Bitterroot Road A Hidden Chapter Of World War Ii UI Researcher Compiling Study Of Kooskia’s Internee-Laborers

Most people have heard how Japanese Americans were torn from their homes by their own government and herded into camps during World War II.

But few in the Inland Northwest know about the Japanese men who helped build a highway through Idaho’s Bitterroot mountains.

Moscow researcher Priscilla Wegars is looking for anyone who remembers the Kooskia Internment Camp.

One of the few she’s found is Cecil Boller. He was a guard. It wasn’t a difficult job, recalled the 83-year-old Kooskia man.

Unlike the previous federal inmates who had labored on what became U.S. Highway 12, these prisoners didn’t seem anxious to leave.

“You couldn’t have paid them to try to get out there,” he said. “They got fed three meals a day, they got showers … They got $1.25 a day or something like that for working. That bought their tobacco.”

The internees broke rock with picks and blasted it with powder. Ninety percent of those he knew were Japanese fishermen, Boller said. Only one was an American citizen.

“They were like any other group of 150 people,” he said. “Some of them worked hard. Some of them wouldn’t work at all.”

It’s true that the Japanese never tried to escape, said University of Washington researcher Tetsuden Kashima. That hardly meant they were happy.

“It was a deprivation of civil liberties for which there was no charge made, there was no trial held,” said Kashima, an associate professor of American ethnic studies.

“You weren’t forced to work. You were kept behind barbed wire and people said, ‘Do you want to do something?’”

The camp was open from May 1943 to May 1945. Boller said there’s nothing left of it at the site near Lowell. That’s about 32 miles east of Kooskia (pronounced KOOS-key).

Wegars, a historical archeologist, was intrigued by vague reports she’d heard about the camp.

The Kooskia camp was among those operated by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which held people of Japanese ancestry who were called “enemy aliens.”

The INS camps were distinct from the 10 major camps supervised by the War Relocation Authority. Wegars said.

The WRA camps, including one at Minidoka in southern Idaho, housed more than 100,000 citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese descent.

Many of the “aliens,” likely including those fishermen at Kooskia, had lived in the United States for many years, Kashima said.

Japanese weren’t allowed to become U.S. citizens between 1922 and 1952, he said. That wasn’t true of German and Italian aliens, some of whom also labored at Kooskia.

According to Kashima, there were 124 Japanese nationals at Kooskia on Aug. 1, 1944, along with one German internee doctor from Bolivia who volunteered to care for them.

None were prisoners of war, who were kept at other work camps in the Northwest.

In 1988, Congress apologized to the internees for the way they were treated, and made payments to them via the Civil Liberties Act.

That same law established an education fund, from which Wegars received $7,000 to conduct her reserach.

She is eager to interview any of the Japanese 175 internees or 27 employees.

She’s already talked with Helen Thiessen, who at age 94 vividly recalls feeding prisoners and guards who were on their way to Kooskia.

Their train stopped in Lewiston near Thiessen’s White Front Cafe.

“I had baked ham, potato slices, cookies and bread-and-butter sandwiches,” the Lewiston woman said. “I had to serve them on the train.”

The Japanese seemed to be in good spirits, she said.

“They’d been on that train for a long time, coming from California and Oregon.”

When local folks read in the newspaper that the “enemy” had been fed ham, they were outraged. Wartime shortages had made that a rare treat.

The butcher had just gotten a ham when Thiessen arrived at his counter, looking for food that would be suitable at whatever time of day the train arrived.

When Thiessen’s brother came back from the war, people stopped him on the street to complain about the ham.

Some people in Kooskia also griped about the Japanese, Boller said.

“They’d say, ‘I don’t know why they have those so-and-so’s around when lots of us don’t have a job.’ I told them they wouldn’t do that kind of work, and it needed to be done.

“To my notion, it was a good deal.”

It was against camp rules to take photographs. But Boller does have one picture of a crew working on a bluff. He lent the photo to someone, and thinks he maybe got it back. It could be buried in a trunk somewhere, he said.

Wegars will likely be rummaging through trunks and attics during the course of her research. In addition to photos, she hopes to find letters, diaries and other camp-related documents.

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: HELP WANTED Priscilla Wegars is an affiliate faculty member in the University of Idaho’s Department of Sociology/Anthropology and volunteer curator of its Asian American Comparative collection. She can be reached at 735 E. Sixth St., Moscow, ID 83843; phone (208) 882-7905. Her e-mail address is pwegars@uidaho.edu.