Between 1943 and 1946, a prisoner of war camp on the outskirts of Douglas held first Italian and then German prisoners — at its peak housing around 3,000 German POWs plus 500 Army personnel, making the camp larger in population than the town of Douglas itself. The site covered over a square mile with 180 buildings, most of which are gone. What remains is the Officers' Club, now a Wyoming State Historic Site, and the remarkable murals painted on its interior walls.
The murals were created by Italian prisoners who found themselves confined in a landscape utterly unlike their home country. Working from imagination and whatever reference materials they could find, they painted western scenes — cowboys, plains, mountains — with surprising skill. The camp also illustrates a largely forgotten aspect of wartime life in rural America: most of the POWs were hired out to work on local farms and ranches, integrating into the local economy in ways that left complicated memories on both sides.