(Also see Addendum 21). The banishment from the West Coast of persons of Japanese ancestry only took a few months. It then took years to help detainees establish new homes after being confined in the ten concentration camps. Resettlement plans helped some of the detainees establish new lives away from the West Coast and the camps; but when the West Coast was finally re-opened to detainees, effective Jan. 2, 1945, most of the internment camps had thousands of persons still confined. The WRA issued a statement, “On Closing of the Center,” outlining the reasons they decided to close the camps before the end of the war. These reasons included the thought that school children were not experiencing normal conditions and needed to be returned to schools in a normal community “in order to adjust to and find their place in normal American life.” Furthermore, there was a high demand for workers, and the evacuees needed to get the jobs before they got too tight after the war. Largely, too, the government publication stated that they didn’t want to get into a situation like they had with the Indian reservations, where a group of people would become dependent upon the government for their support. Special trains returning detainees to the West Coast began slowly in Jan. 1945. Dillon S. Myer, Nat’l Director of the WRA, visited the Heart Mtn. camp in Feb. 1945 and encouraged detainees to leave. Etc. Gov. Hunt wrote to WRA director Myer proposing greater government assistance in resettlement. At this point, July 1945, there were 5,600 still at camp. Hunt suggested that the Government was morally obligated to return the “Japanese” to their homes and to help them in regaining their pre-war economic status. He added: “We do not want a single one of these evacuees to remain in Wyoming.” The exodus from Hear Mtn. increased in volume in the summer of 1945. No crops were planted that year, it was announced there would be no school that fall, the last issue of the Sentinel was published on July 28, and Nov. 15 was fixed as the closing date of the camp. Mr. Bill Hosokawa, the camp’s newspaper editor, years later suggested that those who stayed until the end were older people who were afraid to leave. They enjoyed the leisure and they who had no idea what they might do if they left the camp. After V-J Day, the Heart Mtn. population dwindled rapidly, with most of the people returning to the West Coast. The last left by special train on Nov. 10, 1945. Park County’s fear that many Japanese would become permanent residents of the state proved to be groundless. In the spring of 1946, an auction open to veterans was held to sell off office supplies from the administration office, as well as sewing machines, cook stoves and desks from the high school home economics dept. Local hospitals bought equipment such as beds, linens, and screens. The barracks at Heart Mountain were sold in halves for one dollar each to “homesteaders,” who moved onto the land after the camp was closed.