almota

[Kelvin Saxton]

Hi Ros and All!

Now you're speaking of the territory where I was raised. There was once
a small but busy town at Almota, nothing left now but the giant grain
elevators and barge dock. Good fishing though!

I don't remember any history about the name but I do remember that Lewis
and Clark camped there on their way west (about this time of year), and
that there are three nearby village sites attributable to either the
Alpaweyma or Almitipu bands of the Nez Perce.

It's dry and hot. No wild strawberries grow there. Do you suppose Almota
is a varient and/or treatment of Almitipu? Sorry to say, I never learned
a lick of Nez Perce while living in Pullman. (Bad anthropologist...no
biscuit!)

Who knows? I'd never made the connection before (not learning CW till I
moved West).

hiyu masi!

~Kelvin


PS... Skimmed the Web after writing this note. A report entitled "Nez
Perce use of the Southeast Washington Sub-basin: Draft Report prepared
under contract for Nez Perce Tribe Department of Fisheries Resource
Management, Watershed Division, by Josiah Blackeagle Pinkham" (published
this year) notes that "...the Tucannon, Wawawai, Penewawa, Kahlotus,
Palouse, Alpowai, Pataha, Almota, Anatone Washtucna, Touchet, Walla
Walla and others are attempts to pronounce the Indigenous names for
these areas."





---
  Kelvin Saxton
  ksaxton at fastmail.fm

----- Original message -----
From: "Ros' Haruo" <lilandbr at HOTMAIL.COM>
To: CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 18:34:17 +0000
Subject: almota

On our recent Trailways excursion from Seattle via Spokane to Boise,
Paula
and I passed a junction in the Palouse where the main drag bore left and
the
smaller road that went straight on had a sign reading "Almota 20" (I
think
it was 20, anyway some number of miles). I had never heard of this town
but
immediately thought "Strawberries". Is some form of this current at GR?
(I've seen various spellings in the anglicizing books, almota, amoteh
etc.,
and I think somewhere I saw "lamoteh" (which is why I thought of the
place
just now in the context of "(l)appelah", "(la)p'ush" etc.

I can find no information on the town of Almota, Washington, if there be
such, but there is a Port of Almota on the Snake:

http://www.portwhitman.com/Almota.php?index=3

haluo = lilEnd

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