The United States is pushing West,
Into uncharted territory and danger.
As they tamed the wildness.
The pioneers face incredible hardship
But their battles will build the new American nation.
300 million years BC.
A meteorite hurtles towards Earth.
It strikes the Appalachian Mountains with the force of 100,000 atomic bombs.
The five miles crater relieves behind,
Creates The Cumberland Gap.
Which becomes...
A gateway to the west.
I think Americans have always been-- have been pioneers.
We're a nation of adventurers
And explorers.
We are always moving forward
And we're always dealing with problems, not ignoring them.
1775.
Land west of the Cumberland Gap
Has been claimed and divided by Britain, France and Spain.
As well as hundreds of Native American tribes.
But the strongest claim to this fertile land belongs to whoever conquers it.
Riches, too.
Thousands of tons of gold and silver.
This land is also brutal wilderness.
Conquering it will require extraordinary people.
March 1775.
Explorer and frontiers' man Daniel Boone pushes west.
Come on! Keep clearing
Boone and his 30 men slash through the Cumberland Gap.
On a mission to settle new lands.
Cut it through, we're coming through here.
Before us lay the finest body of land in the world,
With which little exertion we can call our own.
One day thousands will desire this land,
And we will be rich.
Boone's push into the west.
Becomes a defining act for the new nation.
The British King has outlawed any Western expansion
Illegal settlers are rounded up and punished.
But Boone is prepared to defy the British.
Daniel Boone was that first great
Action hero for America.
America wanted to see itself that way, I think.
They wanted to see themselves
As fiercely independent,
Very capable
And... And willing to go places
Most human beings wouldn't have gone.
Come on, men, this way.
Boone and his men take no supplies.
Come on, come on!
They survived from the land.
Bear grease as insect repellent
And wasp's larvae as food.
Come on, come on!
Boone records in his journal.
We are exposed daily to peril and death amongst
Savages and wild beasts.
But nature satisfies all we need.
Few experience the happiness we feel here
In the howling wilderness.
But for the Shawnee, this isn't wilderness.
It is home.
And they will defend it from intruders.
Good work, John, good work.
These areas that seemed like wilderness
To the Americans weren't wilderness
To these American-Indian people.
That was just their lands.
Daniel Boone and the Shawnee have a history.
Only the year before,
They kidnapped his eldest son, James.
And tortured him to death.
On the 25th of March, 1775,
Boone crosses into Shawnee territory.
In the mountains for eight days...
People were able to survive on this...
... With nothing to eat.
Go, go!
Go, go, run!
Rifles, get 'me, come on!
Ambushed, Boone retreats.
Two of his companions are scalped and slaughtered.
But Boone pushes on further west.
Well, I think more than anything,
The American character is perseverance.
They persevered, they fought,
It wasn't easy against great odds,
But they had persevered.
Boone's friend and companion Felix Walker writes:
He conducted the company through the wilderness
With such bravery.
Indeed he appeared void of fear,
With too little caution for the enterprise.
Many of Boone's followers die settling Kentucky.
But within 20 years,
200,000 people through The Cumberland Gap.
We were a burgeoning society.
Suddenly we realized,
Whoa, the owner's manual says,
"This is all ours."
"Keep going west."
In 1803,
The new Nation expands west
With one of the biggest property deal in history.
US President Thomas Jefferson
Buys the vast Louisiana territories from Napoleon of France.
Half a billion acres at 3 cents an acre.
It doubles the size of the United States.
And triggers a new wave of exploration.
Lewis and Clark wanna see
What's on the other side?
Given a mountain, we wanna climb it.
We hold those...
Ventures of the past
In great admiration.
In May 1804.
A presidential aide and a junior army officer
Set out on an epic expedition.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's
Plan to be the first who cross and map the Continent.
Their greatest challenge crossing the vast The Rocky Mountains.
No one expects the Rockies to be
90 separate mountain ranges, 4,800 km long.
After two weeks, starvation sets in.
They eat any plants they can find.
Next, they eat their horses.
The expedition is given up as dead.
But they survive,
And they owe their lives to a 16-year-old Native American girl.
Sacagawea of the Shoshone Nation guides them,
Finds wild food,
And saves their precious million-word journals
From an overturned canoe.
In December 1805, William Clark notes in his journal:
Ocean in view!
O! The joy!
They are the first US citizens.
To reach the Pacific Ocean over land.
Lewis and Clark's remarkable expedition
Discovers 300 Species of wildlife,
Transforming science and agriculture.
And triggering a new rush into the unknown.
1803, two explorers have pushed back the frontiers of the United States.
Lewis and Clark's expedition through the Rockies
Has also uncovered a route to the West's most valuable commodity...
