Heart Mountain and the Camp Beneath It
Near Cody, Wyoming
Northeast of Cody rises Heart Mountain, and at its foot lies one of the hardest chapters in American history. In nineteen forty two, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States government forcibly removed people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, most of them American citizens, and confined them in remote camps. One of those camps sat here on the plain between Cody and Powell.
Construction of some six hundred and fifty barracks and the guard towers around them began in June of nineteen forty two, and the first inmates arrived in August, shipped in by train. Over three years the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center held nearly fourteen thousand Japanese Americans, with a peak population of ten thousand seven hundred and sixty seven. For a time that made it the third largest community in all of Wyoming.
Families lived in tar paper barracks through brutal winters, behind barbed wire, guarded by soldiers. The camp closed in November of nineteen forty five. Today an interpretive center preserves the site and tells the story, so that a mountain that watched over an injustice can also help the country remember it.
