News Release
The University of Idaho Library, with financial assistance from the
Library Associates, a friends group, has acquired a unique photographic
resource related to Idaho's World War II history. It is a hand-made
scrapbook of 148 original photographs (and two drawings) of activities and
buildings related to the Kooskia Internment Camp on the Lochsa River.
Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, federal authorities rounded
up some 1200 Japanese aliens living in the United States. Arrested by the
FBI and local officials, these men were turned over to the Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) who placed them in internment camps in Texas,
North Dakota, New Mexico, and Montana, among others. This was not the
later unconstitutional removal of West Coast Japanese American citizens
and their families who were herded into ten large concentration camps
(including one in southern Idaho, at Minidoka) managed by the War
Relocation Authority.
In 1943 the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, closed its remote work
camps, one of which was a road-building site in a former CCC camp on the
Lochsa River in Idaho. The inmates were extending the Lewis and Clark
Highway (now US 12) up the river toward Montana. Completion of the road
was declared a wartime necessity and so it continued under the authority
of the INS using paid Japanese alien volunteers from the larger internment
camps. Although called the Kooskia Internment Camp, it was actually some
seven miles upstream from Lowell, Idaho.
The photographs in the scrapbook, taken about 1944, are the work of either
one of the Japanese inmates or one of the federal guards. The signed
sketches are by one of the inmates. The son of a deceased guard discovered
the scrapbook among family memorabilia and offered it to the University of
Idaho.
The photographs are an extensive record of life in the camp, with multiple
views of the mess hall, the canteen, and the recreation facilities, as
well as scenes of the heavy equipment and the construction work on the
highway, where the Japanese worked closely with the Bureau of Public Roads
personnel.
Dr. Priscilla Wegars, curator of the university's Asian American
Comparative Collection and author of a recent article on the camp
published in Idaho Yesterdays, calls the scrapbook "a major artifact from
a little-known aspect of Idaho's history."
The scrapbook pages and the photographs have been scanned and added to the
Historical Photographs Collection database, now approaching 100,000
entries. The scrapbook and the database are available for viewing in
Special Collections at the University of Idaho Library during regular
hours.
The Special Collections Department of the University of Idaho Library
includes those materials that, because of subject coverage, rarity,
source, condition, or form, are best handled separately from the General
Collection. The several "collections" housed in this department include
the Day-Northwest Collection of Western Americana, Rare Books, Idaho
Documents, Sir Walter Scott Collection, Ezra Pound Collection, Caxton
Collection, University of Idaho Theses, Historical Maps, Historical
Photograph Collection, and Personal Papers and University Archives.
Descriptions of these collections are on the World Wide Web at
http://www.lib.uidaho.edu/special-collections/.
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Terry Abraham Special Collections, University of Idaho
<http://www.lib.uidaho.edu/special-collections/>