Its location was selected for its proximity to nowhere.
August 11, 1942: The Heart Mountain War Relocation Center officially opened in northwestern Wyoming, receiving its first trainloads of Japanese Americans from the temporary assembly centers in Pomona, Santa Anita, and Portland the following day.
The location wasn’t an accident. Originally part of the ancestral homeland of the Crow people, the site had been managed by the federal Bureau of Reclamation as part of the Shoshone Irrigation Project. It was remote from the nearest towns, yet had fresh water and a railroad spur where thousands of people, along with food and supplies, could be unloaded with remarkable efficiency. Isolation wasn’t an obstacle. It was the plan.
Construction began that June. In only a few months, workers erected 650 military-style barracks, guard towers, and miles of barbed wire. By the time the first families arrived, a city had emerged from the Wyoming sagebrush. Over the next three years, nearly 14,000 Japanese Americans would pass through Heart Mountain. At its peak, more than 10,700 people lived there, making it the third-largest town in Wyoming.
Yet despite the fences and guard towers, Heart Mountain became far more than a prison. It became a community.
A Community Behind Barbed Wire
Residents worked to build a sense of normalcy where none should have existed. Schools opened. Churches held services. Newspapers were published. Gardens were planted. Children grew up behind the wire. Babies were born. Teenagers fell in love. Weddings were celebrated. Funerals were held.
The camp also reflected the inequalities baked into the system running it. Caucasian nurses at the camp hospital earned roughly $150 a month. Japanese American physicians, responsible for the care of thousands of patients, earned $19.
Even so, the community built itself with remarkable resilience, on both fronts.
Just Do It
Athletics became one of the community’s greatest sources of pride. Heart Mountain High School educated roughly 1,500 students in its first year and fielded football, basketball, baseball, and track teams.
The Heart Mountain Eagles competed against neighboring Wyoming high schools and went undefeated during its first year, proof that even behind barbed wire, teenagers still wanted what teenagers everywhere want.
Baseball flourished across the camp. In September 1944, legendary baseball pioneer Kenichi Zenimura led his Gila River team on a 1,170-mile trip from Arizona to play a thirteen-game series against the Heart Mountain All-Stars, one of the few times incarcerated Japanese Americans were allowed to travel between camps at all.
Go For Broke
Military service became a defining chapter. A total of 649 men from Heart Mountain volunteered or were drafted, many serving with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, others with the Military Intelligence Service, using their Japanese language skills to shorten the war and save Allied lives.
Among them were Joe Hayashi and James Kazuo Okubo, both posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. A third recipient, Yukio Okutsu, also had family incarcerated at Heart Mountain, making it home to more Medal of Honor recipients than almost any other WRA camp.
Near the camp’s entrance, residents erected an Honor Roll listing the names of those serving overseas, a reminder that while their families remained imprisoned, hundreds of their sons were risking their lives for the nation that had incarcerated them.
Two Paths, Same Belief
In 1944, the government reinstated the draft for Japanese American men, many of them still behind barbed wire. Some accepted induction, believing service was the clearest way to prove their loyalty. Others asked a harder question: how could the government draft citizens while denying them the constitutional rights those same soldiers were meant to defend?
Led by Frank Emi, the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee organized the largest movement of Japanese American draft resisters of the war. Members argued they would serve willingly once their rights were restored. Many were prosecuted and imprisoned instead.
Heart Mountain remains unique for producing both some of the war’s most decorated Japanese American soldiers and its largest organized draft resistance movement. Both groups believed they were serving the country. They simply chose different paths to get there.
Friendship Across the Fence
Norman Mineta arrived at Heart Mountain as a ten-year-old prisoner. Alan Simpson lived nearby, in Cody. The two met as Boy Scouts and stayed friends for more than seventy years, one on each side of the fence, refusing to let that difference define them.
Decades later, they helped build the bipartisan coalition behind the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the law that formally apologized for the incarceration.
On the surface, they couldn’t have been more different. Race. Party. Even height. And yet, they stood shoulder to shoulder when it mattered most.
They spent the rest of their lives working to preserve Heart Mountain’s history together, and the Mineta-Simpson Institute continues that work today.
The Ones Who Kept the Record
An extraordinary community of artists and writers preserved Heart Mountain’s history long after its buildings came down.
Estelle Ishigo sketched daily life, work that later became her memoir, Lone Heart Mountain. Photographer Bill Manbo and the camp’s photography club captured rare images of ordinary days inside the wire. Bill Hosokawa chronicled it all as editor of the Heart Mountain Sentinel. Young artist Stanley Hayami filled journals with drawings and reflections before volunteering for the 442nd, where he was killed in combat in France.
Among the camp’s youngest residents was S. Neil Fujita, who went on to become one of America’s most influential graphic designers, creating the poster for The Godfather and the album cover for Dave Brubeck’s Time Out.
Life After the Fences
Freedom didn’t erase what had been lost. Many former incarcerees returned to find their homes, farms, and savings gone, or communities that no longer welcomed them back. Those who hoped to stay in Wyoming ran into another wall: a state alien land law that kept many Issei from buying the farmland they’d spent years helping cultivate.
The last train carrying former inmates left Heart Mountain on November 10, 1945. The barracks gradually disappeared. The people did not.
Since 1996, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation has worked to preserve what remains of the site and tell its story through the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center. Annual pilgrimages still bring former incarcerees, their descendants, and visitors together, not just to remember the injustice, but the resilience of the people who lived through it.