“Little More than Minutes”: How Two Wyoming Community Newspapers Covered the Construction of the Heart Mountain Internment Camp

Abstract

This article explores how two Wyoming community newspapers—the Cody Enterprise and the Powell Tribune—covered the internment of more than 6,000 Japanese Americans at the Heart Mountain relocation camp from the day the announcement was made that the camp would be constructed to Heart Mountain's official opening in August 1942. Journalists for the Tribune and Enterprise clearly shied away from the controversial, “unpleasant”¹ aspects of the internment—chief among them, the blatant violation of the internees' civil rights. The newspapers relied on sources who conveyed the “official, “positive version of events. Journalists for these papers endeavored to build what Schudson would call “a community of sentiment”² about the coming of the camp. They conveyed the impression that the internees would become another significant community group. They humanized the internees by running photos of them happily arriving at Heart Mountain, and, later, of the milestones in their lives. Editors and reporters for the Tribune and the Enterprise were indeed acting as “guard dogs” for local officials, but the threat, as they identified it, was not the Japanese Americans, or their allegedly nefarious activities; it was that this new local business might fail. Such an approach is not surprising in light of the support of community development shown in the preceding few decades by the editors of both papers.