BOOKPATHS

Topaz, Utah; Bay Area, California

“Journey to Topaz is the story of what happened to one Japanese American family during this wartime tragedy, then called ‘the evacuation.’ Although the characters are fictional, the events are based on actual fact, and most of what happened to the Sakane family also happened to my own.” – from “Prologue,” Journey to Topaz, by Yoshiko Uchida

Journey to Topaz : a Story of the Japanese-American Evacuation, by Yoshiko Uchida (Berkeley, California : Heyday Books, 2005; originally published in 1971)

“Yuki began to feel apprehensive. If this meant that the United States and Japan were at war, what was going to happen to them?” – Journey to Topaz, by Yoshiko Uchida

Journey to Topaz : a Story of the Japanese-American Evacuation, by Yoshiko Uchida, follows 11-year-old Yuki Sakane and her family during the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. We watch their stable lives quickly change when their father is taken away by the FBI and the rest of the family – Yuki, her mother, and brother – become prisoners in their own home. We watch the family pulled further apart when Mr. Sakane is sent to “an Army Internment Camp in Missoula, Montana,” while Yuki, Ken, and Mrs. Sakane must pack all “they can carry” and report to the “Tanforan Assembly Center” in Oakland. The deplorable conditions at Tanforan are somewhat offset by their reuniting with friends and the meeting of new ones. Just as they learn to cope with conditions at Tanforan, we follow Yuki once again as her family is sent by train to Topaz, “the Central Utah War Relocation Center.”

Uchida reaches back into her own family history as she describes the Sakane family’s life at Topaz where “there was no vegetation at all and they were surrounded by a vast gray-white desert where nothing grew except dry clumps of greasewood.” They must adjust to barrack life, find their way around the internment camp, acclimate to heat and altitude, and adjust to the desert landscape. Friendships and the return of the father ease some of their discomfort. Eventually, after “one long dreary year,” the Sakanes find their way “back in the world again,” as Ken joins the military and their father takes a job in Salt Lake City “outside the prohibited West Coast zone.”

While Uchida wrote Journey to Topaz for older children, the novel is of interest to all. Like Farewell to Manzanar, Journey to Topaz shares a connection with a past that must never be repeated.

“…The whole camp seemed to be festering with irritability. People seemed to be overwhelmed by a despair that was fed by the harsh weather, the drab desert, and the frustration of living behind barbed wire with whole families crowded into one small room.” – from Journey to Topaz, by Yoshiko Uchida

Related Websites

Heyday Books

Topaz Museum

Great Basin Heritage Route – Topaz Internment Camp

“…she remembered…what Mother had said… ‘Fear has made this country do something she will one day regret, Mr. Kurihara, but we cannot let this terrible mistake poison our hearts. If we do, then we will be the ones to destroy ourselves and our children as well. Don’t you see?’ Mother had said. ‘We must make the best of it.’” – from Journey to Topaz, by Yoshiko Uchida

Salt Lake City, Utah

The Salt Lake City Public Library has been named The Thomson Gale/Library Journal Library of the Year.

“SLCPL has established itself as the center of town, the community gathering place. The city block it occupies, now called Library Square, is where ‘citizens practice democracy,’ say library staffers. Of course, it serves as the ‘cultural warehouse’ for Salt Lake City and Utah, as Safdie said, though he quickly added that it was also ‘a community of readers, a place where people interact with the material and each other.’” – from “Where Democracy Happens – Library of the Year,” by John N. Berry III, Library Journal

Salt Lake Public Library website

Utah and Arizona

“Everything was red. Red or orange or some shade thereof – the water, the stream banks, the earth, and the rocks that rose up from the fresh greenness and the cedar-dotted slopes. All red, shades of rust and dried blood. Everywhere the snow was melting and trickling down the rich red earth. And everywhere the rock columns rose up and formed towers and pinnacles and other fanciful shapes.” – from Red Water, by Judith Freeman

Red Water, by Judith Freeman (New York : Anchor Books, 2003)

“It was a strange land to which he brought me as a young bride, fresh from the comforts of the city. Nothing could have prepared me for the world that awaited me in that region far to the south. When I first spied it, it seemed contrived by some scene painter given to employing the most lurid color, so vivid and extreme was the palette of the landscape spreading out before me.” – from Red Water, by Judith Freeman

Red Water, by Judith Freeman, fictionalizes the lives of three women, “sister wives” of John D. Lee, the only man executed for the tragic 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre. The stories of Emma, Ann, and Rachel describe the challenges of living within a strict religion; the shadow of the massacre; and the beautiful, but harsh, landscape.

Emma’s story takes her from Uckfield, Sussex County, England to Utah. She sets sail for Boston in 1855. From there, she travels by train as far as Iowa City, “secure[s] a place with the Willy Handcart Company,” and starts out across the plains for “Zion.” After becoming John D. Lee’s seventeenth wife, she settles in Southern Utah, “the land of the burning rocks.” Readers see the landscape through Emma’s eyes, both the difficulties of living in the dry landscape and its beauty, a place she comes to prefer “to all others.” Some wives leave John D., but Emma stays with him. When he goes into hiding in Northern Arizona, fearful of punishment for the “unfortunate affair at the meadow,” Emma goes with him, settling at Lonely Dell. There, she and John D. Lee begin a ferry service at the site still known today as Lee’s Ferry. This place, by the Colorado River, also grabs her affection, “the mighty river, running red.”

Ann, 13-years-old when she became the eighteenth wife of John D. Lee, tells a different story. Although she marries by choice, she becomes disenchanted with Lee and the strict environment. Eventually, she leaves the marriage, finally homesteading with the man she comes to love, Beezer McGee, in Idaho, “beneath the peaks of Horse Heaven.” When their horse is stolen, Ann takes off in pursuit across the “stern country.” As she rides, she thinks about her life with Lee, of the children she left behind, and other places she’s been. And, we, as readers, follow her across the ever-changing geography, out of a green and forested landscape, into “cacti and agave and clumps of feathery mesquite.”

Like Emma, Rachel, John D. Lee’s fifth wife, stays with him until the last. After years spent in Southern Utah she, too, goes with Lee into hiding, settling in “a shanty,” in “Moenabba, Arizona Territory.” Through her journal entries, readers move into Arizona, as she describes her “farm here in Moenabba,” and Emma Lee’s at Lonely Dell. Rachel writes about the red hills, “Echo cliffs;” the intolerable summer climate, “so hot by midday that the eggs curdle in the coop if [she] doesn’t collect them early;” and the “cold raw wind” of winter. She tells about the Indians who befriend them and the tensions with Emma over Ann’s daughter. Rachel is with John D. Lee at his execution, the “only one left, she feels, “to protect his name and honor.”

Through the fictionalized lives of three of John D. Lee’s “sister wives,” readers of Red Water imagine the history, culture, and landscape of Southern Utah and Northern Arizona in the mid- to late- 1800s. You can plan a bookpath from Red Water, visiting places mentioned in the book, including the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and Lee’s Ferry. If Red Water inspires you to learn more about these events, you can turn to books by Juanita Brooks, Emma Lee and the The Mountain Meadows Massacre.

For more about Red Water, visit the publisher's website.

“And what I saw emptied out my heart. From my place there above the canyon, I saw a world blasted into rock, hard and unforgiving. I saw how ancient trees had been turned to bits of whitened stone at my feet. I saw scree and slag and scarp, fallen debris, seams of purple rock laid down next to blue, and orange against red – and canyons as deep as the sky. I saw a river – the mighty Colorado, running red with the burden of the desert soil.” – from Red Water, by Judith Freeman