The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation awarded the Powell Tribune the LaDonna Zall Compassionate Witness Award at their pilgrimage event Saturday, calling the newspaper’s coverage during and after the use of Heart Mountain as a concentration camp “an exceptional example of fair, accurate and trusted local journalism.”

“Since the 1940s the Powell Tribune has chronicled the evolution of the Heart Mountain incarceration site with thoroughness and thoughtfulness during the camp years when war hysteria and racism toward people of Japanese ancestry were at their peak,” said Executive Director Aura Newlin. “The Powell Tribune urged a cooperative attitude toward the imprisoned community and actively challenged baseless attacks on the character and loyalty of Japanese Americans.”

In their coverage, the newspaper invited incarcerees to share their experiences, hosted guest columnists from the camp and highlighted the economic benefits that these newcomers brought to farmers and businesses in Park County and beyond.

She added, “In 1968, in sharp contrast to many locals of the time, the Powell Tribune’s young Publisher Dave Bonner encouraged University of Wyoming graduate student Douglas W. Nelson’s interest in what happened at the camp during the war. Bonner provided Nelson with a small office and access to the paper’s archives, including its carefully preserved collection of the Heart Mountain Sentinel, which was the camp newspaper.”

“This assistance ultimately resulted in a Pulitzer Prize nominated book, ‘Heart Mountain, The History of an American Concentration Camp,’” Newlin said. “From early gatherings in the 1980s to the opening of the interpretive center in 2011 and the opening of the Mineta-Simpson Institute in 2024, the Powell Tribune leadership and staff have presented Heart Mountain stories with first rate writing integrity and encouragement.”

A decade later, the paper covered the activities of local homesteaders, including LaDonna Zall.

Zall was a little girl living just down the road in the little town of Ralston during the camp years. She used to talk about how her father brought the family to watch the last train leave from camp at the end of the war. LaDonna would talk about how she wept knowing even at that age, that there was a profound wrong associated with the camp that had been built and used for three years, and that was now being erased, Newlin said.

Zall died on July 24, 2021, at which time the award was instituted to honor those special volunteers, supporters and founders worthy of Zall’s commitment.

“Zall committed her retirement years to ensuring that the memory of this place would not be similarly erased. She collected artifacts and oral histories. She served as our first real docent to the site. Before there was anything here, she was showing people around and collecting our stories. She was our first collections manager before we had a title for it, and she set us on the path to what is now a Smithsonian affiliate museum and our research library,” Newlin said.

Bonner, who purchased the paper more than 60 years ago and still guides the company daily along with his children and the paper’s President Shelby Wetzel, Vice President/General Manager Toby Bonner and Secretary/Treasurer Brad Bonner, who now own the company.

“I am absolutely honored to be recognized by the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation,” the senior Bonner said, before adding comments about his own personal memories of the camp.

Born in 1940 in California, Bonner’s family moved to Powell two years later to open a store.  He was just a pre-school toddler when his mother, Nancy Milliken Bonner, took him to the concentration camp after learning a high school classmate and her family were detained at the prison camp.

“My mother vowed to go see her friend, to find her,” Bonner said. “She arranged for a visitors pass and took me — just the two of us, to the Heart Mountain Camp.”

He was very young, yet could remember how saddened his mother was that her friends were being incarcerated despite being American citizens.

Bonner received a plaque commemorating the award, of which he said he was so proud that he wanted to mount it in the main office, where “everyone can see it,” instead of in his office.

“Thanks to the board of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation for honoring the Powell Tribune. This recognition confirms our commitment to reporting the news. This story was reported in the Tribune pages of the early 1940s, and it deserves to be told and re-told, in the mantra of ‘Never Again,’” Bonner said.

The 85-year-old journalist was accompanied by his wife Sue, daughter and Powell Tribune President Shelby Wetzel, daughter-in-law Yancy Bonner and Editor Zac Taylor.