Remembering Heart Mountain
Approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly incarcerated during World War II. In this History Along the Great American Rail-Trail® article, we explore what life was like for the people living at Wyoming’s Heart Mountain WWII Japanese American Confinement Site in 1942 through the memories of a surviving incarceree, Sam Mihara.
In April 1942, Sam Mihara was 9 years old and growing up in San Francisco, when a flyer went up on telephone poles and shop windows around his Japantown neighborhood that would change his life forever. “Instructions to all persons of Japanese Ancestry,” the flyer read in bold, blocky letters, going on to detail the “evacuation” process that would soon unfold for the tens of thousands of Japanese Americans who had opened businesses, cultivated farms and made their homes in the Bay Area.
They had one week to prepare, the flyer explained, to sell or give away their belongings—their shops, houses, cars, boats, refrigerators, pianos and pets. Each member of each family would be allowed to carry just one suitcase full of approved items like linens, toiletries and clothing.
Back at the family’s three-story Victorian home, Mihara’s parents agonized about leaving. While his father, the editor of a popular bilingual newspaper, raced to find someone who might care for the home for however long the family would be gone, his mother packed a suitcase for each of her two boys. But since no details had been provided about where they were going, she wrestled with indecision: Would her sons need snow boots or short-sleeved shirts?
On April 7, 1942, the Miharas reported to the Civil Control Station in downtown San Francisco and boarded the buses that would take them to the trains that would take them away from everything the Mihara children had ever known. “The train was surrounded by soldiers carrying weapons,” Mihara remembers 83 years later, “standing shoulder to shoulder to make sure none of us escaped the train.”
For three days and three nights, the family sat on hard benches as the train crawled through the interior West, stopping to let freight and passenger trains go by. Finally, the cars screeched to a halt in a rugged Wyoming valley filled with low-slung, tar-paper barracks surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers. Inside one of the barracks, the Miharas found the 20-by-20-foot room where they would live for the next three years. It had no bathroom, no running water and no insulation. Sam shivered in his California clothes.
“It was a very, very difficult time,” he said.
Sam and his family were among the 15,000 incarcerees who were held against their will at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center (today more accurately known as the Heart Mountain Confinement Site) in Powell, Wyoming, and numbered among the 120,000 Japanese Americans—the majority of them U.S. citizens—who were imprisoned in 10 prison camps spread across the West during World War II.
Today, at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, visitors can learn about what life was like for incarcerees like the Miharas, what led to this shameful chapter in America’s history, and what can be done to prevent it from happening again.
This article was originally published in the Fall 2025 issue of Rails to Trails magazine and has been reposted here in an edited format. Subscribe to read more articles about remarkable trails while also supporting our work.
This Story Starts With Hate
The first Japanese immigrants to the United States, known as Issei, or “first generation,” arrived in the second half of the 19th century, finding jobs in mines and on farms, in factories and on the railroad. They worked hard to buy homes and land, to open their own stores and start their own farms. They married and had children, “Nisei,” or second generation.
But not everyone welcomed these new Americans. Some white people felt that Asian immigrants would take their jobs; some farmers resented the competition they now faced from highly skilled Japanese farmers.
During the early 20th century, Congress passed a series of restrictive laws prohibiting Japanese people from owning land and becoming naturalized citizens. Eventually, the Immigration Act of 1924 essentially banned all Japanese immigration for the next three decades.
“This story starts with hate,” said Mihara. “That hate culminated in 1942 after the Pearl Harbor attack.”
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawai’i, in December 1941, anti-Japanese sentiment hit a fever pitch, as fear and suspicion swirled that Issei and Nisei posed a threat to national security. In response, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, which authorized the military to designate areas from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” The order made no mention of race, but its target was clear. EO 9066 would result in the mass incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry across the country—two-thirds of them American citizens.
There were no charges of treason or disloyalty against any of these citizens, nor was there a way for them to appeal their incarceration. Instead, like the Miharas, they were herded into far-flung and isolated camps like Rohwer in Arkansas, Manzanar in California and Heart Mountain in Wyoming.
Resilience and Resistance
In the fall of 1942, just like children all over the country, the children of Heart Mountain started school. Except their school was in a ram shackle barrack with few books, few supplies and a plank of plywood painted black for a chalkboard. But the material conditions weren’t the only factor that hampered education at the camp.
