The West

"Do not misunderstand me, "but understand me fully "and my affection for the land.

"I never said the land was mine "to do with as I chose.

"The one who has the right to dispose of it "is the one who has created it.

"I claim a right to live on my land and accord you the privilege to live on yours."

Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht, Chief Joseph.

[men chanting in Native American language] [narrator] The West stretches from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, from the Northern Plains to the Rio Grande-- more than 2 million square miles of the most extraordinary landscape on earth.

Its terrain has always beckoned and repelled.

It is a land of almost impenetrable mountain barriers-- the Rockies and Wasatch, the Bitterroots and Bighorns, the Sierra Nevada and Sangre de Cristo, the Confusions, the Crazies, and the Black Hills.

It is a land of rivers-- the Colorado and Columbia and Missouri, the Sweetwater and the Platte, Sand Creek and the Greasy Grass, the River That Scolds All Others, and the River of No Return.

[N. Scott Momaday] It is a dream.

It is what people who have come here from the beginning of time have dreamed.

It's a dream landscape.

To the Native American, it's full of sacred realities... powerful things.

It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed, and I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen.

[narrator] The West is a land of endless seas of grass... unimaginable distances... infinite horizons... but it was never empty.

People came from every point of the compass.

To the Spanish who traveled up from Mexico, it was the North.

British and French explorers arrived by coming south... the Chinese and the Russians, by going east.

It was the Americans, the last to arrive, who named it the West.

But to the people who were already there, it was home-- the center of the universe.

They had lived there so long that their stories of creation linked them to the land itself.

The Comanches said they came from swirls of dust, the Hidatsas from the bottom of a big lake.

Among the sacred bundles of the Zunis was a stone, they said, within which beats the heart of the world.

But soon there would be other myths-- myths of golden cities, treasure for the taking, souls in need of salvation.

And another longer-lasting myth, eventually pursued by two Americans across the vastness of the West itself-- the myth of an elusive Northwest Passage that would lead them and their nation to the sea.

In their footsteps, more Americans followed-- mountain men and missionaries, solitary adventurers, and wagon trains of hopeful pioneers... a washed-up Tennessee politician who found a second chance in the West and carved out a new republic of his own... a broad-shouldered carpenter from Vermont who declared himself chosen by God to lead his persecuted people to sanctuary in the desert... and a delicate Wellesley graduate who battled flood, disease, and financial ruin yet never lost her love of the West.

Gold was discovered, and the world rushed in-- Chinese peasants and South American aristocrats... and a peach grower from upstate New York who left his wife and daughter in search of easy riches only to find nothing, except what he would remember as the greatest adventure of his life.

[T.H.

Watkins] The West is not any one thing.

It is a tremendous collection of stories... of individual human beings who could at one point demonstrate the highest values of heroism and the lowest values of cowardice... of cruelty and nobility, and all the other things that go in to make great stories, which is why the history of the West is one of the great stories of all time.

But no intelligent person can look at it without feeling a mix of both pride and shame.

[narrator] The West would help ignite the Civil War and witness some of its most savage killing.

Then, after the war was over, Union heroes who had fought to free the slaves in the East would try to subjugate the Indians of the West.

Mexican-Americans who had lived in the West for centuries would find themselves outnumbered in their own country... while a group of pioneers from the south would find in the West their own promised land.

And Native peoples would fight their last gallant wars to hold on to their lands... then begin a new struggle-- simply to remain themselves.

[J.S.

Holliday] I think that the West is the most powerful reality in the history of this country.

It's always had a power, an attraction that differentiated it from the rest of the United States.

Whether the West was a place to be conquered or the West as it is today, a place to be protected and nurtured, it is the regenerative force of America.

[narrator] The West is a story of conquest-- of competing promises and competing visions of the land.

Many peoples laid claim to the West, and many played a part in settling it.

But in the end, only one nation would demand it all... and take it.

And in the end, by moving west, that nation would discover itself.

[Richard White] When Americans tell stories about themselves, they set those stories in the West.

The American heroes are western heroes.

When you begin to think of the quintessential American characters, they're always someplace over the horizon.

There's always someplace in the West where something wonderful is about to happen.

It's not what has happened.

