Heart Mountain Chronicles

— Art Hansen, director emeritus of the California State University, Fullerton Japanese American Oral History Project and former senior historian, Japanese American National Museum:
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.”

Full review here: https://www.nichibei.org/2025/07/a-heart-mountain-treasure/

— Douglas Nelson
Author, Heart Mountain: The History of an American Concentration Camp:
Most books and articles about Heart Mountain, including my own, focus on recounting the experience of the 14,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were forcibly confined at a remote location between Powell and Cody, Wyoming during World War II.  How did they adapt? What hardships did they endure? How did they respond to the injustices of their removal and imprisonment? How did the experience of loss, racial hatred and immense hardship affect their feelings about the United States?  And how did the stress of incarceration impact the bonds of family and community within the camp and after.

By contrast, Ben and Jim Murphy have chosen to focus their research on the physical, operational and administrative infrastructures of the Heart Mountain camp itself.  The result is a remarkable, pathbreaking and much needed book.

Heart Mountain Chronicles gives us a scrupulously researched, detailed and near encyclopedic account of the built environment of an American concentration camp.  With blueprints, photographs, planning documents, and interviews, they have given us best available description of the barracks, mess halls, hospital, schools, latrines, guard towers, root cellars, fences, administrative buildings, boiler rooms, firefighting equipment, utilities infrastructure, and a lot more.

The Chronicles also provides an overview of the administrative and social infrastructure that was built to sustain a viable community within the confines of the camp. In additional to very valuable demographic data on the incarceree population, the authors describe the health care resources, emergency services, policing, recreational activity, employment opportunities, access to consumer goods, social services, community governance, and the educational programing available to thousands of school age incarcerees.  Never before has information about this vast array of camp institutions, facilities, and practices been gathered and assembled in one place.

Finally, a word about the authors. Ben and his late brother Jim weren’t trained as historians or writers. Their interest in adding detail to the story of Heart Mountain grew out of their experience living at the site from 1948 to 1950 in one of the remaining barracks. Their father had been assigned to the area as part of his job as an engineer on the Shoshone Reclamation Project and the boys learned firsthand of the hardships of living in the cold, cramped and dusty  housing-the kind that  had been home to thousands of Japanese Americans a few years earlier. Many decades later, Ben and Jim decided on an ambitious project–to learn much more about Heart Mountain than what they remembered as boys and then help others see and feel the harsh reality of what was built at Heart Mountain. Their ultimate reason was their hope that “rebuilding” the reality of Heart Mountain with words and pictures might move people to help prevent such a “city” from ever being “built again”.  All of us who share that hope are indebted to the Murphys’ for this important book.