# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Gold rush, natural disasters and social upheaval are all part of The Mile High City's Wild West past. Browse this Q&A with historian Tom Noel.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Historic Resources of Downtown Denver | History Colorado

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Historic Resources of Downtown Denver - This multiple property submission provides a historical context for evaluating the significance of historic resources associated with the commercial development of Denver’s Central Business District during the period 1880-1973. The oldest identified historic…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Between 1942 and 1945, the United States government incarcerated more than 10,000 Japanese Americans at the Granada Relocation Center, an internment camp in southeastern Colorado that was also known as Amache.

Almost 80 years after the end of World War II, the site is finally receiving federal protection. Per a statement from the Department of the Interior, a law signed by President Joe Biden on March 18 designates the former relocation center as part of the National Park System (NPS). Thanks to the legislation, Amache is now eligible for federal assistance, reports the Colorado Sun's Kevin Simpson.

Amache, located just outside of the town of Granada and roughly 20 miles from Colorado's border with Kansas, was one of ten internment sites that the U.S. government built to confine Japanese Americans and people of Japanese descent during World War II.

After Japanese troops attacked the U.S. naval base of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a new federal agency, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), and directed its staff to construct internment centers across the country. The WRA forcibly relocated roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, many of them U.S. citizens, over fears they might aid Japan in the war.

"It's a part of American history that for many years, people wanted to sweep under the carpet," Derek Okubo, whose father was incarcerated at Amache, told KRCC's Shanna Lewis in February, on the 80th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the relocation.

Built in the summer of 1942, Amache featured cramped Army-style barracks, mess halls, laundry areas and bathrooms. According to the NPS, the 10,500-acre site, which grew to become the tenth-largest city in Colorado at the time, also had a school, hospital, recreation center, post office, store, barbershop and other shared facilities, all of which were surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and tall watchtowers manned around the clock by armed guards. Internees farmed more than 9,000 acres on the compound, growing a variety of crops and raising livestock.

Even after being removed from their communities and forced to abandon their property and nearly all of their belongings, nearly 1,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated at Amache joined the U.S. war effort; thirty-one of them died serving their country. A memorial to the fallen soldiers, as well as to the 120 internees who died while incarcerated at Amache, stands near the site's cemetery.

After the war ended and internees were allowed to leave Amache, which officially closed on October 15, 1945, the site went dormant. Federal officials sold or demolished Amache's buildings and materials.

Today, the site is mostly barren grassland, save for crumbling concrete foundations, dirt roads and trees planted by the internees. Since 1993, social studies teacher John Hopper and his students at Granada High School have been working to preserve and maintain the site via their Amache Preservation Society. The group's grassroots campaign ultimately helped Amache win federal protection.

Working in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Colorado Preservation, Inc., the society built replica barracks, reassembled Amache's water tower, and returned the former recreation hall (which had been dismantled and relocated) building to the site. Current and former students also gathered artifacts, interviewed former internees and created the nearby Amache Museum.

The site was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1994 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006.

"The story needs to be told so we don't repeat a wrong," Hopper tells theDenver Post's Bruce Finley. "It was wrong then. And it is wrong now. Hopefully, preserving sites like this will teach our youth, our future leaders, that it is wrong."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Japanese American Incarceration Camp in Colorado Receives Federal Protection

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Granada Relocation Center, also known as Amache, grew to become the state's tenth largest city at its peak during World War II

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Unlike mission cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Salt Lake City and Santa Fe, Denver was founded only as a place to make money. Denver began as a gold gamble, as a bet that Rocky Mountain mineral resources would pay off.

On Nov. 22, 1858, a scruffy gang of gold seekers founded the Denver City Town Company. William H. Larimer, the oldest and most experienced town promoter among the pioneers, staked the claim by crossing cottonwood sticks at the four corners of his baby town. He platted the streets in mining town fashion to run perpendicular and parallel to Cherry Creek.

Larimer and his fellow members of the Denver City Town Company named the streets for themselves, but named the newborn town for James W. Denver, the governor of Kansas Territory. Larimer reckoned that the governor would make Denver City the commercial hub and county seat of what was then Arapahoe County, Kansas Territory.