It's something wonderful is about to happen.

And even when we turn that around, even when we say, well, something has been lost, what's lost is always in the West.

[chanting] [Momaday] Myth is such an integral part of the conception of the West.

People think about it in terms of myth.

Always have, I believe.

Kiowa story has it that eight children were playing in the woods, and, uh, there were seven sisters and their brother.

The boy is pretending to be a bear, and he's chasing his sisters, who are pretending to be afraid, and they're running.

And as they-- a terrible thing happens in the course of the game.

The boy actually turns into a bear, and when the... when the sisters see this, they are truly terrified, and they run for their lives, the bear after them.

They pass the stump of a tree, and the tree speaks to them and says, "if you will climb up on me, I will save you."

So the little girls scamper on top of the tree stump, and as they do so, it begins to rise into the air.

The bear comes to kill them, but they're beyond its reach, and it rears up and scores the bark all around with its claws.

The story ends.

The girls are borne into the sky, and they become the stars of the big dipper.

It's a wonderful story because it accounts for the rock, Devil's Tower, this monolith that rises nearly a thousand feet into the air, and it also relates man to the stars.

[chanting and drumming] [narrator] For a thousand generations, the West belonged only to Indians... perhaps more than three million of them.

The Kalispel and Clatsop and Tonkawa... the Tewa, Paiute, and Pawnee... the Hopi, Mojave, Caddo, and Chinook... the Umatilla and the Ute.

There were people who lived in large houses made from the tallest trees on earth... and people who lived in isolated shelters fashioned from brush... people who lived in skin teepees and towering cliff-top cities.

Some started fires to make pastures or built dams and diverted streams to irrigate their crops.

Others did not dare alter the earth they believed to be their mother and prayed to the spirits of the animals they hunted.

[Momaday] The Indian feels that he is related to the animal world, that all living things are related.

In the Kiowa oral tradition, one of the ways to indicate time long past is to say, well, this happened when dogs could talk.

[narrator] In some tribes, war was considered the highest calling, and wealth was measured in slaves.

In others, women owned all the property, and when a couple married, the man joined his wife's family.

While in still other tribes, the punishment for an unfaithful wife was to cut off part of her nose.

[Michael Dorris] The West of the American continent was as diverse as almost any place in the history of the world... had people speaking seven different language families each as different from the other as each one is different from Indo-European.

You have people who don't use in their ordinary conversation I, my, me.

Everything is we.

You had societies that were intensely agricultural, like the Pueblos in the Southwest.

We have cultures in Alaska and the subarctic that didn't see sunlight for half of the year, and so their whole concept of time was different.

You had cultures on the plains where each person discovered through a vision quest his or her own inner voice and then came back after a week of isolation and told the rest of the tribe "who I am," and nobody could argue with that because it came from within.

[woman] You know, there is this marvelous stereotype out there that before white people came, the world here was perfect, that people lived in a paradise in which they were the most elegant, the most moral, the most elevated of all humanity.

That's not true.

We were human beings, and we lived in our own societies, and we did things that all human beings do, and some of it was elevated and marvelous and admirable, and some of it was pretty horrible.

[narrator] People who worshipped different gods, inhabited entirely different worlds, and were sometimes unaware of each other's existence were nonetheless linked together.

Webs of ancient trading trails stretched in every direction and covered every corner of the West.

Buffalo robes warmed people who had never seen a buffalo, cornmeal was eaten by people who had never planted corn, and ocean shells decorated the clothing of people who lived a thousand miles from the sea.

In the high country where the present states of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona come together, there once lived a great people, remembered now as the Anasazi.

For centuries, their civilization thrived, trading with other cultures to the north and south, east and west.

They dammed streams to water their crops, laid out mile upon mile of broad, straight roads across the desert... and built lofty towns where thousands of people lived.

The Anasazi flourished, and their numbers grew.

Then, though no one knows for certain why, they were forced to abandon it all.

Newcomers, the ancestors of the Ute and the Navajo, eventually took over the region.

The Anasazi were not the first people to be displaced by another in the West... and they would not be the last.

[Dorris] People call themselves "human beings" or "the people" or basically "us," and everybody else known and unknown was "them," and, uh, it made dealing with the constant surprise of encountering people who spoke different languages, had a different ethnic look, had different religions, different political systems a lot easier to deal with because "they" were always bizarre.