... Beaver.
Their pelts are traded by Native Americans for guns,
Knives, salt.
And they're a high-fashion luxury for the rich.
In Europe Beavers have been hunted to near extinction.
But in the Rocky Mountains they number in the millions.
New iron traps make catching them easier.
Baited with the beaver's own scent glands,
The animals are drawn to their death.
By October 1823.
There are 300 eager trappers roaming the Rockies,
Hoping to make a fortune.
One in five won't make it out alive.
The conditions are so exhausting,
trappers need eat three times what we eat today,
To survive.
Jedediah Smith is the most successful hunter in the Rocky mountains.
24 years old.
He walks up to 16,00 km each year.
Traps 600 pelts in a season--
The equivalent of three years' average pay back East.
As a devout Christian, he doesn't drink or smoke.
His Bible and gun are constant companions.
He's also astute and works with the Native Americans.
The Crow show him ancient shortcuts,
Sell him horses,
Nurses sick men back to health.
The tribes of North America have adapted to live in every parts of the Continent.
From arid plains to harsh mountain terrain.
Jed Smith uses their knowledge and his skill
To open up the West for vast fur-trapping profits.
But it will almost kill him.
Jed Smith's friend James Clyman writes:
The grizzly did not hesitate, springing on the captain,
Breaking his ribs and cutting his head.
This gave us a lesson on the character of the grizzly,
Which we did not forget.
The grizzly bear is the most dangerous wild animal on the frontier.
After three meters tall
They can weigh 450 kg
In early 1800,
100,000 roam the Rockies 50 times more than today’s
Halfway to death, Jed Smith's right-hand man, Jame Clyman,
Stitches his scalp and ear back to his head.
I put in my needle, stitching it through and through
And over and over,
Laying the lacerated parts together as nice as I could.
There is an amazing sense of confidence
As part of that American spirit
That doesn't...
Even think about failing.
Jed Smith pushes on.
The epitome of American rugged individualism,
The trails he forges become settler paths,
Wagon trains
Today they are roads and an interstate highway.
Many Americans follow in his tracks.
May 1846.
Thousands of men, women and children.
Riding, walking, pushing.
They're heading for a new life 3,000 km away.
It was a land of opportunity.
You can make of yourself what you want.
You're only held back by your own desires.
Germans, Belgians, French.
Catholics, Presbyterians, Mormons.
One of the world's great mass migrations begins.
The pioneers follow the wagon trail west,
Oregon and California.
Like the frontiers man before them
Their journey will become another part of American Mythology.
Some walk 16 km a day
For up to six months.
Going through ten pairs of boots on the journey.
Half are children.
One in five of the women are pregnant.
Families sell farms,
Saving for an average of five years to join the exodus,
Risking everything.
I think if there is one episode
That encapsulates the American spirit,
I think it is probably the move west.
Whip those mules and horses
And cross those rivers and cross over those mountains
To the unknown and say,
"I'm leaving everything behind."
"I'm leaving everything that I know behind"
"To reinvent myself."
A wagon and oxen cost minimum $5,000.
But it buys a complete life-support machine.
The wagons carry nearly 500 kg of supplies,
And the basics for a new life in the west.
Drinking water is captured from rain on the wagon canvas.
Even the oxen's dung is fuel for fires.
But they also need cash.
Native Americans charge $10 for road tolls.
And $100 for river crossings, in modern money.
20,000 Americans will die reaching the west.
Ten graves for every 1.5 km.
But one pioneer story will reveal the most extreme hardships
To the journey west.
Hiyah!
Hiyah, hiyah!
June 1846.
A wagon train heads west.
Its leader is George Donner.
Good luck.
Good, now push!
Push!
His wife, Tamsen Donner, is a school teacher.
Yes, okay.
But on the trail, women must turn their hands to anything.
Yeah, push, push!
The Donner Party are halfway across the blistering
Wyoming Prairie,
Far away from the nearest doctor,
With barely any water.
Good, yes.
Okay.
I think the women who came across America
In the early days, must've been made up of
The strongest fiber possible.
It's unimaginable.
Good.
Yes.
Ludwig.
The child's mother and father
Are Philippine and Ludwig Keseberg.
They christen their son Louis.
The journey is tough...
But the going's good.
Tamsen Donner writes in her journal:
I could never have believed we could have traveled
So far with so little difficulty.
Indeed if we do not experience anything worse,
I shall say the trouble is all in getting started.
But as leader of the wagon train,
Tamsen's husband, George Donner,
Is aware there's one final obstacle to their journey.
The mountains of the Sierra Nevada.
