The History of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center

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Heart Mountain -- A Story Worth Remembering

On August 12, 1942, the Heart Mountain, Relocation Center in Park County, Wyoming opened its gates to Japanese Americans who had been forced from their West Coast homes by the Federal Government after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Before long, Heart Mountain would swell to Wyoming’s third largest city, housing nearly 11,000 citizen and alien internees in its tarpaper barracks and barbed-wire enclosures.

Today, a few haunting remnants of the camp remain – a couple of buildings and a towering chimney. For many, the site constitutes a kind of American sacred ground, a place where stories of government injustice and intense human resilience intertwine.

The Heart Mountain Relocation Center was built to the specifications of racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and failed political leadership. For decades before Pearl Harbor, nativist and anti-Asian groups along the West Coast had sought to rid the region of Japanese immigrants and their American – born children. These racial exclusionists were periodically joined by powerful economic interests resentful of the agricultural successes of Japanese farmers. The surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, gave these groups an opportunity to press their claims on a frightened public, a credulous press, and a military whose leadership believed that there was no such thing as a loyal Japanese American.

Within two months of Pearl Harbor, political and military leaders prevailed upon President Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 9066, which gave the Army carte blanche to uproot citizens and aliens alike from their homes – all on the pretext of “wartime necessity,” but in fact, on the basis of little more than their ancestry. The racial nature of the military orders was unmistakable: no comparable mass action was taken against German or Italian aliens or American citizens of German or Italian ancestry.

Between March and May of 1942, some 45,000 Japanese aliens and 75,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry gave up their homes, property, careers, and communities along the West Coast for indefinite and involuntary relocation.

They took with them only what they could carry.

The federal government at first sought sites for humane, open-gated resettlement communities in the Mountain States, but those states resisted. Under such “permissive” conditions, Wyoming Governor Nels Smith predicted there would be “Japs hanging from every pine tree” in the state. The federal government, therefore, agreed to the conditions that Smith and his fellow western governors demanded: incarceration in “concentration camps” with guard towers and barbed wire.

Conditions at Heart Mountain were harsh. Whole families were moved into unfurnished single-room quarters in barracks served by communal latrines. Privacy vanished. Communal meals in spartan mess halls – among many other factors – contributed to the disintegration of families. With only bare walls and tarpaper to protect them from the Wyoming wind, internees shivered in the winter and sweltered in the summer.

Conditions outside the camp were not much friendlier. Armed sentries patrolled the camp perimeter and peered in from guard towers. Some local farmers sought out internee labor for harvest work, and small numbers of local citizens reached out hands of welcome, but most residents of the nearby towns of Cody and Powell were apprehensive, if not hostile, toward their captive neighbors. In May of 1943, the two towns’ councils passed a joint resolution demanding that “the visiting of the Japanese in the Towns of Powell and Cody be held to an absolute minimum.” And this hostility was not confined to Park County; officials at the state level targeted Heart Mountain residents as well.

Nels Smith ran for reelection in 1942 on a public boast that he had “prevented Japanese evacuees from becoming [legal] residents,” and the Wyoming legislature passed a law in 1943 barring U.S. citizens at Heart Mountain from voting in Wyoming elections.

Yet somehow a culture of perseverance and genuine patriotism managed to flourish in these conditions of oppression. Japanese Americans created a remarkably vibrant community at Heart Mountain. Internees built a functioning system of democratic self-government. A highly professional internee newspaper, the Heart Mountain Sentinel, kept the community informed of both national and community events, and managed to achieve remarkable editorial independence from government administrators. Young Japanese Americans torn from their schools, their sports teams, and their clubs on the West Coast found ways to nourish their minds, their bodies and their interests in camp.

A health care system tended to the community’s needs despite severe limitations in personnel and equipment. Five hundred and fifty babies came into the world inside Heart Mountain’s barbed wire.

Internees sowed and harvested 1,000 acres and ran hog and chicken farms. They added over a mile to an irrigation canal that continues to water fields today.

And more than those at any other Japanese American camp, Heart Mountain’s residents robustly debated and lived the various meanings of loyal American citizenship. In 1943, 38 brave young men volunteered for the U. S. Army from behind Heart Mountain’s barbed wire. When the government reinstated the draft for interned Japanese Americans in 1944, many at Heart Mountain responded affirmatively and fought courageously in Italy, the Pacific and elsewhere.

A significant minority, however, viewed the draft orders as an illegitimate obligation imposed on citizens who had been unfairly deprived of their rights and liberty. These “resisters,” as they were known, mounted an organized, articulate and heartfelt protest movement, demanding the unconditional restoration of civil rights as a condition of military service. In the end, a total of 88 young men who refused the draft on these grounds served sentences in federal prison for their resistance.

Meanwhile, hundreds of other young men answered the call to service. In all, 800 internees from Heart Mountain joined the army, of whom 15 made the ultimate sacrifice for their nation and 52 were wounded. Two Heart Mountain internees received the Distinguished Service Cross and the Silver Star for bravery in the field of battle, as well as posthumous Medals of Honor.

On December 17, 1944, the U.S. War Department announced revocation of the West Coast exclusion order against Japanese Americans effective on January 2, 1945, and on November 10, 1945, the last internees left Heart Mountain to find homes and jobs and try to rebuild their lives. The camp’s buildings and equipment were auctioned off, and farmers moved into homesteads, benefiting from the cleared land and irrigation canal that the internees left behind.

Back home after the war, the former internees struggled to rejoin the path toward the American dream that their exclusion and incarceration had interrupted. Their resilience again served them well: hard work, sacrifice, and a passionate commitment to their country brought them opportunity and success. But the post-war accomplishments of the internees should not obscure the significance of what they both endured and accomplished at Heart Mountain from 1942 to 1945. The camp was a crucible for the most enduring challenges the American people face – challenges of freedom and order, of civil liberties and national security, of citizenship and exclusion, of race and suspicion, and especially of hope and resilience.

Today little remains to remind us of how the U.S. Constitution failed its citizens more than 60 years ago in the shadow of Heart Mountain. Yet those events, perhaps now more than ever, deserve to be remembered. The Heart Mountain story offers a window onto some of the most crucial themes in this nation’s history. It illuminates the dangers of unexamined fears and the destructive power of racial prejudice; it compels us to reflect on the many meanings of patriotism, loyalty and the defense of freedom; it illustrates the enduring importance of vigilance on behalf of basic civil and human rights; and it reminds us that the ideals of individual dignity and equality under law remain America’s defining contribution to the world.

The Heart Mountain, Wyoming Foundation is dedicated to assuring that the lessons of the World War II internment are captured and shared with future generations of Americans. Realizing our vision of a permanent and accessible interpretive center located at Heart Mountain is the next critical step toward fulfilling that mission.