And so when Europeans arrived on the scene, they were just another category of "they."

"The hardships I endured in this journeying business "were long to tell-- peril and privation, "storms and frost, which often overtook me.

"By the unfailing grace of God, our Lord, I came forth from all."

Alvar Nuez Cabeza de Vaca.

[narrator] On a cold morning in the autumn of 1528, 30 years after Christopher Columbus first landed in the New World, a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico blew a frail boat onto the coast of Galveston Island in what is now Texas.

A handful of Spanish soldiers staggered ashore.

They were the first Europeans to set foot in the West.

One of the shipwreck survivors was a nobleman named Alvar Nuez Cabeza de Vaca, a hardened veteran of half a dozen wars against the enemies of Spain.

Spain had already conquered most of South America, Central America, and all of Mexico, converting thousands of Indians to Christ and stripping the Aztec and Incan cultures of their enormous wealth.

Now Cabeza de Vaca's expedition was probing north in search of even greater treasure.

"We came here to serve God and his majesty," one conquistador wrote, "to give light to those who were in darkness and to get rich as all men desire to do."

Cabeza de Vaca and his men were fed and housed by the coastal Cocos Indians, who believed the strangers to have magical powers.

But when dysentery, carried by the Spanish, killed almost half the tribe, the Indians turned on the soldiers.

Cabeza de Vaca and his companions had hoped to come as conquerors.

Instead, they entered the West as captives.

[Alvar Nuez Cabeza de Vaca] "My life became unbearable.

"In addition to much other work, "I had to grub roots in the water "or from the underground in the canebrakes.

"My fingers got so raw, "that if a straw touched them, they would bleed.

The broken canes often slashed my flesh."

[narrator] After two years of misery, Cabeza de Vaca fled his captors.

He began trading-- carrying shells and mesquite fruit to the tribes of the interior and bringing back to the coastal tribes furs, flint for arrowheads, and red ocher for face painting.

Because he belonged to no tribe himself, he was welcomed wherever he went.

By the summer of 1534, Cabeza de Vaca and the three remaining survivors of the expedition decided to try to make their way to Mexico City.

They wandered on foot for two years, through Texas, across the Rio Grande, moving from one tribe to the next.

Throughout his journey, Cabeza de Vaca had expected to find only cruel savages, but he met tribes that impressed him with their gentleness and their generosity to strangers.

And when they asked for his help, he responded in kind, speaking of Christ wherever he could.

[Cabeza de Vaca] "Some Indians came begging us "to cure them of terrible headaches.

"Surely extraordinary men like us, they said, "embodied powers over nature.

"When we made the sign of the cross over them "and commended them to God, "they instantly said all pain had vanished and gave us prickly pears and chunks of venison."

[narrator] Soon Cabeza de Vaca and his companions found themselves escorted from village to village by an army of some 600 admiring Indians.

If they were to be converted to Christianity, Cabeza de Vaca had come to believe, they must be won by kindness, the only certain way.

[White] He becomes a curer.

He becomes a healer.

He becomes an emissary of God, and Cabeza de Vaca becomes, in effect, the leader of Indian peoples.

He moves through the southwest, trudging through the desert from community to community, and then the dream stops.

[narrator] In the spring of 1536, Cabeza de Vaca and hundreds of Indians finally entered Mexico and came upon a column of Spanish soldiers who had come north destroying crops, looting villages, seizing slaves.

[Cabeza de Vaca] "With heavy hearts, we looked out "over the once lavishly watered fertile and beautiful land, "now abandoned and burned "and the people, thin and weak, scattering and hiding in fright."

[narrator] Cabeza de Vaca's Indian followers were confused.

How could he and these Spaniards belong to the same people?

Cabeza de Vaca healed the sick.

They killed the healthy.

He wanted nothing.

They took everything.

Sure that the Spanish would enslave his Indian escorts, Cabeza de Vaca urged them to flee.

Then he set out again for Mexico City.

As soon as he was gone, the Spanish seized many of his Indian friends.

[White] Cabeza de Vaca's journey through this extraordinary world ends up in a very ordinary world, a world of Spanish slavers and Indian victims.

