Description:
Winner of the Wyoming Historical Society's 2025 award for its significant contribution.
The authors focus their research on the physical, operational and administrative infrastructures of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center.
Brief description: The authors lived at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center with their parents from April 1948 until November 1950, occupying barracks that once housed Japanese residents. Their father, B.D. Murphy was a civil engineer with the Bureau of Reclamation who used the deserted Center as the headquarters of the Shoshone Reclamation Project."Jim and I decided to research that unusual place where spent some of our growing-up years. Heart Mountain wasn't a very pretty place; the barracks remaining when we lived there looked pretty flimsy. How did those people from California ever survive living there in that harsh weather? We decided to find out. Since we had lived there and had a general idea of how it was built, we focused our interest on the infrastructure; whose idea was it to build such a place? Why was it built where it was? Who designed it? Who constructed it? Who were these people that were imprisoned? What did they do all day while locked up? Where did its prisoners come from and where did they go? Hopefully, in answering my own questions I will have been able to answer others' questions about this dreadful place" - Ben Murphy.
Review Quotes:
"Never before has information about this vast array of an American concentration camp's institutions, facilities, and practices been gathered and assembled in one place. Chronicles is written so clearly and illustrated with such fascinating photographs, it will be enjoyed by even the casual reader who wants to learn a bit more about what had once been the third largest city in Wyoming. It deserves to be a foundational reference for anyone interested in what was built and what happened at Heart Mountain."
- Douglas Nelson, author of Heart Mountain: The History of an American Concentration Camp.
"Altogether, this book is a veritable treasure to all students of the World War II Japanese American incarceration experience generally and specifically to the Heart Mountain location both during and after its wartime interval. The insatiable curiosity and the indefatigable work ethic of the Murphy brothers have gifted us with a treasure trove of invaluable information."
- Art Hansen, director emeritus of the California State University, Fullerton Japanese American Oral History Project and former senior historian, Japanese American National Museum.