Valley Fever, a Short-Lived Cotton Picking Program, and Other Stories from Gila River Concentration Camp

September 3, 2025

The Gila River concentration camp was one of two in the state of Arizona and was built on land controlled by the Office of Indian Affairs on the ancestral land of the Akimel O’otham and Pee Posh peoples. One of the largest of the WRA concentration camps, with a peak population of 13,348, Gila consisted of two separate camps located around four miles apart that came to be called Canal and Butte, the latter about twice as large as the former. 

Due in part to its distinctive appearance—barracks were covered with white beaverboard and the double roofs (to help alleviate the heat) were red—Gila was regarded by the WRA as the “model camp” and was where dignitaries including Eleanor Roosevelt visited. (Though there was some unrest, triggered by a beating incident, in November 1942.) Gila’s incarceree population came largely from California, mostly from rural parts of the Central Valley and coast, though there was also a significant number from Los Angeles. The site today is owned by the Gila River Indian Community and access is granted only with permission.

Here are some other things that made Gila River unique.

“White Zone” People

Along with Poston and Tule Lake, Gila River had a substantial number of incarcerees who came directly from the eastern part of California that had been designated as “Military Area #2” and that was referred to as the “White Zone” at the time. Two things distinguished this group—which numbered about 3,000 at Gila—from other incarcerees: (a) they were initially under the impression that they would be allowed to remain in their homes, until the Western Defense Command reversed course in June 1942 under heavy political pressure and ruled that they too would be subject to removal, and (b) they did not go first to an “assembly center” but came directly to Gila.

At Tule Lake in particular, this group became a particularly disaffected population, in large part because many had moved to the eastern part of the state during the “voluntary evacuation” period, often at great expense and effort, only to be told later they would be excluded anyway. This didn’t seem to be the case at Gila, as most of this White Zone group had lived there all along, mostly in rural areas in the eastern part of Fresno County, including Del Rey, Parlier, and Selma. The White Zone blocks in Canal, where most ended up living, in fact had among the highest rates of “yes-yes” answers and many who volunteered for the army during the “loyalty questionnaire” period.¹

Stuck in Casa Grande

The chaos of the hurried transfer from “assembly centers” in the summer and fall of 1942 led to additional hardships for many arrivals to Gila River. Incarcerees arrived by train at Casa Grande and traveled by bus from there, a distance of about sixteen miles. Groups from Turlock and Tulare arrived in groups of around five hundred a day in July and August. However, there weren’t enough busses—which carried only forty or fifty passengers each—to transfer all of those arriving by train in a timely manner. Thus, many had to wait hours in the Arizona heat to be taken to Gila. 

In a 2003 interview, George Okada recalled that “… we were stranded in Casa Grande from ten o’clock until four o’clock because we were in the last car and we were stranded there because they forgot to pick us up and this was in the first part of August, a hundred and twenty degrees.” It was more unnecessary hardship brought about by the hurried implementation of the ill-conceived forced exclusion policy.²

Valley Fever

While dust storms are a part of camp lore at pretty much all of the WRA camps, the dust at Gila carried a particular peril—a fungus endemic to the region that caused coccidioidomycosis, colloquially known as “valley fever.” Once inhaled—something that was nearly inevitable for Gila incarcerees—the fungus caused flu-like symptoms and rashes for many that, like COVID, turned into long-term suffering for some. Nearly all of the Gila River incarcerees suffered from valley fever at some point during their incarceration there, which added to the “normal” hardships suffered by those at other camps.³

Model Ship Factory

In addition to being one of the three WRA camps to have a camouflage net factory—there was a fourth at Santa Anita, an “assembly center” not run by the WRA—Gila also had a model ship factory that was located in the warehouse area of the Canal camp. As with the net factory, the model ship factory was meant to provide incarcerees with the opportunity to aid in the war effort. The general idea was for the incarcerees to make models of both Allied and Axis ships that could be used to train navy personnel to quickly identify the ships from various angles. The shop opened in March 1943 using equipment brought over from an existing Works Progress Administration shop in New York. Incarceree workers built models on a scale of fifty to sixty feet to the inch, and the finished models were sent to the Naval Training Section in Washington, DC. Some six hundred models were completed by the time the shop closed in January 1944. The shop was one of the places that Eleanor Roosevelt visited during her trip to Gila in April 1943. After the shop’s closing, the space was used for a furniture repair shop that ran until November 1944.⁴

