Following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans were interned in 10 camps across the US. Taking only what they could carry, around 11,000 Japanese-Americans relocated from West Coast homes to these flimsy tar-paper rooms and made the best of three years of confinement here, setting up a newspaper, two theaters and a high school in what quickly became Wyoming's third-largest town.
Only the former hospital and chimney remain from the original buildings, but a memorial and barracks-style interpretive center tells the powerful story of how – temporarily seized by xenophobia – the US failed its own citizens 60 years ago. The center is 14 miles northeast of Cody.
