Social: We have the Amulonites in a place called Amulon, in a land called Amulon, with a leader called Amulon. We see once again the naming pattern of the Book of Mormon communities. The ruler gives his name to the city, and to the dependent lands.
This highlights the people of Alma as an unusual case, or perhaps one where we are simply not given all of the information. While Alma appears to be the de facto leader, the city and land are nevertheless Helam, clearly named for Helam, who was first baptized, and give the designation "one of the first" which we have interpreted as a social position rather than a reference to his baptismal order.
According to the general rule, Helam should be the political leader, and perhaps he was. Nevertheless, it is to Alma that the people come when there is a question. Whatever organizational scheme Alma used to create order among his people, he gave up the prestigious right of "first" to Helam, and allowed the land and city to be named for Helam.Indeed, it would be more technically correct to refer to these people as "Helamites" that the concocted "Almaites" that I have used.
Nevertheless, I will continue the Almaite designation, as it will more clearly denote these people to modern readers.
Geography: The Lamanite army had pursued the Limhites for 2 days before they gave up (Mosiah 22:16). This time for their travel, their finding of Amulon and his people, and the subsequent discovery of Alma's people can tell us more of the general geography of the land involved in these episodes.
First, we must understand the relative travel speeds of the various groups we are talking about. As indicated, Sorenson suggests that for a people traveling as Alma's and Limhi's group did a reasonable estimate of distance would be 22 miles per day. The Lamanite army should have been able to travel faster than this, since they did not have women, children, and animals to contend with.
The next important point is that each of these groups would have been heading some variation of north, away from Shemlon. Only the Lamanites would have wanted to be close to their homeland and stronghold. Thus we have multiple groups heading in the same general direction, away from Shemlon, and all three groups being in a reasonably close geographic area without any knowledge of each other (save the wandering Lamanites who find both the Amulonites and the Almaites.
To complicate things, we have the Almaites fleeing 8 days from the waters of Mormon (Mosiah 23:3), but the Lamanites had only followed after Limhi two days before turning back. How does all of this fit together?
First, we need to remember that they are all traveling in mountainous areas that are described as "wilderness." The wilderness is sufficiently dense that the tracks of a large number of people traveling with animals and their earthly possessions could be "lost." While we cannot be certain how this happened, the thick undergrowth of the area, and perhaps an afternoon or evening rain might be part of the explanation.
The rest of the explanation would appear to have to do with multiple valley systems. Once the Lamanites missed a critical pass in the mountains, they would have been unable to pick up the trail because the trail was in a different pass/valley system. While the Lamanites would have been going in a mostly northerly direction, they must have become confused with the unfamiliar territory and passes. Thus they decided to turn back.
This turning back is the next critical piece of information, for we really need to understand the degree to which the Lamanites might be reasonably lost. The modern women reading this might suppose that they simply wouldn't stop and ask for directions.The modern man might easily understand getting turned around in a new area.
What we should certainly understand, however, is that these people lived close to the land, and would not have the problem of some modern Americans in remembering in which directions the sun rises and sets. To put it plainly, while we may understand the Lamanites getting lost, we cannot imagine them directionally lost. They would still know north, south, east, and west. Now the question is, with such a directional founding, how did they get so lost as to find the Amulonites and Almaites?
Once again we must appeal to the logic of the situation. The Lamanites had been heading in a northerly direction, and made the decision to turn back. We may be certain that the only guaranteed direction in which they did not travel was north. However, in a series of mountains, valleys, and passes, they might have been required to travel east or west for some amount of time in order to find passage back south. It would be on these trips into the easterly or westerly directions that they would have come upon the Amulonites and Almaites.
How is it that the Lamanites have gone only two days north of Lehi-Nephi, and Alma's people had traveled perhaps at most a couple of days to the waters of Mormon, and then eight days to Helam? The answer must lie in the more western/eastern travel of Alma's people. They simply never traveled the most direct northerly route that Limhi took.
With the waters of Mormon in the more westerly parts of the land, and Helam east of the most direct line of travel to Zarahemla, we have sufficient explanation for the differences in timing. The mountainous nature of the area, with multiple valley systems, also provides precisely the geographic configuration to explain such wanderings and separations in a relatively small area.
Indeed, the topographical maps for the proposed area for Book of Mormon lands shows precisely such multiple east-west valleys among mountain ranges in this area north of the proposed waters of Mormon (see the map 9 in Sorenson, John L. An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon. FARMS 1985, p. 181).