There's something compelling about visiting historic sites, particularly places where sad and tragic events unfolded. Whether it's visiting a Civil War battlefield or the site of some horrible disaster, visitors can get a better sense of exactly what happened. Reading books and watching documentaries are useful, but for Commentator Rex Buchanan, few things compare to being there... in the physical space where something took place.
(Transcript)
We were driving back from New Mexico a few weeks ago when we stopped to visit a place that doesn’t seem to be in the itinerary of most tourists. We were just shy of the Kansas border, a little west of the Colorado town of Granada, at the site of a World War II Japanese interment camp, called Camp Amache.
During the war, the U.S. government relocated Japanese civilians, mostly from California, to this windswept hillside along the Arkansas River valley. The camp held up to 7,500 people, many of whom worked as farmers, growing food for people being held there.
Today there’s not a huge amount to see at the old camp site. A reconstructed barracks shows the typical housing. Given the cold and wind of winters on the High Plains, and the heat and dust in the summer, living conditions must have been miserable. A guard tower looms over the barracks. The rest of the camp is mostly concrete foundations, showing where structures once were.
The camp was previously maintained by the local Amache Preservation Society. In 2022 it became part of the National Park Service system, and a few of the characteristic brown signs in the Park Service style have sprouted up around the site.
This is immediately south of U.S. Highway 50 between Granada and Lamar, easy to access if you’re in that part of the world. With the old foundations now overgrown by grasses and trees, and the quiet disturbed mainly by the wind and bird calls, it’s a poignant place to ponder a slice of history that’s basically in our own backyard.
About 50 miles northwest of Camp Amache is another place to ponder. The Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. Cheyenne and Arapahoe people were told to camp here on the Big Sandy Creek by the U.S. military in the fall of 1864. That November, around 230 were killed by Colorado volunteers. Many of the bodies were desecrated. In the long, sorry history of the U.S. government and Native peoples, the chapter written at Sand Creek is surely among the worst.
This site was on private property when I first visited it a few decades ago. I had to open a gate or two to get there. But in 2007 it became part of the National Park Service system, with all the attendant accessibility and information.
It’s just north of the small town of Chivington, named after the commander of the troops who committed that atrocity. Like Camp Amache, this is a quiet, haunted spot, a creekbed line by cottonwoods, a place to contemplate this country’s history and its ramifications.
For whatever reason, I can never really understand an event until I see the place where it took place: the hills, the trees, the lay of the land. In spite of repeat visits, the stories of Camp Amache and Sand Creek are still pretty much incomprehensible to me. Seeing these places doesn’t explain what happened there. But it’s a start.
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Commentator Rex Buchanan is a writer, traveler and director emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey. He lives in Lawrence.