"I am Denver City," Larimer wrote home to Leavenworth. The general, as he liked to be called, was one of hundreds of town boomers who leap-frogged across 19th century America, fathering boom and bust communities. After siring several abortive towns, the 50-year-old patriarch had founded a real city.

"Denver," he crowed in his correspondence, "is situated at the mouth of Cherry Creek where it forms its confluence with the South Platte. This is the point also where the Santa Fe and New Mexico road crosses to Fort Laramie and Fort Bridger, also the great leading road from the Missouri River: in short, it is the center of all the great leading thoroughfares and is bound to be a great city."

Later, frustrated fortune-seekers would try to hang Larimer for such statements, but he wrote on: Everyone will soon be flocking to Denver for "the most picturesque country in the world, with fine air, good water and everything to make man happy and live to a good, old age."

In founding this new El Dorado, Larimer was jumping two claims, one red, one white. By the Treaty of Fort Laramie, Denver and most of eastern Colorado had been promised to the Arapaho and Cheyenne - forever. In the fall of 1858, the Arapaho showed up at what had long been their winter camp. Their head chief, Little Raven, was astonished to find all these land-, water- and gold-grubbing palefaces. But with traditional Native American hospitality, he shared what little water, trees and grass there was with the newcomers. That was a decision the Indians would come to regret six years later at a place called Sand Creek. There the natives, camped under a white and an American flag, were slaughtered.

Only a few months before Denver's founding, the site had been claimed by prospectors from St. Charles, Mo. They called their new town on the northeast bank of Cherry Creek St. Charles. Then, as General Larimer happily noted, they made the mistake of going back to St. Charles, Mo.

Larimer also dismissed the town of Auraria on the southwest side of Cherry Creek. The Russell boys who founded it, he noted with a sneer, were slow-talking Southerners. Soon they would be off to join the Confederate Army in their native Georgia. While the Russells were gone, Larimer presided at a moonlight ceremony on the Larimer Street Bridge over Cherry Creek, on April 6, 1860, when Auraria was consolidated with Denver.

According to Larimer's son Will, who published an eyewitness account of Denver's founding, his father did not "undergo the hardships and labor of digging gold." Rather, his father bought, sold, traded and gave away town lots to aggrandize his town company.

Foreseeing not only a city but suburbs, Larimer waded across the icy South Platte on Dec. 14, 1858, to found the northwest Denver suburb of Highland. When Colorado Territory was created in 1861, Larimer rushed back to Washington to lobby for appointment as its first governor. Instead, President Lincoln chose a closer friend and ally, William Gilpin. Larimer then sought a consolation prize and ran for mayor of Denver. This time, the crusty old patriarch lost out to a popular young banker.

Embittered by these two political defeats, Larimer left Denver, denouncing its "lack of comforts." He returned to his Leavenworth farm, where he died in 1875. The city he founded lived on, fulfilling his predictions, his imaginings, to become a great city.
Tom Noel teaches history at the University of Colorado Denver. The Colorado History Museum, 1300 Broadway, is hosting a free 150th birthday party and exhibit for Denver on Saturday, Nov. 22, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A Century and a Half in the Making

Like so many ambitious ventures before it, Denver Union Station began as a dream.

In the late 19th century, train travel had opened up the West to untold numbers, eager to build a life for themselves on this bold new frontier. With this in mind, the city planners of Denver began designs on a new station that could capitalize on the strong demand for train travel and serve as a gateway to their growing city.

On June 1, 1881, their bold vision was realized as the new Denver Union Depot opened its doors. Spanning 500 feet and adorned with a 180-foot clock tower at its center, the station held the distinction of being the tallest building in the West in its day.

It stood for less than three years. On March 18, 1894, an electrical fire consumed the station, destroying the central hall and iconic clock tower. Though the Depot was quickly rebuilt, its replacement, too, was short-lived. In the span of two short decades, the city found it had outgrown the now comparatively modest structure, and work began on a grand new vision for this reimagined gateway to the Mile High City.

Built from carved granite in the imposing Beaux-Arts style, the newly christened Denver Union Station at last opened its doors in 1914. Since then, it has played host to an impressive roster of notable dignitaries, from Queen Marie of Romania to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Station reached its zenith in the mid-1940s, welcoming more than 50,000 visitors daily, including many U.S. service members and their loved ones during the Second World War.

