Archeologists find that people sent to Camp Amache during WWII sought respite in the Arkansas River ...Middle East

It depends on your point of view. Sun reporters have fanned out along the Arkansas River, from the headwaters near Leadville to the border with Kansas, to learn what the river means to people in the places it runs through.

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ㅤ⚲ㅤ GRANADA

First the farmers arrived, flushed from the West Coast by Executive Order 9066 and a wave of “civilian exclusion orders,” loaded up with a roll of bedsheets and as many suitcases as they could carry. 

They left their pets and livestock. They left the soil they’d tended season after season, almond trees and rows of tomatoes, and boarded buses to Merced and Santa Anita, California, then got on trains to the Granada Relocation Center in southeastern Colorado, 15 miles west of the Kansas border. 

The first group of 200 people arrived Aug. 27, 1942, to finish building their own barracks and clearing the fields. Then thousands more were incarcerated, creating in a matter of weeks what one Rocky Mountain News reporter called “the strangest city in Colorado.”

The Granada Relocation Center — better known as Amache — was purposely chosen for its remote location. All 10 relocation centers hastily built in the spring and summer of 1942 were sited in the country’s dust bowls and deserts to contain people of Japanese descent. And sure, in the eyes of the U.S. government headquartered roughly 1,500 miles east, Colorado’s Eastern Plains were as windswept and dust ridden as the rest. 

Whatever scrubby native foliage had grown on this terrace above the Arkansas River was bulldozed by the square mile to make room for tar-paper barracks, and the untethered sands tormented incarcerees.

But Amache had the Arkansas. 

Since 2008, Dr. Bonnie Clark, archeology professor at the University of Denver and founder of the Amache Archeology Project, has worked with a shifting crew of students, Amache survivors and descendants, Granada locals, amateur archeologists and volunteers to meticulously uncover an expansive network of gardens cultivated by incarcerees during their wartime imprisonment. 

The gardens are divided into three types: vegetable gardens, ornamental entryway gardens and community gardens. 

All three were fed by the Arkansas. Some in obvious ways — the river irrigated the vegetable gardens, for instance — and others in far more obscure ways, like the culling of river rocks for spiritual ends. 

Clay-rich soil was carted up from the banks to supplement the anemic sands for elaborate ornamental gardens. Trees and shrubs were uprooted and transplanted for much-needed shade, then landscaped with the river’s smooth cobbles and gravel.

The ubiquity of gardens at Amache points to a deep reverence for and need to understand the new landscape, Clark wrote in a 2020 book, “Finding Solace in the Soil,” which contains a dozen years of research on the gardens.

“Ultimately, the way it fused art and act, place and spirit, mind and body,” she wrote, “gardening was a material practice especially suited to help the people of Japanese ancestry imprisoned at Amache cope with a nearly unlivable situation.”

Expert knowledge and skill

Clark’s lab at the University of Denver is a museum unto itself, an incredible repository of Amache artifacts from her nearly two decades surveying the site. There are old photos and blueprints and pennants pinned to her walls, a storage unit of neatly labeled boxes — each box corresponding to one block of barracks — juts out into the center of the room. 

“I’ve always really been interested in the way that people make places, and especially how that happens when your identity is under siege,” Clark told The Colorado Sun. At Amache, she encountered a history of people whose identity issues were “amplified,” she said. “Because basically it was like, you’re a farmer or a dentist one day, and the next day you’re an enemy alien.”

Clark is a gardener, and the way she lights up talking about soil composition seems a combination of her career and her pastime — hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours spent kneeling in the dirt. 

In 2012, Clark’s Amache crew discovered what would have been an especially ravishing personal garden in front of Barrack 9 in Block 11H, likely created by Zenkichi Sairyo and Kahichi Yokoi, neighboring “bachelor gardeners,” a common term for single men who before the war lived in boarding houses and trained as landscapers. 

Pollen samples taken from their shared entryway revealed mint (likely grown as a cover crop), corn, and some type of plum or peach. There was parsley pollen, as well as traces from the lily, mallow and blackberry families. Petunia seeds were present — probably fetched through mail-order catalogues — and a low woody plant in the caltrop family, native to the area. 

Research by one of Clark’s students in 2015 determined that to grow this dense variety, the gardeners enriched their soil with iron fragments sourced from the slag of the Amache blacksmith shop, and a compost made from tiny fish netted in the Arkansas. 

“Such a garden comes about only through expert knowledge and skill,” Clark wrote in “Finding Solace in the Soil.”

Dr. Bonnie Clark, professor of archeology at the University of Denver, looks through a box of artifacts collected from the Amache National Historic Site on Feb. 7, 2025. Each box corresponds to a different “block,” or section of barracks, that Clark and her research teams have studied over the past 17 years. In the second photo, she holds a photo of vegetable gardens — known during wartime as “victory gardens” — planted at the edge of the barracks in Amache. (Parker Yamasaki, The Colorado Sun)

By the time World War II started, over 43% of the Japanese population in the U.S. was working in agriculture, with another 26% working in horticulture or ag-related businesses, like farm stands and flower shops. About half of Amache’s population arrived with such expert knowledge and skill. 

