and Muir, Mathews settled in a place where as a child he had felt a oneness with the ridges and prairies. The influence of Thoreau's Walden and Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra is reflected as well in the organization and content of Talking to the Moon. Mathews follows Thoreau's example by organizing his autobiography by seasons, which allows both authors to describe not only their observations of nature but their personal growth in terms of natural cycles. The focus of Muir's book is on the description of the changes in nature during a single summer and of his maturation during that period. Mathews follows Muir's example in using a month-by-month structure, which he bases on the Osage months of the year.

Mathews also includes topics similar to those treated by Thoreau and Muir. All three authors share a strong sense of place revealed in Thoreau's loving descriptions of the area around Walden Pond, Muir's ecstatic world landscapes of the majestic Sierra Nevada, and Mathews's poetic descriptions of the ridges and prairies in eastern Oklahoma. Both Thoreau and Mathews chronicle the changes these places undergo through the seasons and years, emphasizing that these areas transcend and reflect time while Muir recounts in diary form his daily observations of his summer in the Sierra.

Thoreau examines the Walden Pond area and the soil of his beanfield to trace their history; Muir speculates about the origin of the boulders in the high mountains during the glacial period. Similarly, Mathews analyzes with the eye of the scientist and verbal landscape artist the limestone ridges and his post oak to learn the history of the rain, drought, and fire they endured over the passage of time. For Mathews, the ridges and the blackjacks link primordial nature with contemporary life. At the beginning of his book, Mathews focuses his description of the ridges on the blackjack oaks, whose dead limbs slant downward, "hard and tough as steel lances," protecting them from harm. In earlier days, buffalo rubbed against the trees to scratch their itching hides; now cows hide in their groves to deliver calves. Mathews's description of the blackjacks parallels Muir's numerous tributes to the fir, juniper, and pine trees of the Sierra.

Mathews's careful descriptions of animals, birds, and insects also reflect the influence of Thoreau and Muir. Thoreau's observations on his brute neighbors include his famous description of the mock heroic battle of the red and black ants. In attempting to come close to nature, Thoreau became an amateur scientist, observing under a microscope the movement of ants on a piece of wood, while Muir risked his life to observe a bear up close. Mathews is as curious about the creatures of nature as his predecessors were. Some of his experiments reveal a scientific detachment, as he himself seems to acknowledge. One is his futile attempt to tame a coyote whelp, which spent her days looking out of the pen with her yellow-green eyes filled with "hatred and courage." Mathews coldly comments that "She taught me nothing except the fact that even at her age her mother was still interested in her and made valiant attempts to save her. She also confirmed my experiences that coyotes suffer and die in silence and thus do not endanger the other members of the band by calling for help." Another example is his setting a chicken loose out on the prairie near a coyote den to determine the mother's reaction. Although the mother coyote clearly sees the chicken, she pretends the fowl is not there. The coyote both fascinated and frustrated Mathews, whose attempts to outthink it usually ended in failure. Like the Osage, Mathews regarded the coyote as "a symbol of cupidity and double-dealing." For Mathews these episodes exemplify the eternal battle between the intellect of humankind and the instinct of the animal as humans vainly and destructively attempt to control nature and all its creatures. Mathews is more conscious than Thoreau and Muir that his own efforts to control nature disturb the balance.

