Camp Amache

A trip to Camp Amache last winter…

Camp Amache

“The Granada Relocation Center, better known by its postal designation, Amache, is located one mile outside the small town of Granada, in southeastern Colorado. Before the war, Granada was just one of the small farming towns that dotted
the valley of the Arkansas River, which runs east a few miles north of the site. The area has a semi-arid climate, with low humidity and average annual rainfall. Summers are hot and dry with occasional severe thunderstorms or tornadoes. Winters are generally cold and dry but can bring heavy snowfalls. High wind speeds are common throughout the year and can create choking dust storms.

Amache opened on August 27, 1942, and reached a peak population of 7318 by February 1943. With the smallest overall population of the ten War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps, Amache was notable in other ways. It was the only relocation center established on private land. The entire site was over 10,000 acres, but only 640 acres, or one square mile, was devoted to the central camp area. The majority of the project acreage was earmarked for the camp’s associated agricultural enterprises. The original population came from three main California geographic areas: the Central Valley, northern coast, and southwest Los Angeles. This original group was later joined by inmates transferred from other DOJ Detention Centers and WRA facilities, including over 900 from Tule Lake, CA, and over 500 from Jerome, AK. Around 10, 000 people of Japanese descent were detained in Amache while it was open, where they did their best to cope with life behind barbed wire.

The WRA (War Relocation Authority) purchased the properties that it consolidated into the 16-square-mile Granada War Relocation Center after a process of condemnation that paid local farmers pennies on the dollar for 10,500 acres on the south bank of the Arkansas River. In addition, the Santa Fe Railroad ran through the entire six-mile length of the combined properties, adding to the land’s value.

After the $4.2 million dollar Granada War Relocation Center closed on October 15, 1945, most of the center’s buildings and contents were sold and removed. The fifteen square miles used for agriculture and animal husbandry – along with the canals that provide for irrigation – were sold to local farming interests. The one-square-mile barracks area (“Amache”) was sold to the Town of Granada for $2,500. Otero County School District 11 bought over three dozen buildings and the University of Denver bought more than a dozen for classrooms, offices, and utility buildings. The price for these properties was determined by deducting 80% from their estimated fair market value.”

Via Amache.org

A side note on the namesake, Amache was the daughter of a Cheyenne Chief. She married well known historical figure John Prowers and established a home in Lamar in 1862. Amache’s father, Lone Bear, was killed in the Sand Creek Massacre.

Voices of the Japanese American citizens in the internment camps: 

“Sometimes America failed and suffered…Sometimes she made mistakes, great mistakes…Her history is full of errors, but with each mistake she has learned….Can we the graduating class of Amache Senior High School believe that America still means freedom, equality, security, and justice? Do I believe this? Do my classmates believe this? Yes, with all our hearts, because in the faith, in that hope, is my future, and the world’s future.”

—Excerpt from a graduation valedictory address delivered at the Amache Internment Camp in Colorado

“When we got to Manzanar, it was getting dark and we were given numbers first. We went down to the mess hall, and I remember the first meal we were given in those tin plates and tin cups. It was canned wieners and canned spinach. It was all the food we had, and then after finishing that we were taken to our barracks.

It was dark and trenches were here and there. You’d fall in and get up and finally got to the barracks. The floors were boarded, but the were about a quarter to half inch apart, and the next morning you could see the ground below.

The next morning, the first morning in Manzanar, when I woke up and saw what Manzanar looked like, I just cried. And then I saw the mountain, the high Sierra Mountain, just like my native country’s mountain, and I just cried, that’s all.

I couldn’t think about anything.”

— Yuri Tateishi, Manzanar

“All ten [internment camp] sites can only be called godforsaken. They were in places where nobody lived before and no one has lived since.”

—Roger Daniels, leading authority on the Japanese internment.

“Everybody’s hair and eyebrows would be snow-white with sand.”

—Mary Adachi, an internee at the Topaz internment camp in Utah

“Down in our hearts we cried and cursed this government every time when we showered with sand. We slept in the dust; we breathed the dust; we ate the dust.” 

—Joseph Kurihara, an internee at the Manzanar internment camp in California.

Marielle Tsukamoto, who was a child at the time, later recalled the atmosphere of dread:  “I think the saddest memory is the day we had to leave our farm. I know my mother and father were worried. They did not know what would happen to us. We had no idea where we would be sent. People were all crying and many families were upset. Some believed we would not be treated well, and maybe killed. There were many disturbing rumors. Everyone was easily upset and there were many arguments. It was a horrible experience for all of us, the old people like my grandparents, my parents and children like me. We were all innocent”

“We saw all these people behind the fence, looking out, hanging onto the wire, and looking out because they were anxious to know who was coming in. But I will never forget the shocking feeling that human beings were behind this fence like animals [crying]. And we were going to also lose our freedom and walk inside of that gate and find ourselves…cooped up there…when the gates were shut, we knew that we had lost something that was very precious; that we were no longer free.” 

— Mary Tsukamoto 

“As far as I’m concerned, I was born here, and according to the Constitution that I studied in school, I had the Bill of Rights that should have backed me up. And until the very minute I got onto the evacuation train, I said, ‘It can’t be! How can they do that to an American citizen?’”

– Robert Kashiwagi

Via-Biography.com

Dorothea Lange

After photographing for the Farm Security Administration, Dorothea Lange was hired by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to photograph the internment of the Japanese and Japanese Americans on the Pacific coast, following the bombing
of Pearl Harbor. Presumably, the government wanted to show how orderly the process was, how well the internees were being treated. This time she was deeply in opposition to the government’s actions, but felt it was critically important to document the internment.

Lange worked with a sense of urgency, up at dawn, photographing until the light was gone. There were a number of subjects that were off-limits to her camera: no photographing the barb wire fences, the guard towers with their search lights and guns, no images of the bathrooms, with six pairs of toilets installed back to back with no partitions for privacy.

“The difficulties of doing it were immense,” Lange said. But it wasn’t just the physical hardships she was referring to. She felt forcing the Japanese and Japanese Americans into relocation centers was an unprecedented suspension of civil liberties. For Lange it was “an example of what happens to us if we lose our heads. What was horrifying was to do this completely on the basis of what blood may be coursing through a person’s veins, nothing else. Nothing to do with your affiliations or friendships or associations. Just blood.”

Via-Dorothea Lange Photographs