The Fence, Briefly

As at several other WRA camps, the changing policies over fences confused and angered incarcerees. As incarcerees arrived at Gila from July through October of 1942, there were no fences, though military police patrolled the perimeters. Despite there having been no problems with incarcerees trying to escape or any other reasons to build a fence, the army insisted on building one in December 1942. Barbed wire fences eventually surrounded both the Canal and Butte camps, and one guard tower was also constructed. Incarcerees were allowed to roam the site during the day, but were restricted to the fenced areas at night. Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study fieldworkers Charles Kikuchi and Robert Spencer observed that even though the fence “keeps no one confined, there is great resentment against it.” The fence and guard tower ended up lasting less than six months, coming down in the spring of 1943. Camp Director Leroy Bennett wrote that the “posts and wire [were] removed and used on the farm.”⁵

Movement of Exclusion Boundaries

A possible factor in the decision to take down the fences was a change in the boundaries of the exclusion area. The initial boundary in Arizona placed the Poston and Gila River sites within the exclusion zone, as was the case of the Manzanar and Tule Lake sites in California. Because of this, the Western Defense Command and military police assigned to these camps were stricter about letting incarcerees out, whether to work or to frequent nearby towns.

On March 2, 1943, General John DeWitt issued Public Proclamation No. 16, which shifted the boundary of the exclusion area in Arizona south by approximately sixty miles. As a result, Poston and Gila River were now outside the restricted area. The reason for this change was likely to facilitate Japanese American labor on farms in the area. In the fall of 1942, some 10,000 Japanese Americans temporarily left the concentration camps to serve as farm laborers—mainly to harvest sugar beets—in parts of the West outside of the restricted zone. Though Arizona farmers also wanted to avail themselves of Nikkei labor, they were largely unable to while the Arizona camps and many of the farms remained in the restricted area. Phoenix and the Salt River Valley, the latter the site of a prewar farming community, were also now outside the restricted area, and the WRA announced that incarcerees from those areas would be allowed to return home.⁶

Beyond the fences at Gila coming down, the move of the border seemed to have minimal impact. For various reasons, relatively few incarcerees from the Arizona camps left to serve as farm laborers. And few of the Arizona Nikkei opted to return home initially, given that most had disposed of homes and properties and thus had nowhere to return to and that Arizona remained particularly unfriendly to Japanese Americans.⁷

The Largest Agricultural Program of all the WRA Camps

The WRA mandated that every camp have an agricultural program, the idea being that incarceree skills and labor could help feed the camp population, but also that the land could be made productive for whomever controlled it afterwards. Each camp had a white chief of the agricultural division whose job it was to supervise the incarceree workers and coax as much work out of them as possible, given the low WRA wages and the general lack of any profit motive. 

While each of the WRA camps could claim their agricultural programs achieved some level of “success,” the programs at Gila River and Tule Lake produced more than any of the other camps by an order of magnitude. Of these, Gila’s was the largest operation, at one time producing all of the vegetables consumed at that camp and some 20% of produce consumed by the other camps. There were various reasons for this. One was the presence of 7,000 acres of previously cultivated land located between the Canal and Butte camps that allowed for planting to begin almost immediately, along with a climate favorable for growing many kinds of vegetables. Another was an incarceree population that largely came from rural areas and that included many experienced farmers and farm workers. Agriculture Chief David A. Rogers also devised a system whereby mostly Issei foremen were assigned smaller “farms” where they were allowed to hire their own workers and to produce Japanese crops such as nappa and daikon. And while this no doubt happened at other camps as well, Gila officials seemed to largely look the other way when farm workers supplemented their meager salaries by taking produce home for their own consumption and to sell.⁸

Gila also had a seed farm that supplied seeds to other WRA camps including many Japanese vegetable seeds. There was also a large livestock operation that included chickens, hogs, and both beef and dairy cows.⁹

Tuberculosis Wards

In an era prior to antibiotics, tuberculosis was a feared disease that affected many, including no small number of Japanese Americans. At that time, it was widely believed that TB patients would benefit from dry desert air, resulting in Gila being one of the camps to have a TB ward where cases from other camps would be sent. That Gila’s windblown dry desert air also contained the “valley fever” fungus was apparently not considered.¹⁰

