The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America

by Bradford Pearson

FORTY-EIGHT MILLION YEARS ago, as the inland seas of North America began their retreats to the oceans and crocodiles swam in the warm waters above the Arctic Circle, the earth underneath southern Montana shook and shoved forth a five-hundred-square-mile slab of dolomite and limestone. That piece of carbonate scraped and ground its way twenty-five miles into Wyoming, traveling at more than 100 miles an hour, lurching into its final resting place just thirty minutes later. The cause of the event—the largest surface rockslide in the history of the planet—is still unknown. Most scientists believe a volcanic or steam explosion set the earth in motion, its movement aided by either hydrothermal fluids from a nearby volcano or the creation of a gas from the heating of the limestone. In this second scenario, the gas would have supported the slide in the same way a hoverboard floats over a surface. Over the next 48 million years erosion swept away much of the slide. What was left is an 8,100-foot-tall lump of carbonate unlike any other 8,100-foot lump of carbonate in the world, and it’s the first thing you see when you step off the train in Vocation, Wyoming, a made-up town created to jail eleven thousand human beings. What you see is Heart Mountain, a geological anomaly rising above a human ignominy.