Sixty Japanese Americans at Death Valley: Refuge from Manzanar, 1942–1943

"Here at Death Valley, where I have been digging ditches, cleaning springs, hauling rocks and having one wonderful time with the Park Rangers, my clogged system has been cleared mentally and physically. We've shaken the atmosphere of Manzanar completely." Togo Tanaka wrote those words on January 20, 1943. He was one of 60 Japanese Americans the government had moved from the Manzanar incarceration camp to Death Valley.

The mass incarceration

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, allowing the removal of "any and all people" from designated military zones. Under Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, the U.S. Army used it to force more than 110,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast into inland camps. More than 40 years later, the U.S. government under President Ronald Reagan formally apologized for this unconstitutional mass incarceration of citizens and resident immigrants, naming its causes as "war hysteria, race prejudice, and a failure of political leadership."

From Manzanar to Cow Creek

On December 6, 1942, a revolt broke out at Manzanar — historically called the Manzanar "riot" — during which military police fired on an unarmed crowd and killed two young men. Afterward the government identified people whose well-being it judged to be threatened, and moved 60 of them, from babies to grandparents, to an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Cow Creek in Death Valley. Manzanar lay about 100 miles to the west.

Superintendent T. R. Goodwin, the park rangers and their families welcomed them. The park was running on a wartime skeleton staff, and the new arrivals pitched in on anything that needed doing, from painting new signs to cleaning the water supply at park headquarters. After two months in Death Valley, Tanaka and his family were resettled by the government in Chicago.

"In the desert next to our camp"

Looking back in 1973, Tadaichi Uyeno wrote:

"We cursed the people who clamored to put us into concentration camps. We knew all Americans did not sanction the deprivation of our rights… In this vast country of ours, we were sure there were people who didn't hate us, who sympathized with our plight and would try to help us in their own particular way. We didn't know we would find them in the desert next to our camp… These rangers and their families lit the candles for us to penetrate the darkness of gloom and despair which we had faced."

Manzanar National Historic Site tells the wider story of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Sources

Based on "Incarcerated Japanese Americans at Death Valley," National Park Service (Death Valley National Park), a work of the United States government in the public domain.