When Takashi Hoshizaki looked out at the rich, green fields of alfalfa, barley and other crops growing in the shadow of Heart Mountain between Cody and Powell, he sees, in part, the success of his own handiwork. “I feel better the more I see,” said Hoshizaki, a retired scientist who spent much of his career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. “All the effort that we had put in bore fruit.” Beginning in 1942, when he was 16, Hoshizaki surveyed routes for irrigation ditches, laying the groundwork for the first successful farming of the Heart Mountain area and, ultimately, for today’s farms. Etc. At the time, the first internees found themselves living in wooden barracks on a dusty sagebrush flat. Within a year, they had begun to turn much of the barren landscape into productive farmland that supplied the camp with fresh vegetables and grains, completing an early but often forgotten chapter of Wyoming’s agricultural history. Some canals and ditches completed by internees remain in use today. “They basically put this irrigation project together,” said Don Rolston, former head of the Wyoming Dept. of Agriculture. His wife’s father, Kaz Uriu, was interned at Heart Mountain. After the camp closed, Uriu took over a farm near Worland and greatly expanded it, becoming one of the first farmers to bring malt barley into the Bighorn Basin. Etc. Nearly 100 former internees and local residents recently toured the site of what during the war was known as the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, a complex of barracks surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers that at its peak housed nearly 11,000 Japanese Americans, making it the third largest city in Wyoming. “Everything was sagebrush and there was no water,” said James Ito, who was 28 and a recent graduate of the Univ. of California in soil science when he and his family reported to Heart Mountain. “It was the middle of September and they told me the rattlesnakes were shedding their skin and would strike without warning.” Watching for snakes, Ito walked miles around the camp, inspecting the soils and collecting samples to send to California for testing. He and others interested in developing agriculture concluded that vegetables should grow well in alluvial soils along the Shoshone River, while grains and alfalfa would be better suited to the drier uplands. Crews of young men from the camp surveyed the layout of irrigation ditches and lined the ditches with bentonite to prevent absorption. They earned about $12 a month for the work, Hoshizaki said, but each member of a worker’s family also got a clothing allowance of $3.75 per month. Etc.