<Begin Segment 19>

MA: Do you remember the journey you took to Minidoka?

GM: Did I remember what part of...

MA: When you were traveling to Minidoka?

GM: Oh, to Mini-, yeah.

MA: What was that like?

GM: Well, leaving camp was leaving Fife, because it was so close to home, that's one. The other thing was they never told us where we're going. They never told us what they're going to do with us. And I even thought that they'll, maybe they'll take us out in the desert and shoot us, you know. That's kind of feeling I had, but I knew there was an advance bunch of guys that went to Idaho to fix up a place, so the rumors was that we're probably going to one of those camps that they're building. But I still didn't forget about what they might do to us.

MA: Was that a common fear among the people in camp, was that no one knew...

GM: I think so. I think so, because they, they didn't know what's going to happen. They didn't tell us any, anything about what, what we're going to do, where we're going. And then when you got into the train, to make things worse, they told you to pull all the curtains down. Now, what was the reason for not letting the public see you in these trains? Were they trying to hide something that they were going to do? We had to pull our curtains down, and, of course, I knew the train went past Point Defiance Park, or the Narrows up there, and I wanted to see that from a train. And I did take some peeks out of the window, but after you get over the mountain, there's nothing more than deserts, so there's nothing to see out there once you're in the train. Even today, if you go past the mountains, the Cascades, there's really nothing to see between here and Chicago. [Laughs] It's, it's all desert. But we went to Idaho and...

MA: What were your initial impressions when you arrived at Minidoka?

GM: It was at a spur. A spur is sort of a offshoot of a railroad track that goes to one place, it's a dead end. And this spur was probably around a couple miles from the camp. And from there, they bussed you into camp... I don't know I got there, I think it was a bus. And we started our daily life there. Hard to remember what it was like day by day, but once you got into camp and settled down, it's kind of hard to take because it was the elements that you had to worry about. I think it was very hot then, and boy, when you've got hot weather and no place to go and no trees to sit under, or anything like that, it can get pretty hot there. And later on, of course, the winters got so cold you couldn't stand the cold, and if it rained, the rain in the desert there would soak into the ground, but since the camp area been traveled over and over, the ground was broken up into a fine dust. So when it rained, that dust became a quagmire of cocoa-like -- [laughs] -- and you were knee-deep in mud. But not the kind of mud that you see where you step into it and get a pile of dirt, it was so thin that it was, you could walk through it, you don't have to lift your feet up out of the, that mud, and it was miserable, but stayed out of the mud as much as possible.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.