The bulk of Gila’s incarceree population came from the Tulare, Turlock, and Santa Anita Assembly Centers, along with those who entered directly as noted above. But beyond any TB patients among these groups, there were almost 400 TB patients and family members sent to Gila from the Fresno and Stockton Assembly Centers. Essentially all other incarcerees from these two camps were sent to the Arkansas WRA camps, where the humid conditions were likely seen as particularly harmful to TB patients. There were also forty from Pinedale sent to Gila, who may also have been TB patients, though I couldn’t find any information on the characteristics of this group.¹¹

Dedicated TB wards were set at the hospitals in both the Butte and Canal camps. But given the particular stigma TB had among Japanese Americans, it was difficult to find nursing staff willing to tend to these patients, particularly for the paltry WRA wages. Eventually family members of TB patients were enlisted to care for them.¹²

The Hawai`i Group

Gila also had a small but significant group of incarcerees from Hawai`i. Most were among the 2,000 or so former Jerome incarcerees who transferred to Gila after the June 1944 closing of that camp. Some eight hundred Japanese Americans from Hawai`i had been sent to Jerome directly between November 1942 and February 1943, many of whom were family members of male community leaders who had been previously arrested and interned. Over two hundred of this group came to Gila from Jerome, representing some 60% of those from Hawai`i who remained in Jerome at the time it closed—a much higher percentage than the rest of Jerome’s remaining population, of whom only 35% came to Gila. I don’t know why so many of the Hawai`i group came to Gila and to what extent it represented the preference of the Hawai`i incarcerees. Among this group were artist George Hoshida and his family. Due to the difficulty in finding passage to Hawai`i, 155 members of this group were the very last to leave Gila, finally departing on November 10, 1945.¹³

Cotton Picking

Shortages of farm laborers drove many Western farmers to demand that incarcerated Japanese Americans be temporarily released to help “save” various crops in the summer and fall of 1942. This was ironic since (a) one of the factors behind the shortage of laborers was the incarceration of Japanese Americans, including farm workers, and (b) leaders of nearly all Western states vehemently opposed the resettlement of Japanese Americans in their states, which was a major reason that Japanese Americans excluded from the West Coast ended up in concentration camps. Nonetheless, the WRA worked with local officials to facilitate the short term leave of thousands of Japanese American farm workers in 1942, most of whom came from Minidoka, Topaz, Heart Mountain, and Amache, and most of whom worked in the sugar beet fields of farms in the general vicinity of those camps. Though many problems ensued, this program has generally been viewed as a success in that incarceree workers did help the war effort through their labor and in the process improved the image of Japanese Americans in many of these states. 

For the four camps in the exclusion area—the ones in California and in Arizona—the logistics of outside farm labor were much more difficult and thus relatively limited. One notable and perhaps instructive example was the short-lived effort by Arizona cotton farmers to enlist Gila River incarcerees to pick cotton in the fall of 1942. Much like sugar beet farmers further north, Arizona cotton farmers approached WRA officials about incarceree labor. Starting in September 1942, the call went out for cotton pickers, who would be paid prevailing outside wages.¹⁴

For various reasons, the cotton picking experience was short-lived. While there were many Nikkei incarcerees who were experienced farmers or farm workers, essentially none had experience picking cotton. As such, the first volunteers proved unsatisfactory to the cotton farmers. And since wages were pegged to the amount of cotton picked, wages also proved unsatisfactory to the workers given the arduous conditions. Because both Gila and the cotton farms were within the exclusion area, the workers also had to be accompanied and constantly watched by armed guards. Gila Director Leroy Bennett later wrote that this situation gave incarceree workers the “feeling that they were prisoners of war.” (As noted above/below, the boundaries of the exclusion area were later moved, but this took place too late to help the cotton farmers/pickers.) The Western Defense Command canceled the cotton picking program in November after just a couple of months, when it was found that the 160 incarceree workers were being guarded by a larger number of military police.¹⁵

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By Brian Niiya, Densho Content Director