But in between, in that moment, there was a vision of how something else might have happened that never would really fully happen but would appear in glimpses again and again as Indians and whites interacted in the continent.

[Momaday] Always, when people came into this landscape we call the West, they brought with them a necessity to imagine it.

One of the reasons for this, I think, is simply the vastness.

When one looks at, uh, the Grand Canyon, for example, it's endlessly mysterious.

You know, you feel the silence coming up and enveloping you, and you know that there are places there where no one has ever been.

"Holy Catholic Caesarian Majesty-- "I have done all that I possibly could "to serve Your Majesty "and to discover a country "where God, our Lord, might be served "and the royal treasury increased.

"As your loyal servant and vassal, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado."

[narrator] Six years after Cabeza de Vaca returned to Mexico City, the Spanish viceroy sent yet another expedition northward.

They were searching for seven cities said to be filled with gold and treasure.

In command of the expedition was the ambitious governor of a Mexican province, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado.

For more than four months, Coronado followed old Indian trails across deserts and through the mountains.

Finally, exhausted and hungry, he reached an adobe settlement that he hoped was the first of the fabled seven cities of gold.

It was really the Pueblo of Hawikuh, home to an agricultural people called the Zuni.

The people of the pueblo saw them coming, the sun slanting off their helmets, riding on monstrous animals none of them had ever seen before.

[Alfonso Ortiz] What was going on at Zuni was a summer solstice ritual, and these kinds of rituals are always regarded as private.

And so when Coronado came in while these rituals were in progress, Zuni priests-- Zuni elders-- sketched a cornmeal line between Coronado's men and the people at Zuni, a line which Coronado was not supposed to cross.

Coronado's men, who were literally starving to death by that time, just bulled right in.

[narrator] The Zunis fought back.

[Francisco Vasquez de Coronado] "They grew so bold "that they came up almost to the heels of our horses "to shoot their arrows.

"On this account, "I saw that it was no longer time to hesitate, "and as the priest approved the action, I charged them."

[gunfire] [narrator] The Indians fled from the Spanish guns, whose thunderous sound they had never heard before.

Coronado quickly overran the town, set up a wooden cross, and demanded that the Zuni immediately convert to Christianity.

But he discovered that the Zunis had no gold.

Over the next few weeks, Coronado would destroy 13 villages.

He punished all who resisted him precisely as rebellious subjects would have been punished in Spain-- burning 100 men at the stake and killing still more as they tried to flee.

[Dorris] There was the decree that would be read when the Spanish came into a new Native community that said in Latin, everybody here must fall down and worship Jesus Christ, and if you don't, we will take it that you are worshippers of the devil, and you will be wiped out.

You basically have five minutes.

[narrator] That spring, still convinced that great riches could be found over the next horizon, Coronado sent expeditions into the surrounding countryside.

One group marched to the Gulf of California.

Another crossed the painted desert into the land of the Hopis.

And a third marched for 20 days to the edge of a great gorge-- the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

Nothing in their experience had prepared them for its sheer size.

[Pedro de Castaeda] "Captain Melgosa, "with Juan Galeras and another companion, "kept descending in sight of the men left above "until they were lost to view.

"The men who remained above "estimated that some rocks jutting out from the canyon "must be about as high as a man.

"At 4:00, they returned "and swore that when they reached them, "they were found to be taller than the highest tower of Seville."

[narrator] But once again, they found no gold.

Coronado then heard of yet another city called Quivira, far to the north, filled with treasures beyond his wildest dreams.

He lead his men toward it, out onto the great plains, through an ocean of grass so vast and featureless they had to navigate with a sea compass.

[De Castaeda] "Who could believe "that 1,000 horses and 500 of our cows "and more than 5,000 rams and ewes "and more than 1,500 men, "in traveling over those plains, "would leave no more trace when they had passed than if nothing had been there...nothing?"

[narrator] In the end, Quivira turned out to be just a Wichita village on the bank of the Arkansas River-- a cluster of huts surrounded by bean fields... its inhabitants no wealthier than the other Indians Coronado had encountered.

