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.

The second edition of this remarkable work corrects a few factual errors and clarifies a few points, but the real reason for a new edition is that a book of such importance deserves to be printed and bound in hardcover. This book is a treasure trove of meticulously researched information on a World War II internment camp’s infrastructure, facilities, and administration.

“Heart Mountain Chronicles” tells the remarkable story of 14,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry who were confined at a remote location between Powell and Cody, Wyoming, during World War II. This book focuses on the Heart Mountain Relocation Center itself: its establishment, organization, buildings, and services. 

The opening chapters of Part One traces the U.S. Government’s decision to remove the entire Japanese American population from the West Coast states.

The core of the book is contained in Parts Two and Three: The Physical Infrastructure and The Social Infrastructure. In addition to valuable demographic data on the imprisoned population, the authors describe health care resources, water, food, emergency services, policing, recreational activities, employment opportunities, access to consumer goods, social services, community governance, and the development of schools for the thousands of incarcerated children. This comprehensive collection of information about the wide range of camp institutions, facilities, and practices has never before been compiled in a single book.

The concluding section, Part Four: Transition, discusses the post-World War II usage of the Heart Mountain Camp site. It explains why the Bureau of Reclamation used the area, and of the sale of barracks and land to farmers and former servicemen who established homesteads on and around the camp site. Additionally, it recounts the initial efforts to establish a memorial at the site. A military honor roll was dedicated to those Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain who answered their nation’s call for military service despite the injustice they and their families endured.

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.

 

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.

Author Website: www.heartmountainchronicles.com

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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/