Manzanar is right on U.S. 395. The two original stone police guard houses and the replica guard tower looming beside the highway are impossible to miss. I started my visit by taking a well-marked, three-mile-long auto tour of the site for a quick orientation before parking at the Inter-pretive Center, originally built as the high school auditorium. Inside, you can see a 22-minute film featuring former internees who tell the stories of their incarceration. There’s a detailed 10 x 10 foot model of the camp that was constructed recently by those who had lived there, which provides an excellent perspective of the site. Panels along the walls explain why the internment happened, the fear and racism that drove the federal policy, and what life was like at the camp. Replicas of barracks interiors show their original state and demonstrate how residents transformed them into comfortable quarters by nailing soup can lids over knotholes in the floor to keep out the blowing sand and crafting furniture from scrap lumber. A huge panel lists the name of everyone who was confined at the camp. When I was finished, I drove the auto route again—this time more slowly, stopping frequently to get out and look, because now I knew from the extensive exhibits at the Center what I was seeing.
The wooden barracks are long gone, but it’s clear to a visitor where they had been. The National Park Service has marked the location of each block of barracks with signs, and there is fascinating physical evidence of what had been there. The internees tried their best to make their confinement as pleasant as possible, and the concrete pools they built in elaborate rock gardens are still in place. The camp cemetery, with its iconic obelisk constructed in 1943 with concrete purchased with a fifteen-cent-per-family donation, looks the same today as it did when Ansel Adams photographed it during the war with 14,403-foot Mount Williamson rising majestically behind it.
The Japanese internment was not the first forced relocation in the Owens Valley. The Paiute Indians settled there 1,500 years ago and developed a flourishing culture with crops irrigated by abundant local water supplies. When gold was discovered in the Sierra Nevada, miners, farmers, and cattlemen moved in. The Paiutes were driven out by the U.S. Army in 1863. Farmers planted orchards in the area they called Manzanar—Spanish for “apple orchard.” In 1905 the city of Los Angeles, needing water to expand the growing metropolis, quietly began acquiring water rights in the Owens Valley and built an aqueduct to the city in 1913. By 1933, Los Angeles owned virtually all farm and ranch land in the valley, and the town of Manzanar was abandoned. When the United States decided to open an internment camp in the area, it had to lease the land from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Internees enjoyed fruit from the abandoned orchards located inside the camp. The trees are still there, and visitors can pick a small amount of fruit in season.
It didn’t take long after the camps opened for government officials to figure out that interning all those people was a costly idea. Internees also were anxious to prove their loyalty as citizens. Those who passed a “loyalty questionnaire” could take jobs further from the west coast or sign up for military duty. In 1943, camp volunteers organized into the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Combined with the 100th Infantry Battalion—mostly Japanese Americans from Hawaii—they became one of the most decorated units in the U. S. Army. Its members won 18,143 individual citations and suffered 9,486 casualties in an outfit with an authorized strength of 4,000.
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