With peaks reaching 4,000 meter.
In winter they are impassable.
As the Donner Party approaches Utah,
George Donner makes a fateful decision--
Leading a splinter group off from the main party.
He's read one of the many new trail guidebooks,
Showing a shortcut that claims
To save two weeks of the journey time.
Hastings Cutoff is said to be a saving of 400 miles.
We are informed it is a fine, level road
With plenty of water and grass.
But Donner's information is wrong.
In fact, the "Shortcut" adds 160 km to the journey.
High in the Sierra Nevada,
The Donner Party enters the Truckee Pass.
They're only 50 km from the safety of the California plains.
But supplies are dangerously low,
And traveling through the mountains
Is taking its toll.
A broken axle forces The Donner Party to stop make repairs.
But that night...
1.5 meter of snow falls.
Soon the drifts are 20 meter deep.
The Donner Party will be stranded for five months.
In just three weeks,
They've eaten all their food.
Then they kill their pack animals.
Next, they eat charred bones,
Twigs, bark, leaves, dirt...
And worse.
Even the wind held its breath
As the suggestion was made that was one to die,
The rest might live.
Cannibalism.
Christmas 1846.
They eat their first human.
Bodies are cut up, flesh labeled,
So people don't eat their own relatives.
Four rescue parties bring out some survivors.
The very last finds Philippine's husband.
Ludwig, alone.
He is surrounded by bones, entrails,
And a 2-gallon kettle of human blood.
George Donner's body is found, skull split open,
His brain removed.
Tamsen Donner's body is never found.
The pass is renamed the "Donner Pass,"
A Testament to the hardship of the pioneers' push West.
Today it's the Lincoln Highway.
But beneath the bones of the Donner Party,
The Sierra Nevada conceals a seam of gold.
The largest the world has yet seen.
Gold fever is about to change the West,
And the the people heading there.
March 1836.
The battle of the Alamo in Texas.
The United States run away expansion
Has brought it into conflict with the Mexican Empire.
Mexico’s vast territories stretch from Oregon to Guatemala.
But Texas is disputed territory.
The Mexican government has invited American settlers in,
But they quickly flood the territories in overwhelming numbers.
Americans, by the thousands, were coming into Texas
And they were not abiding to the agreements
To come in as settlers.
And once they outnumber-- By 1835--
Mexicans ten to one in that area,
Of course the Americans are thinking about independence.
At the Alamo the pioneers make their stand to Independence.
In an old Spanish mission 200 American settlers are under attack.
Attempting to retain the control of Texas.
A Mexican army storms that make shift fort.
The seize ends in a massacre.
186 defenders dead
At the Alamo brave men like Davy Crockett become heroes
And martyr
Women and children are spared,
Sent back home to spread the message,
"Don't come."
(Screaming)
It's a turning point.
By the end of the 1848 war with Mexico
Brought both Texas and California into the union.
That same year a new rush westward begins.
It's triggered deep within the earth
Where over millions of years vast geological forces.
Have created Gold
And within the quartz, gold.
The seam is in the Sierra Nevada,
Is one of the densest on the planet.
1848.
Carpenter James Marshall finds a 3-ounce nugget
In the California river.
Two months' pay in his hand,
But billions of dollars beneath his feet.
News of Marshall's discovery
Spreads to every corner of the world.
Everyone wants to get rich quick.
Within a year, 100,000 Desperate amateur prospectors
Flood the Sierra foothills.
It was the American dream distilled to its essence.
Take yourself and go out
And try and make a success of it.
A Chinese prospector's 100-ounce strike
In the Yuba River.
$26,000 made by a single Irishman
In just four days.
A $200,000 super seam
Mined by 12 Mexicans at Bear Valley.
In the port of San Francisco,
A plot of land worth $16 Before the gold strike
Now changes hands for $45,000.
In two years, the population of California explodes
From 15,000 to 100,000.
Now, hand-panning is replaced by lines of sluice boxes
As men combed for anything the first prospectors missed.
The price of living rockets.
Picks, pans, shovels
Go from a few cents to $10 apiece.
Breakfast costs ten times what it does back East.
But still the people come.
200 ships lie abandoned in San Francisco harbor,
Their crews having deserted and rushed for the hills.
After journey of nearly 10,000 km.
And now without money and on foot.
Belgian Jean-Nicolas Perlot writes:
We crossed 200 miles of wilderness
Full of Indians, bears, panthers,
Wildcats, snakes of every kind.
The first thing he finds isn't gold.
Its graves.
200 of them.
Prospectors cut off by rains in the foothills
Would starved to death.
Approaching, we realized animals of some kind
Had dug up the bodies.
