Minidoka: Idaho's Wartime Incarceration Camp
Near Boise, Idaho
About a hundred and thirty miles east of Boise, in the Snake River Plain near Twin Falls, the federal government built a barbed-wire camp in the spring of nineteen forty-two and began filling it with American citizens.
The Minidoka War Relocation Center was one of ten such camps built across the American interior after President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order ninety sixty-six in February of nineteen forty-two. The order authorized the military to exclude persons of Japanese ancestry from designated zones of the West Coast without trial, due process, or individual hearing. Over one hundred twenty thousand people were removed from their homes, businesses, farms, and communities.
Minidoka held nearly nine thousand four hundred people at its peak, drawn primarily from Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. They were American citizens and legal residents, the majority of them born in this country. They arrived in southern Idaho in summer heat that reached a hundred and fifteen degrees and winters that dropped to thirty below zero. They lived in tarpaper barracks with no insulation, shared latrines and mess halls, and were watched by armed guards in towers.
What happened at Minidoka was not a wartime necessity, it was a racially motivated policy. Courts later acknowledged this. Congress apologized in nineteen eighty-eight and paid reparations of twenty thousand dollars to surviving internees.
One striking footnote: more than three hundred young men from Minidoka volunteered to serve in the United States Army while their families were imprisoned behind wire. This represented the highest enlistment rate from any relocation camp in the country. The men of the four hundred forty-second Regimental Combat Team, composed largely of Japanese American soldiers, became one of the most decorated units in American military history.
Note: the records of what happened at Minidoka are well-documented by survivor testimony, federal archives, and the Densho Encyclopedia. This track draws on those sources.
