Heart Mountain: The Wyoming Internment Camp Where 14,000 American Citizens Were Held

Between August 1942 and November 1945, the United States government imprisoned over 14,000 people of Japanese ancestry at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, fourteen miles northeast of Cody. Approximately 11,000 of the 14,000 were American citizens. They were not charged with any crime. They were not given individual hearings. They were not found disloyal. They were sent to Wyoming because they were of Japanese descent during a war with Japan, on the basis of an executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in February 1942 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944, formally repudiated by the Court in 2018).

Heart Mountain was one of ten War Relocation Authority camps holding approximately 120,000 people. It was the third-largest. At peak, it was the third-largest community in Wyoming, larger than Cheyenne or Sheridan. The camp operated for 39 months. The barracks were tar-paper-covered wood frames in winters that hit -30°F. The food was institutional. The barbed wire was real. The guard towers had machine guns aimed inward.

Most of the buildings are gone now. The site is preserved as a National Historic Landmark and operated by the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, which runs an interpretive center, maintains the honor roll cemetery, and conducts regular programming. For visitors to Wyoming, Heart Mountain is a non-optional stop. It sits in conversation with the Buffalo Bill mythology of the rest of the Cody region and complicates it in ways the visitor needs to take seriously.

This is what happened.

The legal background (1941-1942)

The Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, brought the United States into World War II and triggered immediate political pressure for action against Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Decades of anti-Japanese racism in California, Oregon, and Washington (codified in laws including the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement, the 1913 California Alien Land Law, and the 1924 Immigration Act) had built a constituency that wanted Japanese Americans removed from the coast.

On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the military to designate “exclusion zones” from which any persons could be excluded. The Western Defense Command under Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt designated the entire West Coast (California, western Oregon, western Washington, southern Arizona) as Exclusion Area No. 1. All persons of Japanese ancestry were ordered removed.

Approximately 120,000 people were affected. About 80,000 were American citizens by birth (Nisei). The remaining 40,000 were Issei, first-generation immigrants who had been legally barred from naturalizing under the 1924 Immigration Act and were therefore stateless under U.S. law.

Removal began in March 1942. People were given days, sometimes hours, to dispose of homes, businesses, possessions, livestock, and farms. Most accepted whatever offers they could get. Total losses to the Japanese American community in the West Coast economy were estimated at the time at over $400 million in 1942 dollars (over $7 billion in 2026 dollars).

People were initially held at temporary “assembly centers” (often converted racetracks and fairgrounds), then transported by rail to ten permanent camps. Heart Mountain in Wyoming was one of those ten.

The camp (1942-1945)

Construction at Heart Mountain began in June 1942 on a 740-acre site between Cody and Powell, on land owned by the Bureau of Reclamation. The site was selected for remoteness, the existing rail spur, and access to irrigation water for camp agriculture.

The camp was built in three months by a workforce of around 2,000 contractors and Heart Mountain incarcerees themselves who arrived in the early months. By August 1942 the first arrivals were already living in barracks under construction. By December 1942 the camp held over 10,000 people; the peak population of approximately 10,767 was reached in early 1943, with thousands more cycling through across the camp’s lifespan for a total of approximately 14,025 individuals incarcerated.

Physical layout: 468 barracks buildings in 30 residential blocks, each 20 feet by 120 feet, divided into six rooms. Communal latrines, communal mess halls, communal laundry buildings. A camp hospital (one of the larger health facilities in northern Wyoming during the war years). A camp school system serving over 2,500 K-12 students. The Heart Mountain Sentinel, a camp newspaper edited by incarcerees, ran for the duration of the camp’s existence.

Conditions: Wyoming winters at 4,500 feet altitude. The camp recorded -30°F at the worst nights. Tar-paper barracks with single-layer wood walls, gaps between boards, no insulation. Each room was issued one pot-belly coal stove. Food was institutional and the standard of nutrition was low; supplemental gardens cultivated by incarcerees on land outside the immediate camp footprint became a major food source.

Camp life: despite the conditions, the community organized substantially. Schools operated. Churches operated. Boy Scout troops, basketball leagues, traditional Japanese arts (calligraphy, ikebana, judo) all found expression in the camp. The Heart Mountain Sentinel newspaper covered both internal community news and external war news.

Resistance: the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee

In early 1944, the U.S. government began drafting Japanese American men from the camps into the U.S. military. The draft applied to camp residents who, two years earlier, had been forced from their homes and held without due process. Approximately 300 Heart Mountain residents complied with draft orders. Many served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Europe, the most-decorated unit of its size in U.S. military history.

But a group of Heart Mountain residents organized formal resistance to the draft. The Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, led by Frank Emi and others, argued that the draft of incarcerated American citizens (without restoration of their full constitutional rights) was illegal. Sixty-three Heart Mountain men refused induction on these grounds.

They were tried in federal court at Cheyenne in 1944. All 63 were convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to three years in federal prison. The leaders of the Fair Play Committee, including Frank Emi, were tried separately for conspiracy and sentenced to four years.

