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Colorado got a new mountain last month. Actually, the mountain in question has been around for a few million years, but it now has a name, thanks to an Oct. 4 ruling by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.
The 11,293-foot summit on the ridge between Starvation
and Silver creeks in Saguache County, about 25 miles
southwest of Salida, is now Mt. KIA/MIA to honor warriors
who were either killed in action
(thus the KIA) or
missing in action
(MIA).
This is the result of plenty of work by Bruce Salisbury of Aztec, N.M. He grew up in Durango, and joined the military in 1945 when he was only 15 years old -- he lied about his age. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1966, eventually settling at a small farm near Aztec.
Five years ago, he thought there ought to be a prominent mountain named to honor those who were KIA/MIA, like his cousin Irvin Salisbury, whose bomber went down over Iceland in 1944. His first impulse, after poring Colorado maps, was to rename one of Colorado's 33 Sheep Mountains.
(Some people climb all the 14ers. My friend and colleague Allen Best started to climb all the Sheep peaks, but managed only a dozen until health problems halted the quest.)
The Geographic Name Board was sympathetic to Salisbury's proposal, but local bodies, like county commissioners, generally opposed renaming any Sheep promontories -- after all, when you get used to calling something by one name, why change it, no matter how worthy the cause? In 1965, after the death of Great Britain's wartime prime minister, Leadville had to fight off an effort to change Mt. Massive into Mt. Churchill.
So Salisbury started looking for unnamed mountains, of which there seem to be an abundance in Saguache County; it's also the home of triple-divide Headwaters Hill, officially christened in 2001.
The Saguache County Commissioners supported KIA/MIA or
Kiamia or the like, but the U.S. Bureau of Land Management
pointed out a complication. Many summits in that area have
Ute names -- Antora, Ouray, Chipeta, Pahlone, Shavano --
and the BLM worried that Kiamia
would appear to be
garbled Ute, instead of an English acronym.
Enter Dr. Thomas Givon. He's a linguist who used to teach at the University of Oregon; in 1977 the Southern Ute Tribe hired him to produce a phonetic alphabet and compile the first dictionary of the language of the Nuche; before that, Ute was not a written language. When Givon retired, he moved to Ignacio, home of the tribal headquarters.
Presented with Kiamia, Givon made some inquiries and
concluded that Kiya-miya is meaningful in Ute,
if
you add vat,
the place-name suffix. It means
Place where people walk about while laughing,
and in
Ute culture, when warriors pass on, they go to a place of
peace and happiness -- a place where they might well walk
about while laughing.
In other words, from Kiya-miya-vat
to
Kiamia
or KIA/MIA
is as reasonable a
transliteration from Ute to English as going from
Sagma-gi-ci
to Saguache.
(Saguache
as
in the town and county, or Sawatch
as in the
mountain range, means something like blue-green
place
-- the Ute spectrum had the same term for blue
and green, so more precision is impossible. Note also that
Givon's Ute orthography used characters, like a g with a
circumflex and an i with a cedilla, that even modern
computerized typesetting systems have trouble
rendering.)
In the end, the English acronym was preferred, and all the federal agencies eventually got on board with Salisbury and Saguache County, and future maps will show a Mt. KIA/MIA in the Bonanza quadrangle.
This may mean many more visitors to the area, and to be honest, I'm not thrilled about that; upper Silver Creek and the Starvation Creek Trail are among my favorite places to avoid society on summer days when Martha and Bodie inform me that a long walk is in order. But then again, the KIA/MIAs sacrificed a lot more.
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