During his first year in the blackjacks, Mathews lived as part of this balance and was proud of his harmony with the life around him. However, under the influence of the Planting Moon (April), he broke the truce: "After bringing pheasants, guineas, and chickens to the ridge, I had to fight for the survival of my charges against my predacious neighbors, which was probably a more natural state and in the end more satisfying than the 'friends and neighbor' idea." The presence of his charges whetted the predators' desires and sharpened their cunning. He and the predators were caught in a struggle, pitting their wits against one another. Mathews wonders whether his position was unnatural since he did not live off the land; thus, he was then not part of the economic struggle of the ridge which results in the balance. Mathews vividly depicts this battle with predators in the chapter entitled "Little-Flower-Killer Moon" (May), in which he tells how he emptied the cylinder of his revolver into a skunk that slaughtered many of his chickens "from sheer lust." Mathews emphasizes that the skunk behaved abnormally, killing for enjoyment rather than survival and leaving behind his headless victims. Nevertheless, Mathews confesses that, when he held the muzzle of his gun to the skunk's head and emptied the cylinder, he gloried "in the nauseating musk odor that hung on the heavy air of night, transforming its glory with the sharp explosions that broke the silence of the ridge into a symbol of the mighty power of Homo sapiens when aroused and announcing his entrance into the struggle." For Mathews, the episode reveals the desire for revenge that lurks just beneath humankind's civilized veneer. He also acknowledges that this tragedy resulted from his bringing the chickens to his land, an act that interfered with the balance.

Like Thoreau and Muir, Mathews emphasizes sensory experience in nature, particularly hearing and sight. Just as Thoreau devotes a whole chapter of Walden to "Sounds" and gives detailed descriptions of animal sounds in "Winter Animals," and as Muir catalogs the animal and human sounds of the Sierra sheep camp, so Mathews includes descriptions of sounds: the April sounds of bird songs filled with "injured innocence and pessimism" and of long cattle trains that "come screaming into the little loading pens and stand panting from their exertion as the cattle bawl and the boys shout as they unload them." Mathews follows the examples of Thoreau and Muir in his emphasis on sight as well. Thoreau, in his chapter on "The Ponds" in Walden vividly describes the colors of shore and water while Muir, in My First Summer in the Sierra, paints verbal landscapes of the magnificent grandeur of this mountain range. Although Mathews includes far less geographic and landscape description than Thoreau and Muir, he includes some lovely descriptive passages in his chapter "Little-Flower-Killer Moon" of the thousands of little flowers that die away in May and of the flowering weeds that replace them, reinforcing the theme of the fragility of life in the cycles of nature elaborated in that chapter. Equally beautiful are the pictures of the prairies awash in the old-gold color of sunflowers, butterflies, and gold-finches that Mathews creates in the chapter called "Yellow-Flower Moon" (August). However, in both of these chapters Mathews uses these descriptions as introductions to his observations on insects, birds, animals, and men, which are the focus of his interest.

Another parallel to Thoreau and Muir is Mathews's description of his living accommodations. For Mathews, as for Thoreau, his cabin and cultivated land represent personal space between the town and the wild. Whereas Thoreau recounts his labors in planting his garden and tilling his beanfield, Mathews describes his in planting kafir, a grain sorghum, for the prairie chickens and trees and shrubbery for his yard. Thoreau plants to eat while Mathews plants to encourage the presence of fowls and to shade himself from the parching Oklahoma sun and winds. Just as Thoreau pauses in tilling his beanfield to observe the hawks flying above him, Mathews pauses in his planting to observe the mockingbirds' return, the prairie chickens' dances, and the cocks' fights. Unlike Thoreau, Mathews does not use the description of building his cabin as a jumping-off point for discussing the history of man's attitude toward shelter. Instead, he uses it to introduce the human inhabitants of the ridges and prairies—Virgil, the most efficient hand on the ranch and Mathews's house builder, and other ranch hands who question why Mathews builds on a high ridge far from arable land and why he plans to live alone. Their attitudes set Mathews's own in relief.

There are parallels as well in the three authors' treatment of such subjects as solitude, neighbors, and visitors. For example, all three enjoy occasional visits with friends. Thoreau keeps three chairs for company; Mathews keeps a bountiful supply of food for his city guests. Mathews's descriptions of his pleasures in cooking echo those of Thoreau and Muir on bread making. The three authors also create memorable portraits of their visitors and neighbors. However, Muir and Mathews do not denigrate their neighbors or companions as does Thoreau in his description of the hapless Irish bogsman, John Field, whom he calls "honest, hardworking, but shiftless." Muir has little in common with his campmates, who are oblivious to the beauties of nature. He refers to Delaney as Don Quixote, because his sharp profile resembles that of the Spanish knight, and to Billy, the tobacco-chewing shepherd and camp butcher, as Sancho Panza. However, Muir is sympathetic to the hard life that Billy led.