Despite photo evidence of Arkansas River plants in the gardens and along the barracks, it wasn’t until 2016 that Clark found actual archeological evidence that the shrubs and trees used for shade had once grown along the riverbank. 

“I’m digging down to see if I’ve got any actual decaying tree, what we call the tree mold, and that’s when I saw this gray,” she said. “It just pops up against this sandy, tan soil. I’m like, woah!” she snaps her fingers. “That color! That color is crazy!”

She sent the gray, clay-filled soil sample to a lab and found it full of pollen from water-loving plants. “The pollen samples confirmed what I thought, which was that this had to come from the Arkansas,” she said. “It would not have just shown up on a dune.”

The spirits and their sake

The Japanese also carried with them their spiritual traditions, including Christianity and Buddhism, evidenced by the churches and temples built at Amache, and Shinto, which does not appear in the official records. 

Shinto had been adopted as the state religion in Japan a few decades prior to World War II. During the war, the U.S. banned Shinto and destroyed many of its places of worship.

Central to the tradition are “kami,” sometimes described as deities or spirits, though their actual form is much slipperier. There is kami in wind, in waterfalls, in the sun; kami in qualities, like growth or good harvests; kami in the trees and certainly kami in the river rocks. 

At Amache, “it seems very likely that the river gravel, natural stone and native plants were linked by some to the kami of the new landscape in which they found themselves,” Clark said during a presentation at the Denver Art Museum in January. “A belief in the kami of natural stone in particular might explain the lengths that some incarcerees went to acquire such materials.”

And there is the 6F garden. 

The garden, surrounded by four arcs of double-planted trees and shrubs, took up the majority of the common area in block 6F and was used for many purposes — art classes, photo backdrops, marble games, picnics.

Last summer Clark and Jonathan Thumas, researcher of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, discovered evidence of what they believe were secret Shinto practices in the 6F garden. 

For one, there is a small brick foundation at one end which could have received water from the nearby bathhouse, perfect for washing one’s hands and feet before worship, a common Shinto practice. 

Even more convincing are the sake jugs.

Sake is an important substance in Shinto, a divine drink offered to kami at every occasion. Large shrines in Japan have colorful walls of stacked sake barrels, home shrines will often include a small cup for passing spirits who want a slurp. 

Though drinking alcohol was outlawed in the camp, and selling it to incarcerees was outlawed in town, one particularly enterprising drugstore owner figured out a way to acquire an entire warehouse of sake from San Francisco and have it shipped to Granada, where he sold it out the back door of his store. 

In the middle of the 6F garden, research crews found five smashed sake jugs buried in a line. 

“We’ve found the occasional sake jug remnants beneath a tree, but we have never yet before seen a pattern of sake jugs purposely destroyed and left at set intervals across a space,” Clark said of the discovery. 

“It seems very likely to me that these were deposited at the end of camp,” she said. “They call to mind the kind of closing offerings that are often seen at other sacred spaces, such as Mayan temples just prior to closing. Such offerings release the spirits that were once appeased there.”

Tending the topsoil

By the time the camp closed on Oct. 15, 1945, three years after the first incarcerees arrived, the grounds had been transformed from a sandy terrace where Amache leaders frequently bemoaned “the dust problem,” to a rich agricultural site where vegetables that had never taken root in that corner of Colorado grew: daikon, eggplant, Chinese cabbage. Their shoddy barracks were now lined with cottonwoods and dogwood trees, their entryways adorned with blackberry, canna lilies, roses and rye. 

The site is now overgrown with the scrubby sagebrush that was bulldozed to make way for the barracks. Prickly pear cacti have emerged again, too, and some of the Siberian elms that incarcerees planted are still standing. The transplanted cottonwoods died off, though, with no river to dip their roots into and no one around to water them.

In the penultimate issue of the Granada Pioneer, a biweekly newspaper published by incarcerees, editors printed an excerpt from an essay by Christopher Morley, originally published in a 1936 collection called “Streamliness.”

“We hear a good deal about the agricultural problem of soil erosion; hillsides denuded of fertile soil by the actions of streams, of great regions of the Middle Western richness scoured off by dust storms,” the excerpt reads. “Surely not less serious is the matter of mind erosion; the dust storms of daily excitement and of continual triviality can easily blow away the sensitive topsoil of the spirit.”

Clark returns every year with a new roster of helpers, eager to dig, brush and sift through the dusty square mile that was once a strange town’s center, square inch by square inch, seed by seed. 

Her knowledge of the place is nearly encyclopedic, any topic she wanted to research could essentially be hers to lead. But season after season she sticks with the gardens.  

“I think a lot about focusing on where people have agency, where they express the human side of themselves in an inhumane situation,” Clark said. “That for me feels like the right thing to do.”

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