Bernard Murphy

The authors lived at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center with their parents from April 1948 until November 1950, occupying barracks that once housed Japanese residents. Their father, B.D. Murphy was a civil engineer with the Bureau of Reclamationwho used the deserted Center as the headquarters of the Shoshone Reclamation Project.

"Jim and I decided to research that unusual place where spent some of our growing-up years. Heart Mountain wasn't a very pretty place; the barracks remaining when we lived there looked pretty flimsy. How did those people from California ever survive living there in that harsh weather? We decided to find out. Since we had lived there and had a general idea of how it was built, we focused our interest on the infrastructure; whose idea was it to build such a place? Why was it built where it was? Who designed it? Who constructed it? Who were these people that were imprisoned? What did they do all day while locked up? Where did its prisoners come from and where did they go? Hopefully, in answering my own questions I will have been able to answer others' questions about this dreadful place" - Ben Murphy.