Mathews creates several vivid portraits of locals. Especially memorable is that of Les Claypool, a former cowboy whose face was "like weathered granite"; "his steel-gray eyes and his silence, as he looked at his great gold watch with the hunting case," caused Mathews to feel like a guilty schoolboy when he was late for a meeting. Claypool staunchly clung to the past and resisted change. Thirty-eight years after he quit working on cattle drives and after he became a car owner, Claypool still kept his horse saddled, ready for emergencies.

Talking to the Moon shows the influence of Thoreau's Walden in its purpose, general structure, and content, and of Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra in its detailed, scientific descriptions of nature and sympathetic portraits of local characters. While it is clear that Mathews wished to write Talking to the Moon within the tradition of the pastoral, spiritual autobiography popularized by Thoreau and Muir, it is equally clear that he wishes to distinguish his work from theirs by adding an emphasis on Indian history and culture largely absent from their books. The difference in the focus of the autobiographies is evident in the authors' choice of titles. Whereas Thoreau and Muir select titles that refer to the places where they renewed themselves in nature, Mathews chooses one that alludes to the Osage's interrelationship with their natural gods. In Walden, Thoreau makes only a few fleeting references to the Indians near Concord, their simple shelters, and the ancient civilization that inhabited the soil Thoreau tills in his beanfield. Although Muir includes more descriptions of Indians he encounters in the Sierra, he is equally detached from them as people. This is especially clear in his comments about the Indian member of his sheep camp. Describing how the men chatted during breakfast, Muir remarks that the "Indian kept in the background, saying never a word, as if he belonged to another species." Unlike Billy, the shepherd, the "Indian" is neither given a name nor described in a character sketch. Later in My First Summer in the Sierra, Muir expands his reaction to Indian silence in the description of another Indian who arrived unobserved, "as motionless and weather-stained as an old tree-stump that had stood there for centuries. All Indians seem to have learned this wonderful way of walking unseen,—making themselves invisible like certain spiders I have been observing here." Muir also mentions the Digger Indians who inhabit the area and gives a short biography of Old Tenaya, the Yosemite chief and namesake of the basin.

By stressing the Indian heritage of the blackjack region, Mathews makes Talking to the Moon an account of the changes in the Osage culture that had survived for centuries as part of the balance of the blackjacks and prairie as well as an account of the changes in nature and himself. Mathews's sensitivity to the Osage is evident in his decision to pay tribute to his tribal ancestry not by exploring his own ethnicity as a mixed-blood but rather by focusing on the tribe's myths, history, customs, and elders. In fact, he does not mention his own Osage heritage, although his wife does in her foreword to the 1981 edition. As Terry P. Wilson points out in "The Osage Oxonian" [Chronicles of Oklahoma 59, No. 3 (Fall 1981)], Mathews was well aware of the antagonism of a faction of Osage full-bloods toward mixed-bloods. The full-bloods had not forgotten the fraud perpetuated in 1906, when many whites had their names included on the Osage rolls in order to get allotments of Osage land. Mathews realized that, although his own identity as an Osage was not tainted in this way, he was always "suspect in the minds of some." According to Wilson, the author's "elections to the tribal council said less about his identification as an Indian in the eyes of the Osages and more about their respect for his education, familiarity with the complexities of white society, and devotion to the tribe's interests." Wilson correctly concludes that this "reluctant dependence on Mathews and other mixed-bloods is typical of the ambivalence in most tribes and many Indian organizations."

