The Heart Mountain War Relocation Center, named after nearby Heart Mountain and located midway between the northwest Wyoming towns of Cody and Powell, was one of ten concentration camps used for the internment of Japanese Americans evicted during World War II from their local communities (including their homes, businesses, and college residencies) in the West Coast Exclusion Zone by the executive order of President Franklin Roosevelt (after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, upon the recommendation of Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt).

[citation needed] Heart Mountain is perhaps best known[4] for many of its younger residents challenging the controversial draft of Nisei males from camp in order to highlight the loss of their rights through the incarceration.

The Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, led by Frank Emi and several others, was particularly active in this resistance, encouraging internees to refuse U.S. military induction until they and their families were released from camp and their civil rights were restored.

Heart Mountain had the highest rate of draft resistance of all ten camps, with 85 young men and seven Fair Play Committee leaders ultimately sentenced and imprisoned for Selective Service Act violations.

In 1988 and 1992 the U.S. government passed laws both formally apologizing to Japanese Americans for the internment-era violations of their constitutional, state, and personal property rights, and, establishing a temporary fund to pay limited reparations ($20,000) to still-living former internees (or their children) who applied and qualified for them.

The remaining 50 acres (20.2 ha) were purchased by the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, a nonprofit organization established in 1996 to memorialize the center's internees and to interpret the site's historical significance.

[9][10] In 1937 during the Great Depression, the BOR used private contractors and Civilian Conservation Corps laborers to begin construction on the Shoshone Canyon Conduit and the Heart Mountain Canal, as one of a number of governmental infrastructure projects.

[3][11] Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized military commanders to create zones from which "any or all persons may be excluded."

On May 23, 1942, the War Department announced that one of the camps for displaced Japanese Americans would be located in Wyoming, and several communities, hoping to capitalize on internee labor for irrigation and land development projects, vied for the site.

[10] Heart Mountain was chosen because it was remote yet convenient, isolated from the nearest towns but close to fresh water and adjacent to a railroad spur and depot where Japanese Americans, as well as food and supplies, could be off-loaded.

[3] On June 1, 1942, the Bureau of Reclamation transferred 46,000 acres (18,615.5 ha) of the Heart Mountain Irrigation Project and several CCC buildings to the War Relocation Authority, the branch of the Western Defense Command responsible for administration of the incarceration program.

Army higher-ups gave the site's chief engineer only sixty days to complete the project, and newspaper ads recruiting laborers promised jobs "if you can drive a nail" while workers boasted that it took them only 58 minutes to build an apartment barracks.

[13] After being assigned a barracks based on the size of their families, they began making small improvements on their new "apartments," hanging bed sheets to create extra "rooms," and stuffing newspaper and rags into cracks in the shoddily constructed walls and floors to keep out dust and cold.

Soon after, Kiyoshi Okamoto organized the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee to protest the infringement of Nisei citizen rights, and Frank Emi, Paul Nakadate and others began posting fliers around camp encouraging others not to respond to the questions.

[17] When draft orders began arriving in Heart Mountain, Emi, Okamoto and the other leaders of the Fair Play Committee held public meetings to discuss the unconstitutionality of the incarceration and encourage other inmates to refuse military service until their freedom was restored.

[17] In July 1944, in the largest mass trial in Wyoming history, sixty-three Heart Mountain inmates were prosecuted after refusing to show up for their induction and convicted of felony draft evasion.

[13][18] A total of 300 draft resisters from eight WRA camps, including an additional 22 from Heart Mountain sentenced in a subsequent trial, were arrested for this charge, and most served time in federal prison.

[5] Although Heart Mountain is remembered primarily for its organized resistance to the draft, approximately 650 Nisei joined the U.S. Army from this camp, either volunteering or accepting their conscription into the legendary 100th Infantry Battalion,[20] the famed 442nd RCT[21] and MIS.

Beginning in January 1945, internees began to leave Heart Mountain for the West Coast, provided by administrators with $25 and a one-way train ticket to the location they had been picked up from three years earlier.

Senator Alan K. Simpson, who met as Boy Scouts on opposite sides of the barbed wire fence surrounding the Heart Mountain compound, were Honorary Advisors to the Foundation.