"The country itself "is the best I have ever seen "for producing all the products of Spain, "but what I am sure of is "that there is not any gold nor any other metal in all that country."

Francisco Vasquez de Coronado.

[narrator] Finally, Coronado ordered his exhausted men to begin the long march back to Mexico.

His search for the seven cities of gold had lasted three years, led him across a quarter of the West, and earned him nothing.

[man] Neesh-ne-park-ke-ook-- the Cut Nose.

Mandeh-kahchu-- Eagle's Beak.

[woman] Umentucken-- Mountain Lamb.

Waheenee-wea-- Buffalo Bird Woman.

Watkuweis-- Returned from a Faraway Country.

[Momaday] Names in the Indian world are very important, as important or more important, I think, than in any other society that I know.

Naming is, uh... it coexists with meaning, it is indivisible with being.

If something has a name, it is said to be.

If it does not have a name, its being is suspect.

I was taken, when I was an infant, to Devil's Tower by my parents.

And when I was brought back to Oklahoma, where my grandmother lived, an old man came to visit, an old man whose name was Pul Huh, which means Old Wolf.

And he picked me up in his hands, and he began to tell stories.

And this was the name-giving process.

And at the end, when he stopped talking, he looked down at me, and he said, "And now you are Zui Tali."

That's my Indian name, and it means Rocktree Boy.

Zui is what the Kiowas call Devil's Tower, and I was given that name to commemorate my having been taken to this very sacred place.

[narrator] There was Conquering Bear and One Who Yawns... Child of the Wolf and Son of Star... Rock Forehead and Man on a Cloud... Owl Woman, Soft White Corn, and the Blind Man's Daughter...

Yellow Smoke, the Whirlwind... and Hin-mah-too- yah-lat-kekht-- Thunder Rolling from the Mountains.

Soon other men with other kinds of names would begin to converge on the Indian world-- Sir Francis Drake of England... Robert Cavelier Sieur de la Salle from France... Vitus Bering, sailing for Russia... and they were only the beginning.

[Rudolfo Anaya] The West is an interrupted dream.

Different groups of people that have come to the West have interrupted the natural evolution of the groups that they found there, and so we have a constant meeting in the West, a constant migration and meeting of groups, and the real story, I think, lies in how those groups affect each other.

[narrator] By 1680, as English colonists were crushing Indian resistance in New England, the Spanish were firmly in control of most of the pueblos of the southwest.

Each pueblo had built its own church, and priests had baptized thousands of Indians.

The Spanish had established a colony they now called New Mexico, centered around its growing capital, Santa Fe.

[Ortiz] The Indigenous peoples on their side saw what the Spanish offered as just another power to add to their own.

They conceded readily that the Spaniards must be very powerful people because they had guns, they had horses, so they were happy enough to add the Spanish saints... but without replacing their own, without giving up the visions and dreams of their own forebears.

This is what the friars would have nothing of.

For the friars, it was their way or no way at all.

European diseases had torn through the Pueblo peoples, killing a third of them.

Summer after summer, it had refused to rain.

With the drought came famine and raids by their enemies-- the Apache and the Navajo.

[chanting and drumming] [narrator] All these misfortunes coming at once convinced a priest of the Tewa Pueblo, called Pope, that the ancient spirits were displeased.

He began preaching that the foreigners must be driven out.

The Spanish redoubled their efforts to blot out the Pueblos' traditional faith.

Ritual dances were forbidden, religious objects burned.

Twice the Spanish had Pope flogged publicly, but they could not silence him.

Finally, 47 religious leaders were imprisoned in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe for speaking out against the Spanish.

Three were hanged.

[Ortiz] It was probably the final insult.

They understood once and for all then that the Spaniards meant to have nothing less than total victory.

[narrator] Pope began traveling from village to village, spreading his message that all the Pueblo Indians must forget their long-standing differences, band together, and rid themselves of Spain.

Three Pueblo leaders loyal to Spain begged the Spanish governor for help.

[man] "The Indians of this kingdom "are allied for the purpose of rebelling.

"They plan to kill the priests and all the Spaniards... "even women and children, "thus to destroy the total population of this kingdom."

[narrator] On a prearranged day, Pueblos all across New Mexico rose and overthrew the Spanish.

