Lolo Hot Springs

"Hot Springs at Source of Lou Lou Fork"
John Mix Stanley
Lithograph from Reports of Explorations and Surveys, to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economical Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean (1855-1861),
Vol. 12, Plate 58.

Loo-loo?

he "Lou Lou Fork" is the stream Lewis and Clark called "Travelers Rest" creek because it flowed past the ancient Indian campsite the American explorers dubbed "Travelers' Rest." It is now called Lolo Creek. The Indian road that the expedition followed among the peaks of the Bitterroot Mountains is now known officially as the Nez Perce (Nee-me-poo) National Historic Trail, and unofficially as the Lolo Trail.

Several explanations have been given for the source and meaning of the name Lolo. Probably the only one that isn't preposterous is this: According to the early fur trader, surveyor, and explorer David Thompson, a free trapper named Laurence was working the streams of today's Western Montana as early as the spring of 1810. By about 1850 Laurence and his Nez Perce Indian wife were living in a cabin in Grave Creek canyon, about halfway between the Bitterroot Divide and Lewis and Clark's Travelers' Rest campsite.

Laurence probably was part French, and if he was, then his name would have been pronounced lo-RAWHNss, with the French uvular r. Indians, unable to imitate the sound, nicknamed him "Lo Lo," dropping the hard part.

Other authorities have pointed out that in Chinook trade jargon the expression "Ló-lo" means to carry, or load, which certainly makes it an apt euphemism for the long and tortuous road.

The first writer to put the name on a map may have spelled it with phonetic precision, just the way he heard it spoken, Lou Lou, pronounced slowly and deliberately, as he requested--LOH-oo LOH-oo, not "Loo Loo." It is, however, just as easily heard as Lo Lo, which is the way Lieutenant John Mullan spelled it on a map of his own in 1860. Sometime since then the space began to seem superfluous, but the name still sounds like Lolo.

Local folklore has it that Lo Lo was killed by a grizzly bear, and interred near his canyon home along Grave Creek.

Lolo Hot Springs is still known far and wide for its comforting warmth to road-weary travelers, as it has been for thousands of years.

Read-Read about Lo-Lo

Sister M. Alfreda Elsensohn, O.S.B., Pioneer Days in Idaho County (2 vols., Cottonwood, Idaho: The Idaho Corporation of Benedictine Sisters, 1971), 2:392-96.

George Gibbs, A Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, or Trade Language of Oregon, Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, No. 161 (March 1863).

Lieutenant Mullan's reference will be found in Report on the Construction of a Military Road from Fort Walla-Walla to Fort Benton (reprint, with introduction and notes by Kimberly Rice Brown; Fairfield, Washington: Ye Galleon Press, 1994), 45.

Ralph S. Space, The Lolo Trail, 2nd ed. (Missoula, Montana: Historic Montana Publishing, 2001).

--Joseph Mussulman, rev. 02/04