Ontario, Oregon: The Town That Said Yes

In the spring of nineteen forty-two, after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order Nine Thousand and Sixty-Six forcing Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast into internment camps, most of the communities they were relocated to did not want them. Ontario, Oregon, population about thirty-six hundred, was different.

Mayor Elmo Smith, who also published the local newspaper, made a decision that cost him politically and defined the town for generations. He wrote publicly that if Japanese Americans were considered a security risk on the coast, then Ontario would take them in and put them to work, and he used the phrase downright cowardly to describe any other response. He lobbied the War Relocation Authority to route internees to his city. He helped connect arriving families with farm labor and housing. A real-estate agent found them land to rent. The Chevrolet dealer hired several as mechanics. By the end of the war, the Malheur County Japanese American population had grown from under two hundred to fifteen hundred people.

Ontario already had layers of immigrant culture from its agricultural economy, including Basque sheepherders who had come to the region in the late eighteen hundreds and established a community that still maintains its own social club. The Four Rivers Cultural Center, opened in the nineteen nineties, tells the story of the Northern Paiute people who originally inhabited the region, alongside the later arrivals: Basque, Hispanic, Japanese American, and Euro-American communities who transformed the Snake River plain into productive farmland.

Ontario sits at the point where the Snake River crosses the Oregon-Idaho border, the same river that Oregon Trail emigrants forded at Farewell Bend a few miles to the north. The landscape is high desert: alkaline flats, irrigated fields of sugar beets and onions, the Snake winding through a canyon that would look barren without water and looks abundant with it. The town's wartime story sits in that same landscape, a small civic act in a remote place that carried a moral weight far out of proportion to its geography.