With the waning popularity of train travel in the latter half of the 20th century, the Station gradually fell into disuse. In 2001, efforts began in earnest to revitalize the once-great landmark of historic Lower Downtown, culminating in a grand reopening of the reimagined Denver Union Station as a shopping, dining, and cultural destination in 2014 - precisely one hundred years after the opening of the rebuilt structure.
Please feel free to contact us for any question or inquiries.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The History & Legacy of Denver Union Station | Denver Union Station

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On June 1, 1881, the Denver Union Depot opened its doors. Learn more about the fascinating history of Denver Union Station and its inception in the late 19th century.

# data[].attributes.headline
50 Native American Tribes Called Denver Home

# data[].attributes.subject
50 Native American Tribes Called Denver Home

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"The people coming to mine that gold were hostile to the Indigenous peoples who had been living here for hundreds of years," said Bock.

To protect Denver and the mines, the U.S. sent troops. In 1864, the U.S. Army attacked a camp of mostly women, children, and elders on Big Sandy Creek in southeastern Colorado, as the exhibit documents. The soldiers murdered more than 230 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapahoe people.

"It's really one of the most important moments in Colorado history," said Bock.

That moment came after a string of treaties were broken by the government, with John Evans, the second governor of the Colorado Territory from 1862-65, playing a central role.

"We were here defending our land," said Richard Williams, executive director of a nonprofit called People of the Sacred Land, who is Oglala Lakota and Cheyenne. "There was not a single person who was in Colorado at that time that was here legally."

Sand Creek also set the stage for more death and devastation.

"These people were pushed very far away from their homeland," Bock said. "They were pushed into residential boarding schools where their children against their will were taken and, and oftentimes, sadly had their language and culture literally beaten from them."

John Daley/CPR News
"You can't understand the creation of Colorado without understanding both the Sand Creek Massacre and the Gold Rush. They're all connected," said Sam Bock, publications director and lead exhibit developer for History Colorado.

The Sand Creek Massacre is a key moment in the history of the entire hemisphere, Williams said.

"Our, my, ancestors were living in their homeland, and they were surviving in a very comfortable manner. And they were annihilated," said Williams, an educator and former CEO of the American Indian College Fund. "Sand Creek, and the before and after of Sand Creek, from about 1861 to about 1869, is the worst case of genocide in the Americas."

Reconciling the past with the present

Momentum is building to revisit the past with an eye toward restoration and reconciliation.

In February, hundreds gathered at the Denver Indian Center, an urban cultural gathering center for the American Indian and Alaska Native community, which makes up roughly 2 percent of Colorado's population, according to the U.S. Census. They were there for the kickoff of an event aimed at sharing the history of Denver's American Indian and Indigenous Peoples communities.

"I think that we need to be able to tell our own story," said Williams, who gave an invocation.

Community members, surrounded by the flags of Native American nations that decorate the walls of the center, joined in a traditional round dance along with Seven Falls Indian Dancers.

Denver's Landmark Preservation team and Office of Storytelling are developing a written study and a documentary. Community members are telling their stories.

Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Rick Williams prepares to give an invocation at the Denver Indian Center as Denver's Office of Storytelling kicks off a project about the city's Indigenous community. Feb. 25, 2023.

The state too is working to bolster the historic record, including about the dozens of tribes with ties to the land here.

"History Colorado and the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs held tribal consultations to make a list of these 48 Tribes that have ties to what is now known as the state of Colorado," said spokesperson Melissa Dworkin in an email. That includes the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and Southern Ute Indian Tribe which have jurisdictions in Colorado.

An exhibit at History Colorado called Written on the Land documents the story of the Utes, Colorado's longest continuous residents, told in their own voices.

Currently, there are over 200 Tribal Nations represented in American Indian/Alaska Native communities in the Denver metro area, according to Dworkin.

Williams said history also requires a hard, often painful look at how Colorado was formed.

"You only need to ask yourself one question. Why are there no Indian reservations on the front range or in eastern plains of Colorado? And it's a sad story."

Williams hopes in better remembering, chronicling and understanding its history the people living in the land now known as Colorado can seek truth and chart a better future.

For him, the effort is long overdue.