At Taos, Santa Clara, and Picuris, Keres, Hopi, and Santa Cruz, they killed the friars, leveled their churches.

21 priests were killed... so were at least 400 settlers.

Survivors found sanctuary in Santa Fe, huddled inside the Palace of the Governors.

2,500 Indians surrounded them, cut off their water, burned the rest of the capital, and sang the Catholic liturgy in Latin to mock them.

After 11 days of siege, the surviving Spanish fought their way out and fled to Mexico.

The Indians did not pursue them.

[Ortiz] That was the whole object of the revolt-- to get the hated Spaniards to leave, and when they achieved that objective, they sat back and were content.

[narrator] For the moment, it was enough that the land was theirs again, that they could once again practice their faith without fear of punishment.

Pope had led the most successful Indian revolt in all of north American history... but Indian independence did not last long.

The Spanish eventually returned and overwhelmed the Pueblos, but they grew more tolerant of Indian religion.

Indians and Spaniards began to intermarry.

[Anaya] Think of two world views coming together with completely different conceptions of the universe and of nature... and a lot of times when we speak of the meeting of cultures, we forget that beyond the initial clash emerges a new view of the world, and I think that's what we Chicanos represent today.

"It has a shaggy neck "and a tail almost touching the ground.

"Its hooves are round.

"This animal will carry you on his back "and help you in many ways.

"Those far hills that seem only a blue vision in the distance "take many days to reach now, "but with this animal, "you can get there in a short time, "so fear him not.

Remember what I have said."

Sweet Medicine.

[narrator] According to Cheyenne tradition, there was once a prophet named Sweet Medicine who taught his people how to conduct themselves.

He set up a council of 44 chiefs to speak for all the Cheyenne and presented them with four sacred arrows-- two to subdue their human enemies, two to make the buffalo fall before them.

And he brought them a warning-- strangers called earth men would one day appear among them-- light-skinned, speaking an unknown tongue-- and with them would come a strange animal.

It would change the Cheyenne way of life and that of every other Indian people...forever.

It was the horse.

Apache and Navajo raiders got them first, but when the Spanish were driven out of New Mexico, the thousands of horses they left behind spread across the West.

By the 1690s, the horse was being used by tribes of the southern plains.

By 1700, it had transformed the lives of the Kiowa and Comanche along the eastern foothills of the Rockies.

At the same time, the horse reached the Shoshone and Bannock in what is now Idaho.

The Nez Perce stole some from them and soon had herds that numbered in the thousands in the lush Wallowa Valley of the Pacific Northwest.

[Momaday] It must have been the realization of an ancient dream to be elevated, to be severed from the Earth, cut free.

What a sense of life that must have been-- different to anything they had ever known.

And with the horse, their ancient nomadism was realized to the fullest extent, and they had conquered their oldest enemy, which was distance.

[narrator] The Great Plains now became a crowded meeting ground for some 30 tribes from every direction.

The horse became the most precious symbol of wealth and prestige, a valuable prize to steal from your enemies and a faster way to reach them.

A man's bravery was measured by the size of his horse herd and by the number of times he had touched an enemy in battle-- called "counting coup."

Within each tribe, warrior societies flourished-- the Blackmouths, the Bowstrings, the Dog Soldiers.

[Momaday] Before the horse, life must have been hard.

A person would have to give virtually every hour of his waking time to solving the simple problem of survival-- "Well, how am I going to get enough food for myself and my family today?"

But with the horse, a hunter could acquire enough food in one day to last him months, and so he was suddenly given a margin of freedom that he could never have imagined, and so what he did with it, of course, was to celebrate it in terms of the warrior ideal-- "Now I have leisure.

"I can go and hunt, and, uh, I can, uh, "I can visit my enemies and count coup.

I can be brave, and I can attain glory."

"I longed to join the war parties "I watched going out.

"In the evenings, I wandered through the village "until I found a teepee where some old man "was telling stories of famous raids.

"I would sit outside, "my ear pressed to the skin wall.

"I hated this quiet life.

"After hunting buffalo until I grew bored, "I would often sit alone on some high ridge and think about the honors a man could win."

Two Leggings.

[Momaday] The Dog Soldiers were the elite military organizations in the tribe.

