Camping with Ghosts of America’s Past

The desert can be an inhospitable place. Moab, Utah, is like that. It can be like an unfaithful lover, leaving you high and dry. After all, it is a desert more than 4,000 feet above sea level.

I ventured there without any definite plans for camping accommodations. Arches National Park maintains a minimal number of campsites that book early. Canyonlands National Park has 23 campsites that are up for grabs on a first-come basis, but I arrived too late to be so fortunate. Other nearby campgrounds with names like Horsethief and Dead Horse provide ample slots where traveling folk can rest their heads. Of course, if you don’t mind being on the outskirts of the tourist town a bit further away from the national parks, you can find BLM land with a vast number of campsites.

BLM used to stand for Bureau of Land Management, before the Black Lives Matter protests. Many acres of federal lands are being given to corporate interests for oil and natural gas exploration, particularly in Utah. A friendly traveler recommended a BLM parcel on Dalton Wells Road. The BLM campsites I’ve found are on rocky roads, dirt roads or what barely passes for a road where four-wheel drive is a good idea. Dalton Wells was no different. I forgot to turn on the 4WD until I went beyond the solid rock road and started sinking in soft sand. Once I shifted into gear I easily covered the river of sand and hit solid land again.

The area was desolate. I drove less than a mile, guided by a full moon at twilight, and spotted an unclaimed fire ring where I could establish camp. The nearest neighbors were a hundred yards away or more. There was not a tree in sight, only sagebrush and something Utahns call biscuitroot. Way in the distance, the La Sal Mountains broke the flat tedium. It was a far cry from the mountains, buttes and canyons no further than the other side of the highway.

I slept comfortably in the Jeep so I could zoom out early in the morning to photograph Arches in the morning light. As the beautiful sunrise erupted over the mountains, I saw just how desolate this place was. It served my purpose, and it was free. Later that day, quite by accident, I learned the history of Dalton Wells. On my way out of town, I needed to pull off the highway to make an essential phone call, so I turned down Dalton Wells Road. Off to the side of a parking area was a historical placard that told the story of one of America’s biggest black eyes. During World War II, the land beneath my feet was a concentration camp for Japanese-Americans.

After the Great Depression, Dalton Wells became a CCC camp – the Conservation Corps established by FDR. The camp was deserted by 1941, although the administration buildings and barracks remained. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing a campaign to round up American citizens of Japanese descent and keep them under a watchful eye in Manzanar, a prison camp “relocation center” in a remote part of California. Protests erupted there when kitchen workers accused administrators of  theft when sugar, meat and other supplies designated for the prisoners went missing.

Five of the rioters were labeled “troublemakers’ and separated, including Harry Ueno, who became known as the “Manzanar Martyr,” even though he didn’t die in the incident. But he did become a scapegoat, and with four others, he was shipped to Dalton Wells January 11, 1943. More men were confined there, some for offenses as small as offending a nurse with an insult. One day turned into 106 days. On April 27, the growing number of Japanese-Americans at Dalton Wells were integrated with others at an abandoned Indian boarding school in Leupp, Arizona. Ueno was among the last five to leave. After spending 11 days in a nearby jail, the five men were crammed into a 4’ x 6’ crate loaded on the back of a pickup truck and driven to their new Arizona encampment.

Some accounts say that a fence was build around the compound at Dalton Wells, although there is no record of it and no remnants of a fence. Those who were incarcerated claim there was no need for a fence because the area was so barren that escape seemed futile. At that time, the nearest city was more than 100 miles away.

Ueno described Dalton Wells being “about as far from civilization as one could get at the time, perhaps the American equivalent of Siberia.”

The isolation center was headed by career bureaucrat Ray Best. He attempted to intimidate Ueno and the inmates, telling him, “You know this place is wide open country. Nothing but sagebrush. Anybody could die in here, and they will never find his body.”

At its peak, the Dalton Wells concentration camp held 49 men. They were guarded by 150 military police. During the Cold War, Moab would become the Uranium Capital of the World and later, a hub for motion pictures and recreation. Canyonlands became a National Park in 1964 and Arches in 1971. Aside from the few who turn off the highway onto the BLM road, millions of visitors pass by Dalton Wells never knowing of its place in American history.