"One hundred and fifty years," Williams said.

So who's who?
Courtesy of History Colorado.
Many tribes have called this place home. At least 48tribes have lived at times throughout the land we now call Colorado.

The Ancestral Puebloan People were farmers who lived in the southwest part of Colorado for thousands of years. They built homes, villages, and cliff dwellings. (In the recent past, they were incorrectly called "Anasazi".) Their modern descendants are these federally-recognized nations:

The Hopi Tribe, Arizona

Kewa Pueblo (formerly the Pueblo of Santo Domingo), New Mexico

Ohkay Owingeh (Pueblo of San Juan), New Mexico

Pueblo of Acoma, New Mexico

Pueblo de Cochiti, New Mexico

Pueblo of Isleta, New Mexico

Pueblo of Jemez, New Mexico)

Pueblo of Laguna, New Mexico

Pueblo of Nambe, New Mexico

Pueblo of Picuris, New Mexico

Pueblo of Pojoaque, New Mexico

Pueblo of San Felipe, New Mexico

Pueblo of San Ildefonso, New Mexico

Pueblo of Sandia, New Mexico

Pueblo of Santa Ana, New Mexico

Pueblo of Santa Clara, New Mexico

Pueblo of Taos, New Mexico

Pueblo of Tesuque, New Mexico

Pueblo of Zia, New Mexico

Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, Texas

Zuni Tribe of the Zuni Reservation, New Mexico

The Nuuciu, today known as the Ute, lived for generations in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico. They moved with the seasons to hunt and gather everything they needed and traded for horses. Today, the Utes are three tribes:

Southern Ute Indian Tribe, Colorado

Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Colorado and Utah

Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah & Ouray Reservation, Utah

Southern Ute and Ute Mountain are the only two Indian Reservations in Colorado. Tribes of the Great Basin lived in what is now western Colorado, and developed ways to live in a challenging desert environment. Their modern descendants are part of these sovereign tribes:

Navajo Nation, Arizona and New Mexico

Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah

San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe, Arizona

Many different tribes lived and moved through the Great Plains of eastern Colorado. Their lifeways centered on hunting bison, following a seasonal round, and trading for horses and other goods. Cheyenne and Arapaho people are today part of these tribal nations:

Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma

Northern Arapaho Tribe, Wind River, Wyoming

Northern Cheyenne Tribe, Montana

Many tribes were closely connected to the Southeastern plains of Colorado, their descendants are part of these tribal nations:

Apache Tribe of Oklahoma

Fort Sill Apache Tribe, Oklahoma

Jicarilla Apache Nation, New Mexico

Mescalero Apache Tribe, New Mexico

Comanche Nation, Oklahoma

Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma

Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma

Osage Nation, Oklahoma

Wichita & Affiliated Tribes, Oklahoma

Many tribes were closely connected to the Northeastern plains of Colorado, their descendants are part of these tribal nations:

Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, South Dakota

Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, South Dakota

Oglala Sioux Tribe, South Dakota

Rosebud Sioux Tribe, South Dakota

Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, North Dakota

Three Affiliated Tribes Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, North Dakota

Crow Tribe, Montana

Eastern Shoshone Tribe, Wind River Reservation, Wyoming

Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, Idaho

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Long before Denver was here, nearly 50 Native American tribes called the Front Range home

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Momentum is building to revisit the past with an eye toward restoration and reconciliation.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Sand Creek Massacre: The Betrayal that Changed Cheyenne and Arapaho People Forever

# data[].attributes.subject
The Sand Creek Massacre: The Betrayal that Changed Cheyenne and Arapaho People Forever

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Sand Creek Massacre was the deadliest day in Colorado's history, and it changed Cheyenne and Arapaho people forever. At sunrise on November 29, 1864, the US Army attacked a camp of mostly women, children, and elders on Big Sandy Creek in southeastern Colorado. The soldiers murdered more than 230 peaceful people.