Footnotes

1. For the number of direct arrivals, see John L. Dewitt, Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Army, Western Defense Command), 282–84. On attitudes of direct arrivals at Tule Lake, see Shotaro Frank Miyamoto, “Chapter X: The Registration Crisis Tule Lake,” pp. 162–63, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records (JAERR) BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder 20.36: 2, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. [Joe Omachi], “Draft Registration,” Mar. 31, 1943, JAERR BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder K8.28. ↩︎
2. Robert F. Spencer, Diary report of visit to Gila, Aug. 15, 1942, p. 4, JAERR BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder; Charles Kikuchi diary, Oct. 27, 1942, p. 1004, JAERR BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder W 1.80:07**; George Okada interview by Grace Kimoto, Fresno, California, Oct. 17, 2003, JACL-CCDC Japanese American Oral History Collection, California State University, Fresno, Japanese American Digitization Project. ↩︎
3. Charles Kikuchi and Robert Spencer, “Evacuee and Administrative Interrelationships in the Gila Relocation Center,” pp. 21–23, March-April, 1943, JAERR BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder K8.31; Koji Lau-Ozawa, “Japanese Diaspora in a WWII Incarceration Camp: Archaeology of Gila River” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2023), 297–303. ↩︎
4. Hoyt A. Martin, “Industry: Final Report, Historical,” May 1, 1945, pp 1–4, JAERR BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder K7.50:29; Karl Lillquist, “Imprisoned in the Desert: The Geography of World War II-Era, Japanese American Relocation Centers in the Western United States” (Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, September 2007), 496. ↩︎
5. Kikuchi and Spencer, “Evacuee and Administrative Interrelationships,” Physical Description 3; Lillquist, “Imprisoned in the Desert,” 485; L H. Bennett, Closing Report, July 23, 1945, p. 26, JAERR BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder K7.50:3. ↩︎
6. A copy of the proclamation can be downloaded from the Japanese American Veterans Association archive; Pacific Citizen, Mar. 4, 1943, 1. ↩︎
7. Pacific Citizen, Mar. 25, 1943, 8. ↩︎
8. Lillquist, “Imprisoned in the Desert,” 488–93; Bennett, Closing Report, 26–27; Kikuchi and Spencer, “Evacuee and Administrative Interrelationships,” Agricultural, 1–4; John F. Embree, “Notes on the Gila River Project,” Sept. 5, 1942, JAERR BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder K1.01; Junko Kobayashi, “‘Bitter Sweet Home’: Celebration of Biculturalism in Japanese Language Japanese American Literature, 1936–1952” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 2005), 178–79. ↩︎
9. Connie Y. Chiang, Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 103, 164; Bennett, Closing Report, 26–27; Lillquist, “Imprisoned in the Desert,” 491. ↩︎
10. Kikuchi and Spencer, “Evacuee and Administrative Interrelationships,” Health & Hospital 1; Lau-Ozawa, “Japanese Diaspora,” 292–97. ↩︎
11. Stockton El Joaquin, Final Edition 3, 5; Alfred “Al” Miyagishima Interview by Tom Ikeda, Segment 17, May 13, 2008, Denver, Colorado, Manzanar National Historic Site Collection, Densho Digital Archive; Asa S. Nicholson, Weekly Report, Oct. 6, 1942, Report—Weekly, Fresno Center Manager, General Correspondence File, Fresno Assembly Center, Reel 313, NARA San Bruno. ↩︎
12. Kikuchi and Spencer, “Evacuee and Administrative Interrelationships,” Health & Hospital 15–16; Lau-Ozawa, “Japanese Diaspora,” 292–97. ↩︎
13. Figures for the migration of Hawai`i incarcerees from Jerome based on research by Sheila Chun using records held by the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai`i; [Ethel A. Flemming], Weekly Report, Nov. 5–12, 1945, BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder K1.10:4. On the Hoshidas, see George and Tamae Hoshida, Taken from the Paradise Isle: The Hoshida Family Story, ed. Heidi Kim (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2015). ↩︎
14. Pacific Citizen, Sept. 17, 1942, 1; Stephanie Hinnershitz, Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor During World War II (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 97–99. ↩︎
15. Pacific Citizen, Sept. 24, 1942, 1 and Nov. 12, 1942, 2; Masaji Inoshita, interview by Richard Hawkins, p. 41, Phoenix, Arizona, Apr. 22, 2006, Go For Broke National Education Center Oral History Project, Japanese American Military History Collection; Bennett, Closing Report, 17–18; Samuel T. Caruso, “After Pearl Harbor: Arizona’s Response to the Gila River Relocation Center,” Journal of Arizona History 14.4 (1973), 340; Hinnershitz, Japanese American Incarceration, 99–101. ↩︎

[Header: Landscape of the Gila River concentration camp. Courtesy of CSU Dominguez Hills Department of Archives and Special Collections.]

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