Heart Mountain Internment Camp, Wyoming

The federal government located one of its ten Japanese-American interment camps here, north of Cody, during World War II. Like the other relocation centers, the Heart Mountain Internment Camp had around 650 buildings, with 450 barracks holding as many as 10,000 people in a fenced compound covering just over a square mile of land. Several of the original structures have been preserved, and an interpretive center opened in 2011. The locations of these ten facilities, housing a total of 100,000 innocent people during the war, in places like Delta, Utah; Independence and Tule Lake, California; Poston and Gila River, Arizona, are in a sense a map of especially empty parts of the West, in more ways than one.