History Colorado is telling the history of that betrayal from the perspectives of Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal representatives, drawn from oral histories that have been passed down for generations. Cheyenne and Arapaho people continue living with the unresolved trauma the massacre left behind. For many Cheyenne and Arapaho people, the Sand Creek Massacre isn't just history, it's family history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Sand Creek Massacre: The Betrayal that Changed Cheyenne and Arapah

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Sand Creek Massacre: The Betrayal that Changed Cheyenne and Arapaho People Forever - The Sand Creek Massacre was the deadliest day in Colorado's history, and it changed Cheyenne and Arapaho people forever. At sunrise on November 29, 1864, the US Army attacked a camp of mostly women, children, and elders on Big Sandy Creek in southeastern Colorado.

# data[].attributes.headline
Amache Internment Camp Survivor Bob Fuchigami

# data[].attributes.subject
Amache Internment Camp Survivor Bob Fuchigami

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Amache Internment Camp survivor Bob Fuchigami

# data[].attributes.headline
Amache: Japanese American Internment in Colorado Online Exhibit

# data[].attributes.subject
Amache: Japanese American Internment in Colorado Online Exhibit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
ERROR: The request could not be satisfied

# data[].attributes.headline
Japanese Americans Imprisoned at Amache: Lifetimes of Silence and Undeserved Shame

# data[].attributes.subject
Japanese Americans Imprisoned at Amache: Lifetimes of Silence and Undeserved Shame

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Fifteen miles from the Kansas border, Prowers County Road 23½ comes to a dusty end, surrounded by sagebrush and prickly pear cacti and dead junipers. A place this newspaper called, eight decades ago, "as bleak a spot as one can find on the western plains."

In one of the more shameful moments in American history, the federal government removed 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals from their homes on the West Coast between 1942 and 1945 and imprisoned 10,000 over that timespan in far southeast Colorado, at a concentration camp it euphemistically named the Granada Relocation Center.

The inmates called it Amache.

"No charges were leveled against us. No trial, no hearings," recalled Bob Fuchigami, who was 11 years old when he was imprisoned there. "We were loyal, patriotic, law-abiding citizens."

The story of Amache is one of despair, desolation and, for 121 inmates, death. But it's also a story about what came next, about a generation who rebuilt their lives and even thrived, all the while keeping quiet about the trauma they carried. It's a story of bigotry and hate worth revisiting as the U.S. witnesses a new spike in anti-Asian violence and Colorado congressmen move to make Amache part of the National Park Service, preserving the site for generations to come.

"You try to make sense of what is being done to you and part of your thought process is to return to the idea that you deserved it somehow, even though you know you didn't," said Calvin Hada, an Amache descendant and president of the Nikkeijin Kai, or Japanese American Club, of Colorado.

"They were not saboteurs or fifth columnists or spies. They were just people trying to make a living."

Eyeballs and grit

In 2004, while cleaning out his late grandmother's possessions, Mitch Homma came across a trove of documents he had never seen or heard of: arrest warrants, letters, photographs of Amache. They revealed that three generations of his prominent Japanese American family were locked up for being Japanese, nine people in all. His grandfather and the camp's dentist, Kyushiro Homma, died there of a heart attack after losing 30 pounds.

"My father and his siblings, they didn't talk about Amache," Homma said. "My grandmother certainly didn't talk about it."

Homma's father, Hisao, returned to Amache for the first time in 2008, telling stories of his childhood that Homma had never heard. When Hisao entered a nursing home in his later years, more stories came out.

"I probably learned more about Amache in those last three years than I did my whole life growing up," Homma said.

In Japan, Homma's family had been members of the samurai class, nobles who lived by a code that said to never surrender. With imprisonment at Amache came embarrassment and shame.

"In Japanese culture, we're very sensitive to shame," Hada said. "A friend once told me that the Japanese are as sensitive to shame as an eyeball is to grit."

Hada was raised in a middle-class Lakewood home with no inkling of Amache or his grandmother's time there. One day, his father dropped a book on his desk and said, "You should read this." It was "Nisei: The Quiet Americans," a history of Japanese Americans in the West by Bill Hosokawa. Hada read nearly all of it in one sitting, his first lesson on internment.

Kirsten Leong's introduction to Amache was similar to Homma's, cleaning out her late grandmother's belongings in 2011. She found a photo, flipped it over and saw on the back, "In Amache concentration camp." She had been repeatedly told that none of her family had been imprisoned during World War II. But four great-grandparents and two great-uncles were at Amache.

"Our family's experience of not talking about it was really similar to a lot of people in our community," Leong said.

