Heart Mountain: The Wyoming Camp Where Nearly 14,000 Japanese Americans Were Held

Between August 1942 and November 1945, the United States government imprisoned nearly 14,000 people of Japanese ancestry at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, between Cody and Powell. Most of them 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 for the roughly 120,000 people removed from the West Coast, and the fourth-largest. At its peak it was unofficially the third-largest community in Wyoming. 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, and nine guard towers ringed the residential area.

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 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 military areas “from which any or all persons may be excluded.” The Western Defense Command under Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt used it to order all persons of Japanese ancestry removed from most of the West Coast.

Approximately 120,000 people were affected. Most were American citizens by birth (Nisei). The rest were Issei, first-generation immigrants whom U.S. law barred from becoming naturalized citizens.

Removal began in March 1942. People were given a few days or a couple of weeks to dispose of homes, businesses, possessions, livestock, and farms, and many Issei had their bank accounts frozen. Most accepted whatever offers they could get.

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 46,000 acres of Bureau of Reclamation land between Cody and Powell, part of the unfinished Heart Mountain irrigation project. About 740 acres of it were set aside to house the incarcerees; most of the rest was farmed.

Around 2,000 civilian laborers, recruited with overtime pay, built it under the Army Corps of Engineers. By August 1942 they had put up 468 barracks and 39 halls and utility buildings, and the first incarcerees arrived that month, many into buildings so hastily built that doors and windows would not close. The peak population of 10,767 was reached on January 1, 1943, and nearly 14,000 people passed through over the camp’s lifespan.

Physical layout: 468 barracks in 20 residential blocks, out of 30 blocks in all; the other ten held open space, gardens, and a cemetery. Communal latrines, communal mess halls, communal laundry buildings. A 150-bed hospital. An elementary school and a high school that held over 1,500 students in its first year. The Heart Mountain Sentinel, a camp newspaper, carried camp news and regulations.

Conditions: Wyoming winters at 4,700 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

On January 20, 1944, the U.S. government reinstated the draft for Japanese American men, including those in the camps. It applied to camp residents who, two years earlier, had been forced from their homes and held without due process. In all, 385 Heart Mountain residents served in the military, many in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Europe, one of the most decorated units in U.S. history.

But a group of Heart Mountain residents organized formal resistance to the draft. The Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, which formed around Kiyoshi Okamoto and included Frank Emi, argued that drafting incarcerated American citizens without restoring their constitutional rights was illegal. By June 1944, sixty-three of its young members had refused induction and been arrested.

They were tried in Cheyenne before Judge T. Blake Kennedy, in the largest mass trial in Wyoming’s history. All 63 were convicted and sentenced to three years in federal prison, and the appeals court in Denver affirmed. Twenty-two more who resisted after that trial were also convicted. The committee’s leaders, including Okamoto and Emi, were tried separately for conspiracy and sentenced to four years (two years for those judged less culpable).

In 1945 the federal appeals court in Denver overturned the leaders’ conspiracy convictions over an error in the jury instructions, and prosecutors chose not to retry them. In December 1947 President Truman pardoned the convicted draft resisters from Heart Mountain and the other camps. The National Park Service calls it the largest single draft resistance movement in American history, and 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. The last incarcerees left Heart Mountain on 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. Farmers homesteaded the former camp land and bid for the buildings and equipment at auction; some barracks are still in use on Park County properties. The former incarcerees could not homestead: a 1943 Wyoming alien land law kept them out, and it was not repealed until 2001.

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 Wyoming Foundation was formed in 1996 and secured National Historic Landmark status for the site. The interpretive center opened in 2011, the same year as the first annual Heart Mountain Pilgrimage.

What to see at Heart Mountain today

The Heart Mountain interpretive center sits off US-14A between Cody and Powell. It is open daily from mid-May to mid-October and on a reduced Wednesday-to-Saturday or Thursday-to-Saturday schedule through the winter. Admission is $14 for adults, $12 for seniors and students, $10 for ages 10 to 17, and free under 10. 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 385 Heart Mountain residents who served in the military.
• The reparations process and the long arc of recognition.

Most of the camp’s dead were cremated. About 27 were buried there, mostly elderly people with no known relatives and infants, and seven of those graves were later moved to Crown Hill Cemetery in Powell.

Outside the interpretive center, a 1,000-foot walking tour takes in the remaining camp structures, including the high school, the hospital complex, and the barracks area. The hospital’s brick smokestack, visible from the road, is the most recognizable surviving element of the camp.

The site hosts an annual pilgrimage and oral history programs. Allow two to three hours for a basic visit.

Heart Mountain sits in exposed high-plains country between Cody and Powell. The interpretive center is indoor, but the walking tour crosses open ground 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, a quarter hour away, was Buffalo Bill’s town and is built around Western tourism. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West fills five museums with the West’s story. 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 about a 15-minute drive from 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
• Wyoming hot springs you can actually soak in: fees, seasons, access

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.