A new book on Heart Mountain Internment Camp was just released, written by two brothers who lived on the grounds after the war.

Heart Mountain Chronicles: The History of a Japanese Relocation Center by Bernard Murphy and James Murphy, was published in June.

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 after the war. 

The Heart Mountain Relocation Center, built between the towns of Cody and Powell in northwestern Wyoming, was one of 10 facilities conceived by the federal government to remove and temporarily incarcerate persons of Japanese ancestry living in the states of California, Oregon and Washington after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Most of the Japanese-Americans who were sent to Heart Mountain were from Los Angeles County.

This is the story of a temporary city. Heart Mountain Chronicles is a meticulously researched account of the construction and operation of one of the 10 prison camps built by the U.S. Government in the summer of 1942 to incarcerate persons of Japanese ancestry living along the West Coast after the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

The book details the planning, construction and services that were developed to intern 11,000 people at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. It’s the story of the physical as well as the social infrastructure that the internees had to create for themselves: schools, shops, a newspaper, hospital, fire department and a system of self-government. 

This is the record of who built the internment camp, where the blueprints came from, how its infrastructure turned out the way it did, who managed it, how the prisoners completed its construction with their own labor, what life was like living in such dreadful place, and what happened to the camp after the war was over. 

Included are many previously unpublished photographs and blueprints.

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 we spent some of our growing-up years,” Ben Murphy said. “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.”