The
West
Spanning the years from the first
European advance into the wilderness to the dawn of the 20th
century, the series portrays the profound, often devastating
impact the onrushing white settlers, adventurers and exploiters
had on Indian peoples and the land. In vivid imagery and in
words spoken by many of today's best-known
personalities, The West shows how
the discovery of gold in California changed the country forever.
Witness the torrent of violence triggered by the Civil War,
the building of the transcontinental railroad, the tragedies
at Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee -- all the key events and
the people who created and shaped this great American story.
EPISODE ONE
The People
Beginning with a stunning visual tour of one
of the most magnificent landscapes on earth, this first episode
establishes the West as a vast and mythic place -- a "dream
landscape," as Kiowa poet N. Scott Momaday calls it.
A dizzying array of Native American cultures link their creation
stories to the land they each call home. But soon, other myths
bring other people.  Cabeza
de Vaca, who finds more friends than enemies. Coronado, whose
relentless search for Seven Cities of Gold ends in bitter
failure. And Father Junipero Serra, traveling north to "save"
people who never considered themselves lost.
We witness the dramatic Pueblo Revolt of 1680, then watch
two European imports -- horses and diseases -- transform the
lives of tribes that have not yet even seen Europeans. The
episode climaxes with the expedition of Lewis and Clark, Americans
chasing a yet another myth across the West and breaking the
trail for a young republic that will soon follow them to the
sea.
EPISODE TWO
Empire Upon the Trails
When this episode begins, the West's destiny
is uncertain. Mexico, England, and a host of Native American
tribes have as much a claim as the United States. But Americans
are now moving westward for a variety of individual reasons.
Joe Meek wants adventure, and finds it as a mountain man.
Sam Houston hopes to revive a failed political career, and
ends up as president of his own Republic of Texas. Narcissa
Whitman seeks to save the souls of Indians, but in the end
cannot save herself. The Mormons and Cherokees are forced
west against their will. And the family of Henry and Naomi
Sager, following a restless dream of better times over the
next horizon, sets off for the continent's farthest shore.
We also meet the people who encounter these Americans: tejano
Juan Seguin, the Cayuse and Nez Percé, and Mariano
Vallejo, proud descendant of Spanish conquistadors. In the
episode's climax, all the individual trails converge. Under
President James K. Polk, the United States declares that crossing
the continent is its "manifest destiny" -- and only
one nation ends up claiming the West.
EPISODE THREE
The Speck of the Future
Episode Three opens with one of the most momentous
events in the West's history: the discovery of gold at John
Sutter's mill in California. The human stampede it touches
off -- 50,000 people in the first year alone -- will transform
everything and everyone in its path. A peach grower named
William Swain sets off for a "pocketful of rocks,"
and through the touching letters he exchanges with his young
wife, Sabrina, we experience the Days of '49 through the eyes
of both those who joined the rush for riches and those who
stayed behind. Swain takes us through the hardships of the
overland trail and into the raucous and overcrowded mining
camps, where glittering hope and bitter disappointment exist
side by side.
Merchants become millionaires. Kit Carson becomes a legend.
San Francisco becomes an international city, the "Emporium
of the Pacific." But the newly arrived Chinese and well-established
Californios find themselves equally shut out. And California's
Indians face the worst slaughter of Native Americans in United
States history. The episode ends as discouraged 49ers head
home -- and on their way, some make new discoveries, touching
off new gold rushes and repeating California's experience
in every corner of the West.
EPISODE FOUR
Death Runs Riot
As the episode opens, the Kansas frontier has
become the flashpoint for the national argument over slavery,
a breeding ground for the bloodshed that soon engulfs the
entire country. In the West, the Civil War starts earlier
-- and is fought differently than on the battlegrounds of
the East. Abolitionist Julia Louisa Lovejoy watches in horror
as William Quantrill and "Bloody Bill" Anderson
slaughter innocent civilians in Lawrence. A devout Mormon,
John D. Lee, participates in the worst massacre of pioneers
in American history. Along the Rio Grande, Juan Cortina leads
a Mexican-American insurrection against injustice. And parson
John Chivington leads troops to victory at the "Gettysburg
of the West," then turns against an unsuspecting Indian
village at Sand Creek.
In the Nevada mining camps, Mark Twain avoids the war's carnage,
but on the Great Plains, the Cheyenne peace chief Black Kettle
is unable to escape it. The episode climaxes as Union heroes
like George Armstrong Custer, fresh from freeing the slaves
in the East, discover less glory in trying to subjugate the
Indians of the West.