The convictions were later overturned (the conspiracy convictions in 1946; the draft-resistance convictions through later legal action and eventual presidential pardons). The Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee remains one of the most consequential acts of constitutional resistance in American history; the Fair Play Committee leaders are now honored at the Heart Mountain interpretive center and in scholarly literature on the internment.

Closing the camp (1945)

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Ex parte Endo (December 1944) found that the government could not continue to detain admittedly loyal American citizens. By early 1945 the War Relocation Authority began closing the camps. Heart Mountain officially closed November 10, 1945, three months after Japan’s surrender.

Most Heart Mountain residents had to find their way back to West Coast communities that had taken their property and businesses years earlier and were not eager to see them return. Many never recovered the assets they had lost in 1942. Many never returned to the West Coast at all and instead resettled in Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, or other interior cities.

The camp infrastructure was dismantled. Some buildings were sold for scrap or moved to area farms; a handful are still in use today on Park County properties. The 740-acre camp site was reverted to Bureau of Reclamation control and has been mostly empty since.

Reparations and recognition (1980-2018)

The 1980 Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, established by Congress, conducted public hearings and concluded in its 1983 report Personal Justice Denied that the internment was the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership,” not military necessity.

The 1988 Civil Liberties Act formally apologized to surviving incarcerees, acknowledged the violation of constitutional rights, and authorized $20,000 reparations payments to each surviving incarceree (approximately 82,000 individuals received payments totaling $1.6 billion).

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court formally repudiated Korematsu v. United States (the 1944 case that had upheld the constitutionality of the internment) in Trump v. Hawaii. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Korematsu “was gravely wrong the day it was decided” and was “overruled in the court of history.”

The Heart Mountain site itself was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2007. The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation was formed in 1996 by surviving incarcerees and their descendants; the interpretive center opened in 2011.

What to see at Heart Mountain today

The Heart Mountain interpretive center is open seasonally (typically May through October, with limited winter hours). The exhibits are small in scale, large in substance. They cover:

• The legal and political background of Executive Order 9066.
• The lived experience of camp life, illustrated through personal accounts, photographs, and artifacts donated by former incarcerees and their families.
• The Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee and the constitutional resistance movement.
• The 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the Heart Mountain veterans who served.
• The reparations process and the long arc of recognition.

The honor roll cemetery on the grounds remembers the camp residents who died during incarceration, including infants born in the camp.

Outside the interpretive center, several original camp structures remain in place or have been relocated back to the site, including the camp hospital chimney (a single brick structure visible from the road, the most recognizable surviving element of the camp).

The site sponsors annual pilgrimages, oral history programs, and academic scholarship. For visitors who want to spend more than the 2-3 hours required for a basic visit, the Foundation publishes a self-guided driving tour that connects multiple historical points across the broader camp footprint.

Heart Mountain sits in exposed high-plains country between Cody and Powell. The interpretive center is indoor, but the driving tour runs across open agricultural land with no shade. An insulated water bottle matters more than it seems on a hot Wyoming July afternoon; a wool layer or work gloves for the spring and fall shoulder season when the wind picks up from the Bighorn Basin.

Why visit

Heart Mountain sits in deliberate conversation with the heroic Western mythology of the surrounding region. Cody, 14 miles southwest, was Buffalo Bill’s town and is built around Western tourism. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West holds the world’s most significant collection of Western Americana. The Cody Stampede every July celebrates rodeo and frontier culture.

Heart Mountain is the other Wyoming, the part the tourism mythology mostly does not address. It is a 740-acre reminder that the same Wyoming country that hosted the Bozeman Trail Lakota victories, the Johnson County War, and the gold-rush mythologies also hosted, eighty years ago, one of the largest acts of state-sponsored civil rights violation in U.S. history. The two sit on the same map. The interpretive center exists in part to make sure visitors driving through Park County have the option of holding both at once.

The Heart Mountain Foundation does not frame the visit as obligation; they frame it as invitation. Visitors who accept the invitation walk away with a meaningfully more complete understanding of twentieth-century America than they came in with.

For anyone visiting Cody or Yellowstone via the East Entrance, Heart Mountain is a 30-minute drive from downtown Cody and a 2-3 hour visit. There is no good reason to skip it.

Related reading on this site

• Cody, Wyoming: a local’s guide
• Buffalo Bill Cody: the man who sold the West to the world
• The Bozeman Trail and the Fetterman Fight
• The Johnson County War: how Wyoming’s cattle barons lost the range
• Tom Horn: stock detective, hanged in Cheyenne 1903
• Chief Washakie: the Eastern Shoshone leader who shaped Wyoming
• 9 Wyoming hot springs you can actually soak in

Further reading

• Personal Justice Denied (Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, 1983). The official government report. Available free online.
• Mike Mackey, A Documentary History of the Heart Mountain Japanese American Relocation Center (Western History Publications, 2000).
• Eric L. Muller, Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II (University of Chicago Press, 2001). The definitive treatment of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee.
• Densho Digital Repository (densho.org). Comprehensive archive of internment-era documents and oral histories.
• Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation publications.