"If you look back at our family pictures from the 1950s, they look like 'Leave It to Beaver,' they look like 'Father Knows Best,'" she said. "It was always about trying to be as American as possible and playing up how American you are, because they got locked up for looking different and not being American enough."

Even the most famous inmate didn't tell his daughter until she was a junior in high school.

Fred Korematsu refused to be imprisoned and challenged the constitutionality of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, which created the concentration camps - 10 overall in remote parts of the country. In Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the executive order, a ruling it has since condemned. (Korematsu was imprisoned in Utah.)

"Culturally, the Japanese keep everything inside," his daughter Karen Korematsu, who first learned of her father's defiance during a high school class presentation, said in an interview. "They're not ones to be boisterous and loud and to complain. It's a part of their culture."

Robin Lawrentz, president of the Japan-America Society of Southern Colorado, said he knows several people who only recently learned their family was placed in Amache or the other camps.

"One of them was born at an internment camp in Arkansas and didn't know that until much later," he said. "Those older generations were less likely ... to make it known."

But it's a story that must be known now, said Korematsu, whose Korematsu Institute works with K-12 teachers to educate children about America's concentration camps. She believes ignorance of Asian Americans' experiences is partly to blame for a worrisome uptick in anti-Asian violence.

Thirty-two percent of Asian American adults told Pew Research Center pollsters last month that they have feared physical threats and attacks, a higher percentage than any other racial group, and 81% said violence against the Asian American community is increasing. On Tuesday, Congress sent President Joe Biden a bill that aims to expedite the reporting and review of anti-Asian hate crimes.

"The Amache story is not over," Fuchigami told a congressional subcommittee last month from his home in Evergreen. "Asians in America, including some of the most vulnerable, are still discriminated against, treated as invisible and suffer from hate crimes to this day."

The stories they told

Amache was constructed on land that once belonged to the Southern Cheyenne tribe, which was stripped of its land and relocated by the federal government. The smallest of the 10 concentration camps and lesser known than California's high-security Tule Lake or Arizona's Gila River camp, Amache's construction required 1,000 workers, several months and $4.5 million (about $74 million in today's dollars).

It provided a brief boon for the nearby towns of Granada and Lamar, but the government's purchase of private land angered locals.

After a journey of several days, Japanese Americans usually arrived at night and stumbled into one of 348 barracks. The barracks were divided into six apartments no bigger than 24 feet wide and 20 feet long, empty except for a coal-burning stove, military cots and a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. Bathrooms were communal and had no doors, so many women waited until nighttime to use them. Days were spent working in the fields or a silkscreen shop.

As a kid, Mike Honda would ask his mother about dreams in which he was at a camp. His mother would explain over the dinner table that they had been imprisoned at a place called Amache. His father and grandfather, free-thinking and defiant, discussed internment, too.

"It upset (my father) because he felt like he was an American and his rights were being curtailed. His father was even more upset because all the things he had been able to accrue (were lost): a gas station, a pickup truck, his guns and his radio, things like that," recalled Honda, who went on to become an eight-term California congressman.

His grandfather went so far as to push his truck into the Sacramento River to ensure the government didn't take it.

As a twentysomething, Honda spoke to a junior high class about the camps. Afterward, the parents of one Japanese American student invited Honda to their home.

"I thought I was in trouble but I went and they asked me to sit down with them, to tell their story more fully with their children. They brought out a box of photos and they shared the story with their kids, with me there adding to it and validating what had happened," Honda recalled. "I think that was the first time I realized there were parents who did not talk about it."

Honda's father left Amache to work for the Military Intelligence Service, one of the few pathways inmates had to get out. About 950 Amache inmates volunteered for the U.S. Army to escape and 31 died fighting in Europe with the 442nd Regiment, a highly decorated combat unit. Marcia Yonemoto's uncle died fighting in France as his family was locked up in Amache.

"I asked my mother, 'How did you feel about that? I mean, here you are, your family is jailed in the United States for being Japanese and your brother gets killed defending the U.S. in Europe. Did you think that was unfair?'" said Yonemoto, a University of Colorado-Boulder history professor. "And she said, 'Oh, yeah.' She was maybe 13 at the time but she remembered feeling it was not right."

