This is the story of a city. The Heart Mountain Relocation Center, located in northwest Wyoming, was one of ten Japanese-American internment camps built by government in the summer of 1942 to hold persons of Japanese ancestry forceably removed from the West Coast during WWII in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Constructed in just 60 days, it became the third-largest city in Wyoming at the time. Japanese evacuees were interned there from August 1942, until November 1945, when the last of its residents left to resume their interrupted lives.
This book details the planning, construction, and services that were developed to house 11,000 people. It's the story of the physical as well as the social infrastructure that the internees created for themselves: schools, shops, a newspaper, hospital, fire department, and a system of self-government.
While others have written about the people who were interned in Japanese relocation centers during WWII, this is the story of one of the camps, told by two brothers who lived there.