Editing Leupp, Arizona (section)

==World War II==
{{main|Code talkers}}
[[Choctaw]] and [[Cherokee]] American soldiers served as [[code talkers]] in Europe during [[World War I]], also known as the Great War. Germans were known to have sent people to the US in the postwar period to learn these languages before World War II broke out, so the US did not repeat using code talkers from these tribes in Europe.

[[Philip Johnston (code talker)|Philip Johnston]] was a European American who had grown up in the Leupp area with his missionary parents, where he learned some Navajo. As an engineer in World War II, he suggested to the Marines to use the Navajo language as a code against the [[Japanese people|Japanese]]. He knew how impenetrable and complex the language was, making it nearly impossible for an outsider to learn easily. The Navajo language is so complex with its dialect and sentence structure that it would take code talkers {{frac|2|1|2}} minutes to successfully translate and transmit and then re-translate the message. But this effort would have taken hours for soldiers trained in other codes to complete. Had it not been for growing up in this area, Johnston probably would have never interacted with the Navajo people and learned the language, and the Navajo code talkers may not have been used. Their effort is believed to have helped the US in the war immeasurably. Their code, based on Navajo, was unbreakable until the US government released the top-secret files years later.

===Leupp Isolation Center===
During [[World War II]], the US Army took over the abandoned [[Bureau of Indian Affairs]] boarding school in Leupp to use as the Leupp Isolation Center, for [[Japanese American]] [[Japanese American internment|internees]] considered "troublemakers" by authorities at other internment camps.<ref>[http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/anthropology74/ce14b.htm Leupp Isolation Center, Arizona], [[National Park Service]]</ref> The first inmates were transferred from [[Manzanar]] Isolation Center, which had preceded the use of Leupp for this purpose. In [[Manzanar#Resistance|December 1942 a clash]] had taken place between camp guards and several hundred Japanese-American internees. Two prisoners were killed, and nine prisoners and one guard were injured.

The 16 men suspected as having instigated the protests were removed from camp and placed in surrounding town jails. While they were held in jail (without being charged with a crime or allowed a hearing), [[War Relocation Authority]] officials converted a former [[Civilian Conservation Corps]] camp outside [[Moab, Utah]], into a temporary isolation center for "noncompliant" Japanese Americans. The 16 men from Manzanar arrived in Moab on January 11, 1943. Over the next three months, another 25 "troublemakers"—mostly men who had resisted the WRA's attempts to [[Internment of Japanese Americans#Loyalty questions and segregation|assess the loyalty]] of incarcerated Japanese Americans by asking them to take a poorly worded oath—were brought to Moab. On April 27 most of the population was transferred to Leupp. (Five men, serving sentences in the nearby county jail after protesting conditions in the isolation center, were transported to Leupp in a five-by-six-foot box on the back of a truck. Their separate transportation was arranged by Moab director Francis Frederick, who had also sentenced them for "unlawful assembly.")<ref name=Hansen>Hansen, Arthur A. [http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Moab/Leupp%20Isolation%20Centers%20%28detention%20facility%29/ "Moab/Leupp Isolation Centers"] ''Densho Encyclopedia'' (accessed June 17, 2014).</ref>

Additional internees were sent here from [[Tule Lake Unit, World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument|Tule Lake]], [[Topaz War Relocation Center|Topaz]] and other camps. Leupp housed a population of approximately 50–60 prisoners at a time, with a total of 80 Japanese Americans passing through the isolation center while it operated. The 52 inmates then residing in Leupp were transferred to the stockade at Tule Lake (converted to a segregation center for "disloyal" Japanese Americans earlier that year) on December 2, 1943. The camp technically remained open, retained with minimal maintenance, until September 20, 1944. On that date it was returned to Department of the Interior authority.<ref name=Hansen/>