Fuchigami, who was a preteen in Amache, later served in the Korean War. Hisao Homma joined the Marines, in part because his family had lost everything and couldn't afford to send him to college. One of Leong's uncles also worked for the Military Intelligence Service. The father of Derek Okubo, executive director of Denver's Agency for Human Rights, left Amache, enlisted in the Army and was sent to occupied Japan.

A wrong atop a wrong

This year, Coloradans in Congress have introduced two bills meant to turn Amache into a national historic site, a designation three other former camps have. That would bring National Park Service funding and resources to a place that has, for 25 years, been maintained by Granada High School teacher John Hopper and his students. A guard tower, water tower, mess hall and barrack have been restored at the site. Concrete foundations, along with the original roads, remain intact.

"Preserving and protecting the Amache site presents a valuable opportunity to better our country, our state, our history and most importantly our future in the spirit of justice, equity and inclusion," Colorado Gov. Jared Polis wrote Tuesday in supporting the quest for a designation.

Midori Takeuchi, Japan's consul general in Denver, also supports the designation. She said Tuesday that the legislation in Congress "would provide an educational chance for future generations to learn the history of Japanese Americans, and hand their stories and lessons down to posterity."

Amache's namesake was the daughter of a Cheyenne sub-chief murdered in 1864 at the Sand Creek Massacre, 35 miles northwest of Camp Amache as the crow flies.

It wasn't until the 2000s that Sand Creek became a national historic site, thanks to a push from Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a former U.S. senator from Colorado and member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe. Growing up in California in the 1930s and '40s, Campbell knew some of the Japanese Americans who were forced to sell their belongings for cheap before being loaded onto trains and buses and sent away.

"I wish like hell that I would have included language for (preserving) Amache when I introduced my Sand Creek bill," he said.

Okubo, whose father and grandparents were at Amache, said it's a history that cannot be forgotten.

"It's one of the biggest stains and darkest periods in our nation's history," he said. "When you're talking about this country that's supposed to represent freedom and equality and equity - what they did was counter to every one of those values. It's important to remember the history for the full purpose of not allowing it to happen again to any people."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
For Japanese Americans imprisoned at Amache internment camp, lifetimes of silence and undeserved shame

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The World War II-era Amache internment camp in far southeast Colorado brought despair and desolation for thousands of Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals. But their story is also about a generation who rebuilt their lives while keeping quiet about the trauma they carried.

# data[].attributes.body
What are the main agricultural products of Denver?

# data[].attributes.body
What are Denver’s biggest industries today?

# data[].attributes.body
Have any statues been removed or replaced as Indigenous People and land are given back their importance?

# data[].attributes.body
What is the city’s relationship to their native populations?

# data[].attributes.body
Japanese internment in Colorado looked so similar to the Topaz camp in Utah

# data[].attributes.body
Why is there a blue bear outside the convention center?

# data[].attributes.body
Why is it called the Mile High City?

# data[].attributes.body
How far from Denver was the Amache internment camp

# data[].attributes.body
Where are the indigenous people now?

Did the internment camps result in Asians settling in the area?

# data[].attributes.body
What was the foundation to create Denver?

What are some of the culture influences we can see in the city and the stories of the people behind them?

# data[].attributes.body
Does the clock still work?? And does the Greek amphitheater still host live events??

# data[].attributes.body
Early Denver history consists of immigrants moving into the area similar to many other cultures around the world 🌎

# data[].attributes.headline
What does the open face statue stand for? 

# data[].attributes.subject
What does the open face statue stand for? 

# data[].attributes.body
Will the mile above sea level marker continue to change?

# data[].attributes.body
What is the significance of the monuments all being in line?

# data[].attributes.body
Why Broncho and not bronco?

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Strolling through Denver’s vibrant cultural  tapestry.  

# data[].attributes.body
Walking through Denver’s eclectic, colorful history.

# data[].attributes.body
We discovered 5 new things about our capital city, we didn’t know about before.

# data[].attributes.body
Women came!

Women saw!

Women conquered!

# data[].attributes.body
We came. We saw. We photographed. ✅

# data[].attributes.body
Mile High City history and art

# data[].attributes.body
The nature of history in Denver

# data[].attributes.body
Swept away in Mile High City 😊