Background
Staff Sergeant George Oiye was born on February 19, 1922 in a log cabin at a gold mining camp near Basin Creek, Montana. It
was forty below zero on the continental divide and his Japanese-born parents and two older sisters had fifty cents to live
on for the winter. The nearest store was seven miles away and was a twelve-hour trip on homemade snowshoes. They lived there
for two years before moving to Helena, Montana to work in the Northern Pacific Railroad round-house; from there they moved
to Trident, Montana, at the headwaters of the Missouri River, to work in a cement factory. George went to grammar school at
Trident and high school at Three Forks, seven miles away. In 1938 his parents bought a small 23-acre truck farm at Logan,
Montana, where they lived for the next fifty years.
Restrictions
All requests for permission to publish, reproduce, or quote from materials in this collection must be submitted to the Collections
Management and Access Unit at the Japanese American National Museum (collections@janm.org).