Fort Missoula

The Army built this post in 1877, at the request of settlers who wanted soldiers between themselves and the tribes of western Montana. For sixty years it was a quiet garrison. Then, in April 1941, the War Department handed it to the Justice Department as an alien detention center, and in May the first trains brought Italian men who had done nothing but be stranded: merchant seamen, workers from the New York World's Fair, and the crew of the liner Conte Biancamano, seized in the Panama Canal. About 1,200 of them spent the war here. They called the place Bella Vista for the view, and many worked as paid laborers on farms, in the forests and in the sugar beet fields.

After Pearl Harbor the FBI arrested Japanese community leaders up and down the West Coast, and from December 1941 more than a thousand Japanese men came to Missoula behind the same ten-foot fence. They were Issei, immigrants whom federal law barred from becoming citizens however long they had lived in the country: businessmen, religious leaders, doctors, teachers, their average age around sixty. Hearing boards from their home districts came to the fort to judge their loyalty, and most were sent on to other camps after three to six months. The center closed in 1944.

The Historical Museum at Fort Missoula keeps one of the detention barracks as an exhibit and has restored the courtroom where the Issei hearings were held. The museum grounds also hold the post's 1877 buildings and a collection on western Montana's timber industry.