They were the last line of defense for the people, and so they were greatly esteemed.

The warriors in the society were outfitted with a sash, a particular sash which trailed the ground, and each member carried a sacred arrow, and in time of battle, the Dog Soldier would impale the sash to the ground and stand the ground to the death.

They had a song which only the members could sing and only in the face of death.

So you can imagine that, uh, you know, children, when they saw a Dog Soldier go by, must have just, "Ah!

Wow!

Look at that guy.

He's a Dog Soldier."

"A man could not even court a girl "unless he had proved his courage.

"That was one reason "so many were anxious to win good war records.

"They were all afraid of what people, "and especially the women, "would say if they were cowardly.

"The women even had a song they would sing "about a man whose courage had failed him-- "if you are afraid when you charge, "turn back.

"The desert women will eat you.

"It was hard to go into a fight, "and they were often afraid, but it was worse to turn back and face the women."

John Stands in Timber.

[Jo Allyn Archambault] As a Lakota woman four generations ago, I would have cut off the arms and the legs and heads of the enemies that my husband killed, and I would have put them on a stick, and I would have paraded them in the scalp dance at that evening when we honored our men.

[woman] Women used to get out and show, you know, that they were emotional, worried about their warriors going off, and while they were gone, they always watched.

When the horses get together, they make a lot of dust, and when they'd see this, why, they knew that they were coming back from a hunt or a fight, you know, and they recognized their family member, and that's the way they--they lulued for them.

[whooping] That's the way they did it, and, uh, then they danced all jolly and happy after they fed their warriors, and everybody spruced up and got out, and they had a big victory dance.

That's when women all get in line and dance around.

[narrator] On the southern plains, the Comanches began driving their enemies, the Apaches, out of the grasslands and into the deserts and mountains of New Mexico.

In the North, the Lakota-- or the Sioux, as their enemies called them-- pressed even farther westward, pushing the Cheyenne ahead of them and displacing other tribes as they expanded across the Missouri.

[woman] "Of course the Lakota, "Cheyenne, Arapahos, and other tribes "never let us rest, "so there was always war.

"When our enemies were not bothering us, "our warriors were bothering them, "so there was always fighting going on somewhere.

"We women sometimes tried to keep our men from going to war, but this was like talking to winter winds."

Pretty-Shield.

"The warriors came out on a high cliff to the east "and saw an enemy village down there-- "a crow village-- but nobody seemed around.

"Just as they got there, "they smelled this awful smell, "and when they went into the village "and examined the first teepees, "they found them full of dead people "laying there wrapped up.

"So they got out of there and started back, "but before they reached their own village, "one of them got sick and died, too, "and when they got in, "the rest of them came down with smallpox also.

It killed many of them."

John Stands in Timber.

[narrator] Smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, measles, diphtheria-- European diseases against which they had no immunity-- now raced from people to people.

[Dorris] What must it have been like to live in a community and suddenly a disease that you had never seen before, for which your medicines were not effective, and which had horribly ugly symptoms wiped out everybody you saw?

Was it witchcraft?

Was it a punishment?

Was it the end of the world?

Who knew what was going on?

And those people who didn't die-- they were left stragglers.

If they were children, they had, you know, they were very dependent on anybody who else survived.

It was a total holocaust, and it wasn't the cavalry.

It was a series of pandemics that wiped out most people before Europeans ever encountered them.

"Know that on the right hand of the Indies, "there is an island... "very near to the terrestrial paradise... "which was peopled with Black women "without any men among them "because they were accustomed "to live after the fashion of Amazons.

"And there reigned in this island a queen-- "very large in person, "the most beautiful of all of them.

Her name--Calafia."

Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo.

[narrator] In 1533, a Spanish expedition sent north from Mexico had discovered what its members assumed was a large island.

They named it California, after a mythical land of Amazons they had read about in a popular novel.

But the cost of colonizing the Southwest had proved so high that Spain made no effort to settle the new territory.

For the next two and a half centuries, California remained essentially untouched by Europeans, home to more than 300,000 Indians living in hundreds of small bands.

Then in 1767, it all began to change.

Rumors reached the Spanish that Russian traders were building outposts along the Pacific Coast.