EPISODE FIVE
The Grandest Enterprise Under God
Episode Five begins with an unprecedented race
across the West as two companies embark on one of the greatest
technological achievements of the age -- building the first
transcontinental railroad. Here are Irish immigrants toiling
across the treeless Plains for the Union Pacific, while the
Central Pacific's Chinese crews struggle to surmount the Sierra
Nevadas. Here, too, are the far-reaching consequences when
the "iron road" transforms the West. Cowboys Charles
Goodnight and Teddy Blue Abbott drive herds of longhorns to
the nearest railhead. Landless European peasants build farms
and towns on previously virgin prairie. And Uriah and Mattie
Oblinger ride the rails to Nebraska, pursuing the American
dream of land they can call their own.
But for the vast herds of buffalo -- and the Native Americans
whose very existence revolved around them -- the railroad
spells disaster as hunters like Frank Mayer rush to the Plains
and ship hides by the millions back to eastern factories.
In the emotional climax of the episode, a magnificent animal
that symbolized the West is driven to the brink of extinction.
EPISODE SIX
Fight No More Forever
The episode begins with a biographical comparison
of George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull, both equally
renowned among their own people for their bravery and air
of invincibility. In the Black Hills, Custer ignites a gold
rush on land Sitting Bull and the Lakotas consider sacred.
Then, on a fateful day at the Little Bighorn, their two trails
inevitably meet -- and Custer's demise also marks a "Last
Stand" for the defiant Lakotas.
Two other men resist the federal government's tightening grip
on the West. In Utah, Brigham Young is forced to choose between
saving his distinctive Mormon culture or sacrificing his spiritual
son. And in the Northwest, Chief Joseph finds himself caught
between his lifelong desire for peace and his solemn promise
to his dying father never to abandon his homeland. The episode
concludes with the poignant and stirring story of Joseph's
flight for freedom -- one of the most remarkable military
campaigns in American history, in which Joseph emerges as
an eloquent voice of conscience in the West.
EPISODE SEVEN
The Geography of Hope
In this episode, Americans attempt to "tame"
the West -- and sometimes find themselves transformed instead.
An ex-slave named Pap Singleton declares Kansas the "Promised
Land" for impoverished African-Americans, while other
settlers are assured that the semi-arid climate of the Plains
will be altered by their plows. A frail Teddy Roosevelt comes
West and turns himself into a rugged rancher, and a bookish
ethnologist named Frank Cushing becomes a war chief of the
Zuñi tribe he was sent to study. A real estate boom
overwhelms the rural Hispanic village of Los Angeles, while
a "beef bonanza" promising easy profits collides
head-on with the harsh realities of a western winter.
But for many in the West, the drive to turn it into a replica
of the East ends in heartache. Native American children are
torn from their parents and placed in schools that try to
strip them of their traditional culture. A federal crackdown
on polygamy separates Mormon families. And the Chinese are
persecuted, then told told to leave their adopted land. Meanwhile,
Buffalo Bill Cody offers adoring crowds his own version of
it all: a "Wild West" -- heroic, romantic, and mythic.
EPISODE EIGHT
Ghost Dance
Episode Eight begins with the raucous Oklahoma
land rush, as 100,000 eager settlers frantically stake out
farms and bang together towns literally overnight. The mining
town of Butte, Montana -- with its mix of driving energy and
incredible pollution -- is another symbol of how the new industrial
age has quickened the pace of change in the West. And a refined
Wellesley graduate named Ethel Waxham meets rugged sheep rancher
John Love, whose dogged pursuit of a brighter future soon
revolves around persuading her to return to him in Wyoming.
For Native Americans, an era seems to be ending. Well-intended
reformers like Alice Fletcher, hoping to help Indians, implement
laws that instead only accelerate their loss of homeland.
And the Ghost Dance religion, offering the hope that the buffalo
and the old ways will soon return, results in even greater
despair -- first with the death of Sitting Bull at the hands
of his own people, and then on the tragic killing ground of
Wounded Knee.
EPISODE NINE
One Sky Above Us
In this powerfully moving final episode of
the series, the West enters the 20th century with its historic
-- and mythic -- twin characteristics undiminished and compellingly
intertwined. Bright hopes and painful loss, dreams denied
and dreams fulfilled, swirl through every story. With a fresh
supply of water, Los Angeles rises to become the West's most
powerful city, but at the expense of the rural Owens Valley.
Mariano Vallejo, the aging representative of the West's oldest
European culture, laments the decline in his people's fortunes;
but millions more are arriving from Mexico in pursuit of fresh
opportunity.
In their response to rapid change, a brother and sister of
the Hidatsas choose very different paths to follow. John and
Ethel Love, meanwhile, battle against floods, blizzards, disease,
and hard times to hold onto their ranch -- and their faith
in a better future. And although Chief Joseph dies of a broken
heart, his legacy of dignity and his simple plea for justice
live on. Interspersed through it all, some of today's westerners
share poignant moments from their own lives, and as the series
concludes it becomes clear that the story of the West is intensely
personal and fragilely human, yet also as heroically grand
and as enduring as the land itself.
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