Undoubtedly, Mathews realized that exploring his own ethnicity in this autobiography would have resulted in severe criticism from the Osages and would have undercut his efforts on their behalf. Instead, he chose to focus on recording what he learned from the Osages and on creating memorable portraits of tribal members. Mathews was all too aware that, since the beginning of the reservation period in 1878, the Osages had endured traumatic changes in their culture. In 1907, Oklahoma became a state and the Osage Nation reservation became Osage County. Unlike other Indian tribes in Oklahoma, the Osage had retained the mineral rights to their lands after allotment. The discovery of oil on Osage lands in 1897 led to boom times in the 1920s that threatened to extinguish traditional Osage culture and values. Oil companies, entrepreneurs, and scalawags poured into Osage County to take advantage of the Osages' oil and their new-found wealth. During what Mathews calls in The Osages the "Great Frenzy," some Osages spent their money freely. Other Osages were defrauded or murdered for their lands and oil money. Still others succumbed to alcoholism. By 1932, when Mathews settled in his cabin in the blackjacks, the boom of the 1920s was over. As Mathews notes in The Osages, the oil royalties peaked in 1925 at $13,000 per capita but slipped in 1932 to $712.

The traditional Osage were, in Mathews's view, the human inhabitants of the blackjack region most in tune with the land. The key to this oneness with nature was their religion:

He [the traditional Osage man] built up in his imagination the Great Mysteries and he walked, fought, hunted and mated with the approval of them. When the Force urged him to expression, he turned his eyes to Grandfather the Sun; the colors he saw under his closed eyelids, he put into beadwork, quillwork, and painting, as inspirations from one of the greatest manifestations of the Great Mysteries, the sun, Father of Father Fire, impregnator of Mother Earth.

The Osage tribe symbolized the universe, and the Osages divided themselves and their universe into two parts: man and animal, spiritual and material, sky (Chesho; Sky People; Peace Division) and earth (Hunkah; Earth People; War Division). The Osage conceived of the moon as a woman because she periodically appeared twelve times a year; because of the moon's power over the earth; and because when she dominated the ridges, there was no disturbance by the male element: "Grandfather the Sun has gone to rest and even Father the fire is dim in her presence, as though out of a traditional understanding and deference, like a great warrior in camp where woman is supreme." As a good woman should, she leaves at dawn, taking her children, the stars, so as not to disturb Grandfather the Sun when he takes over the male world of daytime. Mathews incorporates the Osage concept of the moon as a woman into many chapters of Talking to the Moon. The opening passage of the chapter called "Single Moon by Himself" (January) illustrates how Mathews uses Osage concepts of the Moon Woman to set the mood: "The Moon Woman floats by herself now. There are no babies or fruits or flowers, say the Osage, and the Moon Woman is lonesome. She is not so gay and temperamental but dull and moody. Snow may stay on the ground for a long time, and there will be no sun, and the days as much alike, cold and gloomy. The moon is sometimes called Frost-on-Inside-of-Lodge Moon and long ago was known as the Hunger Moon."

For Mathews, traditional Osage life achieved a balance in nature which the white man never gained and which the Osage themselves lost when they were forced to abandon the old, free life and substitute the peyote cult or Christianity for the gods of their ancestors. Mathews describes the balance the Osage achieved in the chapter on the Planting Moon (April), the time for female ceremonies of planting and growth. Using Osage-style English, Mathews retells old Ee-Nah-Apee's story about Osage planting customs, which exemplify the tribe's belief in balance:

Purty soon womens go to them little—hills, I guess, and they make hole with that pole on south side of that there hill. They used to say Grandfather sure would see them holes in them hills on south side, that-a-way. We put corn in them hills, in them little holes; and when we have all of 'em with corn in it, we put our feets on it. We stand on them little hills and make drum against the earth with the poles and sing purty song.

