1st place winner of 2025 Wyoming Historical Society’s “Reference Work on a Wyoming Subject or Locale” award in recognition of outstanding accomplishments and contributions to Wyoming’s Legacy.

Heart Mountain Chronicles is a meticulously researched account of the construction and operation of one of the ten 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, administration, 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 created for themselves: schools, shops, a newspaper, hospital, fire department, and a system of self-government. It is a fascinating study of a temporary city, the resilience and creativity of the Japanese-Americans interned there, and all the accompanying community services that they created from scratch in a short time with few resources.

The Heart Mountain Relocation Center was constructed in just 60 days and became the third-largest city in Wyoming at the time. Japanese evacuees were interned there from August 12, 1942, until November 10, 1945, when the last of its residents left to rebuild their interrupted lives. Although the purpose of the Camp ceased to exist after the war, Heart Mountain continued to house others until the mid-1950s. After WWII, the Camp was managed by the Bureau of Reclamation, and its remaining facilities were used to support the construction of the Shoshone Reclamation Project, which provides irrigation for crops in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin.

Included is a chapter describing the efforts that led to its listing on the National Registry of Historic Places in 1985 and its designation as a National Historic Landmark in 2006.

Table of Contents:

• Part 1: the Order
  Decision
  Evacuation
  Design
  Building the Camp
• Part 2: the Physical Infrastructure
  Completing the Camp
  Electric Power
  Water
  Agriculture and Food
  Hospital Staff
  Hospital Infrastructure
  Fire Protection
  Police Protection and Judicial System
  Mail Delivery
  Motor Pool
  The Sawmill and Cellars
• Part 3: the Social Infrastructure
  Community Enterprise
  Community Activities
  Education
  The Heart Mountain Sentinel
  Military Police
  Coal, Stoves, and Celotex
  Warehousing
  The WRA and Self-Government
  Leaving the Camp
• Part 4: Transition
  The Homesteaders
  The End of the Camp’s Life
  Creating a Tribute
  Remembrance

About the Authors
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 which 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? And 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.

---

Reviews:

“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.

Read Douglas Nelson’s full review here: https://heartmountainchronicles.com/

“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.

Read Art Hansen’s full review here: https://www.nichibei.org/2025/07/a-heart-mountain-treasure/