I read a note attached to one of the graves.
"God has willed that civilization"
"Should begin in this place,"
"With this duty which a man owes to his kind."
"Bury the dead."
Perlot does find gold,
But never in the quantities that he dreamed off.
As the gold fields are picked clean,
Tensions rise, times get tougher.
After just six years, the Gold Rush is over.
I think that there is that
Western mentality of prospecting--
Try and fail, try and fail,
And the fact that you tried is worthy in and of itself.
Of 300,000 Who rush to find gold,
Less than one out of 100 Struck it rich.
But fortunes are made by the merchants and landowners
Who supplied the miners.
From dirt and dreams
Come the great cities of California.
But the new Nation hunger for goods triggers another kind of revolution.
October 1818.
A nine-year-old boy comforts his mother
As she lies on her deathbed.
Milk sickness kills thousands of pioneers every year.
The cause:
White Snakeroot eaten by cattle,
The deadly poison passed in milk to humans.
At 18, the boy becomes a man,
But he has been working for years,
Battling for existence in this harsh environment.
It was a wild region,
With many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.
There I grew up.
I had an ax in my hand
From my eighth to my 20th year.
This is the life of an American settler.
The young man's grandfather followed
Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road into Kentucky.
His father pushed further into the forests Indiana.
Settler families live in basic single room log cabins.
Sometimes housing ten or more.
The wilderness provides everything.
They make their own plows,
Rakes, forks, shovels, build their own furniture.
And they bury their dead.
In bad years, malaria kills
One in eight of the settlers.
Life expectancy is half of what it is today.
But from these hardworking settlers come America's 16th president.
Abraham Lincoln.
If you work hard,
You can do anything you wanna do.
The possibilities are endless.
To me, that was the American dream, as a kid.
Lincoln's family and thousands like them.
Settled the West in four generations.
President Thomas Jefferson though it would take 1,000.
The forests are cleared:
At a rate of five acres per family a year.
In 1800, 23 million acres of Indiana is wilderness.
In 60 years, it's tamed,
Flat, fertile farmland.
But clearance means more than forests.
It's always been one of the deep flaws
Of the American imagination,
That it can't imagine a future
For American-Indian people as Americans.
American-Indian people have to imagine that for themselves,
And that's the hard part.
Keep walking.
1830.
President Andrew Jackson
A policy that America will maintain
For more than 100 years.
The forced relocation of American tribal people
Onto reservations.
You, keep moving!
The bill passes Congress by a single vote.
Chickasaw, Chocktaw,
Creek, Seminole, Cherokee,
All forced off their land at the point of a bayonet.
An episode in the conquest of the West
That even some of the soldiers taking part find shameful.
US Army Private John G. Burnett writes:
The sufferings of the Cherokee were awful.
The trail of the exiles was a trail of death.
They slept in the wagons and on the ground without fire.
I saw as many as 20 die in a single night
of pneumonia, cold, exposure.
Move along.
They march of 1600 km becomes known
As the Trail of Tears.
It's a shameful act in American history
And it's, in its own way, sort of an iconic act
Because it really symbolizes
What happened to the Native Americans?
Else where the West is being transformed in other ways.
Running from Minnesota to New Orleans,
Is The Mighty Mississippi river.
3000 km long. It's fed by rain fall from 31 states.
It's a lifeline connecting the West
To the outside world.
If roads exist, they're muddy tracks.
This is the only trade route,
That allows the settlers to sell the produce they've sweated over.
A huge amount of goods are shipped out,
But they're shipped out in
The most nickel-and-dime way.
A farmer will build a flatboat,
Fill it up with hogs, sassafras root,
Ginseng root, tobacco--
Whatever it is you grow-- Put it on the flatboat,
Use the power of the Mississippi
To drift you down to sell them along the riverbank.
At the Aged of 19, Abraham Lincoln
Makes his first trip down the Mississippi,
In his simple raft.
The current is too strong to return upstream.
The primitive flatboats
Are simply sold as lumber in New Orleans.
Farmers then have to walk up to the 1000 km home
But on his first journey, Lincoln sees the future.
A new invention which will transform the Mississippi,
The Midwest and America.
The steamboat was the 19th century's
Time machine,
Just as surely as the airplane
Was the 20th century's time machine.
It shrunk distance.
By shrinking distance, it enabled commerce.
Even upstream, steamboats can travel 80 km a day,
Eight times faster,
With eight times the cargo of a raft.
The early models are dangerous.
More than half explode,
But their number triples every decade.
They make the Midwest America's economic heartland.
In just four generations
America has grown from 500 km strip of colonies
On the Eastern Seaboard to a continental powerhouse.