The women stamp the hills with the left foot for Chesho and the right for Hunkah. That the Osage have moved from these customs into the world of the white man is demonstrated by Ee-Nah-Apee laughing when she told the story, as "though she were embarrassed by recalling such primitive things that the tribe was now attempting to put away forever." The Osage recognized that the nature of the world and humankind included both of these polarities, which must be kept in balance. They also recognized that at various times one would dominate the other. Certainly this division of the Osage into Chesho (associated with peace and thought or imagination) and Hunkah (associated with war and physical action) influences Mathews's attitudes toward his own state of mind, which moves between these polarities. When the author first moved to the blackjacks, he exulted in the physical: "I wanted to express my harmony with the natural flow of life on my bit of earth through physical action." The planting song of the Osages runs through his head, stimulating him to the physical action of planting trees and shrubs. Another example of action during a Hunkah state of mind is his narrative, in the chapter called "Deer Breeding Moon" (October), of joining in a hunt to track down a bear which had killed some of a neighbor's sheep: "Bear hunting, with its frenzied action and the deep voices of the bloodhounds echoing from the savage walls of the mountain canyons, awakens every nerve to incautious action." He notes that, ten years later, his desire for action had been tempered. In the chapter "Single Moon by Himself" (January), Mathews describes his thoughts as "Chesho, as they should be, and there are no longer Hunkah thoughts of youth and action, when Single Moon by Himself comes to the blackjacks, and I am inside the dark little sandstone house by the fire."

Among the several Osage myths that Mathews blends into Talking to the Moon is that of the spider, the Osage symbol that Mathews uses on the spines of the books he has authored. Mathews indicates that the spider was formerly a clan symbol but is now used by a woman's secret society. According to the story, members of a clan could not make up their minds about which animal to choose as a symbol suitable to great warriors. During their search, they rejected many animals until one of their leaders walked into a spiderweb. The spider persuaded them to accept it as their symbol: "I am a little black thing; I have not the strength, the courage, the beauty of those you talk about, but remember this: wherever I go I build my house, and where I build my house all things come to it." Mathews also comments on the Osage use of the coyote in their stories that "depend on dignity made ridiculous as a basis for humor." The coyote also appears as a warning for children that they should never think of themselves as being shrewder than others, since "one may be outwitted through one's own vanity." For the Osage, the coyote was an indicator of something astir on the prairie, either enemy, friend, or quarry. They mimicked his yelping to deceive enemies: "He was an important person in the scheme of things, but he hadn't the proper virtues for symbolism."

Mathews's most extended treatment of Osage history and culture is contained in the chapter "Buffalo-Pawing-Earth Moon" (June), focusing on the month when the Ee-lonshescha, male ceremonial dances, are held at the villages of the three active branches of the original five physical divisions of the Osage. He vividly evokes the color and customs of these dances, describing the different costumes and steps used by dancers from various clans, the honoring songs, giveaways, and the storytelling. Mathews's activities and observations during the ceremonies reveal his relationship to the tribe. While he does not participate in the ceremonies, he observes proper etiquette by giving money to the drum keeper to help support the ceremonies and then joins the old men, who evidently welcome him: "Here I pick up many stories of the jealousy between the Peyote factions, and laugh with them over the stories of dignified men being humiliated. I like the sound of their voices and the graceful movements of their hands as they talk, in this setting of colorful activity." To illustrate Osage storytelling, Mathews recreates a scene in which an elder describes, in Osage dialect and within the hearing of the subject's grandson, how an arrogant Osage male was humiliated in the midst of his bragging. While the proud Osage was in the middle of a speech designed to impress some Sioux visitors, a louse crawled up his eagle feather headdress: "At the same time he finish his talkin' that feather make bow, ain't it? That little eagle feather make bow with louse ridin' on it—sure was funny." The story exemplifies Indians' use of humorous stories to enforce approved behavior.

Mathews confesses that he has never grown tired of watching the dancers, whom he has watched since he was a small boy—"a time when they wore nothing except breechcloths, moccasins, silver arm bands, and scalplocks and carried hand mirrors and war axes." Then the dancers were tall and lean. But now, despite the fat bellies and flab-by arms and gorgeous costumes, "the dance is grave and the figures graceful, and in its dignity and fervency the dance is still a prayer" to Wah'Kon-Tah of the old religion, "not withstanding the symbols of peyote with which they adorn themselves." He comments that the June dances, which originally had ritual but at the time he describes had only social significance, and the gossip at the dances about conflict between peyote factions reinforce his sense of the drama in the world represented by the relentless movement of Christianity: "I feel the earth's drama all about me, but the conflict between Christianity and the old religion of the Osages forces itself upon my attention…." Mathews feels extremely fortunate to witness the last struggle of a native religion and believes that his daily life in the blackjacks was as influenced by this as by any other struggle for survival: "The passing of a concept of God seems to be almost as poignant as the passing of a species."