“The problem was the teaching staff,” said Mihara. “Among the prisoner ranks, there were very few certified teachers.”
The children were grateful to have their Boy and Girl Scout programs, which had been a big part of Nisei life prior to the war. Heart Mountain’s remote setting provided for myriad outdoor activities like camping, hiking and swimming, as well as jamborees with troops in nearby Cody and Powell.
Nisei were also permitted to have jobs, working in the mess hall or for the camp’s police and fire departments and making up to $19 a month.
“The government tried to create conditions that were somewhat normal,” Mihara explained. But for Issei, normalcy was elusive.
“A lot of the people incarcerated lost everything; they lost businesses and farms,” said Ray Locker, director of communications and strategy for the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, which owns and operates the interpretive center. Being stripped of their homes, careers and freedom “wreaked havoc on their self-esteem and mental health.”
Still, Issei persevered. They launched a newspaper—the Heart Mountain Sentinel—which was distributed to 6,000 camp households every Saturday. They also cleared thousands of acres of sagebrush to create the most successful agricultural program of all the prison camps, despite Wyoming’s unforgiving climate, growing crops that had never been successfully cultivated in the region.
More than 800 incarcerees from Heart Mountain served in the military, becoming members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit in U.S. military history relative to its size and length of service. Fifteen men from the Wyoming prison camp were killed in combat, and two received the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award.
Heart Mountain was also the site of the largest single draft resistance movement in United States history, when more than 80 incarcerees—many of whom had once been deemed “unfit for military service” by the U.S. government based on their Japanese heritage—declined to report for their military induction physicals. Almost all the men were tried for violation of the Selective Service Act and sent to prison.
Connecting the Great American Rail-Trail in Powell, Wyoming
Currently, the Heart Mountain WWII Japanese American Confinement Site is located in a 52-mile gap of the Great American Rail-Trail® between Cody and Greybull, Wyoming. In 2024, Rails to Trails Conservancy collaborated with the Powell Economic Partnership (PEP) to host a petition in support of a connector through the small city of Powell, one that would contribute to the nationwide trail while providing local residents with the nearby outdoor recreation they lack.
“When we’ve done outreach and surveys, what the community says they want is more access,” said Rebekah Burns, PEP’s executive director. “They want somewhere they can take their grandchildren, run after work or bike on a safe pathway.”
RTC and PEP’s petition quickly reached its goal of 1,000 signatures, and Burns said the group is now working with the county to begin fundraising and developing plans for the project.
An Uncertain Return and Long Reconciliation
On Dec. 17, 1944, the U.S. government announced mass exclusion was no longer necessary and would end the following month. Incarcerees would be given $25 and a train ticket to anywhere in the country. But for some, release was not a cause for celebration. Many no longer had a home or a job to return to; others worried about their safety back on the West Coast.
“Some people didn’t want to go back because they were afraid of what would happen to them,” said Locker. Prejudice against the Japanese had continued to grow during the war. “There was persistent racism. People’s houses were set on fire.”
Fearing racial violence in San Francisco, Mihara and his family first left Heart Mountain for Salt Lake City, where his father struggled to open a new business. Eventually, six years after Pearl Harbor, the Miharas returned home to California and “tried to re-create the life we used to have,” said Mihara, who went on to become a rocket scientist at Boeing.
Today, the prison camp where the family spent three difficult years is open for those who want to learn more about this tragic era in American history. On the grounds of the Heart Mountain WWII Japanese American Confinement Site, recently named a Smithsonian affiliate, visitors can walk through an original root cellar, a barrack and the hospital building where 556 babies were born. An interpretive center features photographs, arti facts, oral histories and interactive exhibits that tell the story of Heart Mountain through the eyes of those Japanese and Japanese Americans who were imprisoned there.
In the years since WWII, the U.S. government has pardoned the draft resisters, given $20,000 in reparations to each incarceree, and issued a number of formal apologies about Japanese confinement. The first came in 1976 from President Gerald Ford, who called incarceration a “national mistake” that “shall never again be repeated.”
But Mihara, one of a small surviving group of Heart Mountain incarcerees, said that it’s very possible for history to repeat itself.
Incarceration “almost happened to other groups during WWII. It almost happened to Muslim Americans after 9/11. Even today, there are detention centers for immigrants where the conditions are not good,” he said. “We need to be on our guard to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
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