The Eagles of Heart Mountain
A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America
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3.9 • 17 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“One of Ten Best History Books of 2021.” —Smithsonian Magazine
For fans of The Boys in the Boat and The Storm on Our Shores, this impeccably researched, deeply moving, never-before-told “tale that ultimately stands as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit” (Garrett M. Graff, New York Times bestselling author) about a World War II incarceration camp in Wyoming and its extraordinary high school football team.
In the spring of 1942, the United States government forced 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona and sent them to incarceration camps across the West. Nearly 14,000 of them landed on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming, at the base of Heart Mountain.
Behind barbed wire fences, they faced racism, cruelty, and frozen winters. Trying to recreate comforts from home, they established Buddhist temples and sumo wrestling pits. Kabuki performances drew hundreds of spectators—yet there was little hope.
That is, until the fall of 1943, when the camp’s high school football team, the Eagles, started its first season and finished it undefeated, crushing the competition from nearby, predominantly white high schools. Amid all this excitement, American politics continued to disrupt their lives as the federal government drafted men from the camps for the front lines—including some of the Eagles. As the team’s second season kicked off, the young men faced a choice to either join the Army or resist the draft. Teammates were divided, and some were jailed for their decisions.
The Eagles of Heart Mountain honors the resilience of extraordinary heroes and the power of sports in a “timely and utterly absorbing account of a country losing its moral way, and a group of its young citizens who never did” (Evan Ratliff, author of The Mastermind).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Pearson debuts with a novelistic account of sports glory at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. Pearson sketches the history of anti-Asian immigration policies leading up to President Roosevelt's 1942 executive order authorizing the detainment of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, and paints a harrowing picture of life at Heart Mountain, where detainees endured extreme temperatures, hunger, and substandard medical care. Yet more than a dozen social clubs sprouted within the camp's first year, and Heart Mountain High School started a football team coached by a former star athlete from the University of Wyoming. Most of the boys who joined were "scrawny" and had never played the sport before, Pearson notes, yet the Eagles lost only one game in two seasons and might have won a conference championship if players from a local rival hadn't refused to play them. Pearson intertwines play-by-play game recaps with updates on the war's progress, biographical sketches, and rundowns on the legal battles over internment and military draft resistance by detainees. Frequent tangents interrupt the narrative momentum, yet Pearson succeeds in unearthing a feel-good story from a dark chapter in U.S. history. The result is a worthy portrait of triumph in the face of tragedy.