Mathews illustrates this passing of the old religion, along with his own determination to preserve its artifacts, by recreating a scene between himself and the second son of Spotted Horse. The young man brings his father's message that, although it is all right to have a sacred medicine bundle in the Osage museum that Mathews is to establish, he should not open it: "He says you alltime ask too many questions about them bundles, he says. You oughtn't do that; it's bad. He says you' sure die if you fool with them things. Osage have put them bad things away, he says."

The confusion into which Christianity and industrialization have thrown the Osage is only part of that tribe's tragedy. Although old men lamented the destruction of the social structure, they lamented even more the consequent end of the tribe as a unit and the loss of their individual immortality. Their consciousness points out to them "the end of their race, the end of their god, the complete assimilation of their children, and the end of their immortality. It is the sheet-water of oblivion that washes their moccasin prints from the ridges and agitates their last thoughts."

Because the old Osage chief, Eagle-That-Gets-What-He-Wants, feared that tribal traditions would disappear from memory, unremembered by young Osage eager to adopt white ways, he arranged for his wife to interpret his accounts of Osage oral traditions, which Mathews wrote down. The chief's story about Tze Topah, his uncle and the chief of the Little Osages, illustrates how the Osage used oral tradition to keep their history and culture alive in the memories of their people. When old Tze Topah realized he would die soon, he spent many hours telling people what he knew and did when young. Unable to tell his stories to a band out hunting, Tze Topah dressed in his war finery and rode through the band's camp, singing so that all people would stop their work to hear his song and so that they would know him and remember him as long as they had tongues to talk and their children ears to hear.

For Mathews, the peyotism of the Native American Church represents a blend of Osage religion and Christianity. Many of the Osage elders felt that the religion of their god, Wah'Kon-Tah, was not strong enough to stand up against Christianity and therefore should be put aside. Mathews emphasizes that the Osage "adopted the Man on the Cross because they understand him. He is both Chesho and Hunkah. His footprints are on the peyote altars, and they are deep like the footprints of one who has jumped." Mathews enlivens his discussion of Osage culture with a series of verbal portraits of Osage elders. Many of these are contained in the chapter "Yellow-Flower Moon" (August), in which he describes how he helped an artist commissioned to paint the pictures of the old men for the Osage Museum. The proud Osage elder, Claremore, insists on posing for days in full regalia despite the withering July heat. The teasing Abbott, a member of the Osage tribal council, comments that the portrait of Claremore looks like a "white man that lost his money. Maybe someday when I look at it, I shoot myself." When Abbott poses for his own portrait, Mathews brings the desired twinkle to the council member's eye by recalling the story of how Abbott, who was always in debt, told a butterfly that landed on his shoulder, "'Pay you next week.'" The incident also illustrates Mathews's rapport with the Osage elders. Other examples of Indian humor are provided by Nonceh Tonkah, the only elder to wear a scalplock. The old man instructs his daughter in Osage to tell the artist to bring his daughter to Nonceh Tonkah in exchange for his posing. The elder also asked the artist if he wants Nonceh Tonkah's head when he dies. His patronizing daughter refuses to translate these unseemly remarks. Mathews creates another memorable portrait in his characterization of Louie, a Cherokee who talks to owls, explaining that he does not have to hide from the owls because "'them owls don't care 'bout nothin' when they do this here big talkin'.'" Louie hoots at the owls in a coaxing, seductive tone which they answer in kind. For Mathews, Louie embodies the unity between the Indian and nature.

