Remembering Heart Mountain
Approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly incarcerated during World War II. At Wyoming’s Heart Mountain, visitors contend with a dark chapter of American history.
By Ashley Stimpson
In April 1942, Sam Mihara was 9 years old and growing up in San Francisco, when a flyer went up on telephone poles and shop windows around his Japantown neighborhood that would change his life forever. “Instructions to all persons of Japanese Ancestry,” the flyer read in bold, blocky letters, going on to detail the “evacuation” process that would soon unfold for the tens of thousands of Japanese Americans who had opened businesses, cultivated farms and made their homes in the Bay Area. They had one week to prepare, the flyer explained, to sell or give away their belongings—their shops, houses, cars, boats, refrigerators, pianos and pets. Each member of each family would be allowed to carry just one suitcase full of approved items like linens, toiletries and clothing.
PHOTOS: This page: Incarcerees of Heart Mountain confinement site arrive by train in 1942 | Yone Kudo, Densho/ Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration. Opposite page, from top: Heart Mountain incarcerees Sam Mihara and his family in front of their barack | Courtesy Mihara Family Collection; Children incarcerees at Heart Mountain | Tom Parker, courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.
Rails to Trails MAGAZINE | FALL 2025
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