Like Thoreau and Muir, Mathews sees himself as a mediator between man and nature. However, whereas Thoreau eschews identification with the purely natural man represented by Indians and non-Indian woodcutters, and Muir feels a bond with his shepherd but not with the Sierra Indians, Mathews praises both Indians and other men of nature for achieving a natural balance through instinct that he can achieve only through intellect. Each of the three writers attempts to achieve a balance between the polarities of the intellectual or imaginative and the physical or instinctual. Thoreau's concept of nature and of the balance between the polarities is rooted in the Romantic attitudes toward nature expressed by writers like Goethe and Wordsworth. As James MacIntosh points out [in Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist: His Shifting Stance Toward Nature, 1974], Thoreau shares with these writers a "powerful wish to love nature and even to merge with it, with a consciousness, sometimes explicit, sometimes concealed, of separation." MacIntosh notes that Thoreau shares the Romantics' secret fear of the destructiveness of nature—the natural cycle of growth, decay, death, and rebirth—and that he is wary both of the existence of nature within himself and of his realization that nature can sometimes exist as power or chaos rather than as life or growth. For Goe-the, Wordsworth, and Thoreau, repeated experience is a "necessary way to enlightenment and truth." They are attracted by the "world of generation that brings pleasure and peace to the men of restless mind because it is both ordered and alive."

Muir shares with the Romantics an ability to express ecstasy in the presence of the natural sublime. Like Thoreau, he was influenced by both Wordsworth and Emerson. Harold P. Simonson suggests in "The Tempered Romanticism of John Muir" [Western American Literature 13, No. 3 (1978)] that the author tried in his work to reconcile the conflicting ideas that pertained, on the one hand, "to nature that conforms to the mind's eye and projects the drama of one's developing self; and, on the other hand, to nature as divine emanation, as revelation, as topological figure presupposing a distinctly separate and sovereign God." Simonson comments that Muir attempted to verify nature's higher laws, as did Thoreau, and found his epiphany in nature. Although Muir has less fear of the destructiveness of nature than Thoreau, he is nevertheless aware of its darker side. Simonson concludes that, despite Muir's affirmations about the flow and unity of nature's laws, Muir retained a dualized Christian cosmology, in which the soul is a divine spark known in a rapt state of wildness, and body was the bondage of society and morality, symbolized by life in the lowlands.

Mathews's sense of balance is rooted not only in the literary traditions represented by Thoreau and Muir but in the oral traditions of the Osage. Like Thoreau and Muir, he too deals with issues of duality—between the primal and the ornamental (a term he takes from Thoreau) or intellectually creative. Strongly influencing his thought, however, are the Osage principles of Chesho (sky, passivity, peace) and Hunkah (earth, action, war), which one must learn to balance. However, Mathews seems far less fearful of the dark side of nature than do Thoreau and Muir. In the chapter "The Single Moon By Himself" (January), Mathews comments on the constant battle to keep the balance:

The peace of my ridge is not a peace but a series of range-line skirmishes and constant struggle for survival. The balance is kept by bluff and a respect for that power which backs it up, and it utilizes and protects an area large enough and fruitful enough to sustain that power. The laws of the earth for survival are laid down, and man is not far enough away from the earth to supersede them with those of his own creation; he can only go back to the earth to ascertain where he has diverged from the natural processes.

Thoreau and Muir lament that America destroys its soul and the land in its quest for material and industrial wealth. While recognizing these dangers, Mathews is also deeply concerned about the possible extinction both of Osage culture as a result of white pressure and of the free world as a result of World War II. Writing in 1942, when the survival of freedom in the United States and Europe was very much in doubt, Mathews concludes that the human race cannot have lasting peace, even though organized warfare seems to be human-created and therefore may be human-controlled: "Forced peace, which is the only kind of peace man can conceive of now in his present stage of development, cannot last any longer than the powers that impose it."

All three authors want to merge with and yet remain separate from nature. The differences between the philosophical positions of Thoreau and Mathews are exemplified in their attitudes toward hunting. In the chapter on "Higher Laws" in Walden, Thoreau stresses that hunting and fishing are usually a young man's introduction to nature. If he has the seeds of a better life in him, a man "distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fishpole behind" as did Thoreau himself. Meat eating, Thoreau feels, is a throwback to savage cannibalism—a reminder of a primitiveness that man must overcome. Muir treats the subject indirectly, through his description of the hunting techniques of David Brown, a gold miner and renowned bear hunter. Mathews, on the other hand, regards hunting as a form of ornamental play, a reminder of man's struggle for survival. The instinct to hunt remains strong in Mathews despite his progression to a sense of community with humanity and its renewal in nature. In the chapter "Deer-Breeding Moon" (October), Mathews describes the revitalizing power of a bear hunt:

Somewhere ahead of that excited chorusing was a great black beast whose ancestors far back in time once hunted man, and man has a racial memory of having been the delicate, thin-skinned hunted instead of the hunter, which adds zest to bear hunting; the racial memory of the scratching and sniffing at his cave barrier is still deep in man's soul.

Thoreau, Muir, and Mathews use the cycles of nature as a framework for describing their own cycles of maturation and renewal, recalled for the benefit of the reader. All three authors emphasize, as did Wordsworth before them, that humanity must progress from physical to spiritual perceptions of nature but that close observation of the physical is a necessary stage to reaching the spiritual. Early in Talking to the Moon, Mathews stresses that, although humankind has the same natural urges as other species, he goes farther by acknowledging the progression of life through his dream of God. Mathews's attempts to protect his fowls from predators made him part of the life struggle and of the balance of the ridge: "Thus, I achieved a greater harmony with my environment and found that there is no place for dreams in natural progression, and it seems to me that I realized for the first time that with responsibility come enemies."

As the time and the seasons come and go, Mathews, like the other inhabitants of the ridges and prairies, is changed. Although he no longer wants to battle the natural elements, he becomes restless because just living and filling up his days are not enough: "First, I had to have responsibility and disturb the balance of the blackjacks: then, after a few years, I extended my activities beyond the ridges." Unlike Thoreau, he did not move away from his retreat, but instead he entered the world of social service by becoming a member of the Osage tribal business committee and a member of the Oklahoma Board of Education.

In explaining why he left Walden Pond, Thoreau says that "perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route and make a beaten track for ourselves." Urging his readers to be a "Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you," Thoreau wants them to open new channels, "not of trade, but of thought." Thoreau yearns for truth rather than for love, money, or fame. For Muir, the exploration of the Sierra Nevada is the first excursion into a sublime land, which ends only because the coming fall and winter necessitate his bringing the sheep back down from the mountains, not because he was psychologically ready to leave unspoiled nature. He remained in the Sierra for ten years.

Like Thoreau, Mathews matures sufficiently to end his isolation. He had begun to reenter the world of social responsibility by becoming a member of the Osage tribal council and running, unsuccessfully, for the school board. His decision to conclude his retreat is dramatized in his vain attempt to enlist in active service during World War II, described in the last chapter, "The Light-of-the-Day-Returns or Coyote-Breeding Moon" (February). Turned down, Mathews was forced to recognize that he had indeed moved from the active Hunkah world to the inactive Chesho world. His "Chesho thoughts have the same roots as his Hunkah thoughts and the same roots as the Hunkah actions in all species, even though inspired by the Force as an urge to immortality." Not satisfied to feel and enjoy the flood of emotion that living inspires and expresses in action, he now wants to express the subtleties of world symbols.

In his conclusion, Mathews seems to take up the challenge offered by Thoreau to seek out new worlds of thought, which he will express in words, so that people will not only know that a great ego passed that way but that Mathews "heard the wood thrush at twilight—the voice disembodied in the dripping woods—that I have heard the coyote talk to the moon and watched the geese against a cold autumn sunset." By writing Talking to the Moon, Mathews recaptures the experience of renewal in nature earlier described by Thoreau in Walden and Muir in My First Summer in the Sierra. He also immortalizes in poetic prose the traditions of his beloved Osage, who achieved a harmony with nature that the three authors sought and that humankind must seek if we are to survive.