To protect Spanish interests, Mexico City decided to establish a chain of forts and missions in California and sent a column of soldiers north.

With them went a missionary-- Father Junipero Serra.

Serra was a former teacher of philosophy, badly handicapped by an ulcerated leg and further weakened by his habit of scourging his own flesh in atonement for the sins of others.

But nothing could quell his missionary zeal.

By may of 1769, Serra had arrived in California and met his first potential converts.

"I found myself in front of 12 of them, "and I saw something I could not believe.

"It was this-- "they were entirely naked as Adam in the garden, "before sin.

"We spoke a long time with them, "and not for one moment, while they saw us clothed, "could you notice the least sign of shame in them."

Father Junipero Serra.

[narrator] Father Serra and his followers helped establish 21 missions in all-- San Diego, San Gabriel, San Antonio de Padua, San Jose, and on a magnificent bay in northern California, San Francisco, established in 1776, the year 13 colonies along the Atlantic Coast declared their independence from Britain.

Near the mission at San Gabriel in Southern California, a town sprang up in 1781, settled by people whom the missionary fathers considered lazy and corrupt, interested mainly in drinking, gambling, and pursuing women.

It was Los Angeles.

[singing in Latin] The friars believed themselves engaged in holy work.

They thought it their duty to round up the Indians, to teach them to weave, make bricks, tend crops, herd cattle, and to give up their old ways.

[Adrian Bustamante] The friar felt that if he didn't save these people, they were going to go to hell, and so his motive was, get these people baptized, get them to believe in Jesus Christ and his church, and get them to become Christian so that they can go to heaven.

Otherwise, they're in the grasp of the devil, and this was a very serious responsibility for a friar.

[Dorris] Just imagine if an Iroquois holy man or a Lakota medicine person suddenly arrived in Paris, told everybody that Catholicism was devil worship and that they must burn every trapping that they had of Catholicism and completely change their world view.

I don't think the French would have been as polite, but in fact, most missionaries did pretty well.

People treated them with respect.

People gave them a place to live.

Oftentimes, people went to their services.

Sometimes they even believed what they said.

[narrator] The Mission Indians, called neophytes by the friars, were crowded into barracks.

Handpicked Indian overseers with whips drove them from task to task, even to and from mass.

The neophytes tried again and again to escape into the interior, but soldiers were sent to hunt them down.

During the Mission Period, from San Francisco to San Diego, three out of four of the coastal Indians perished.

"They live well free," a puzzled friar said, "but as soon as we reduce them "to a Christian and community life, they fatten, sicken, and die."

"The object of your mission "is to explore the Missouri River, "and such principal stream of it, "as by its course and communications "with the waters of the Pacific Ocean "may offer the most direct "and practicable water communication "across this continent.

"Those who come after us will fill up the canvas we begin."

President Thomas Jefferson.

[chanting and drumming] [narrator] For centuries, the Mandans of the upper Missouri river had been one of the most prosperous tribes on the great plains, living in permanent villages and growing crops in such abundance that other tribes came great distances to trade with them.

Europeans came, too-- Frenchmen, Englishmen, Spaniards.

Each time, they brought flags and claimed that the Mandans and their land had been added to their empires.

But the Mandans believed they had merely added the French, English, and Spanish to their list of customers.

Each country was searching for the Northwest Passage, a water route believed to connect the Missouri river with the Pacific and the riches of the Orient that lay beyond.

Whichever nation found it first and then controlled it would control the destiny of the continent.

[Dayton Duncan] From the time of Columbus, the Europeans were looking for the fastest route they could to India and China.

There was still this notion that there must be an easy way across, that it couldn't be this big a land, and particularly, there must be a water route across.

[narrator] On October 24, 1804, the Mandans looked down from the bluffs of the Missouri and saw the largest boat they had ever seen-- 55 feet long, 22 oars at its sides, and a cannon mounted in the bow.

They hurried down to see it.

Strangers stepped onto the shore, and their two leaders spoke to the Mandans.

[man] "Children, your old fathers, "the French and the Spaniards, "have gone beyond the Great Lake "toward the rising sun.

Children, the great chief..." [narrator] They were explorers, not traders, they said, on their way from St.

Louis to find the great ocean toward the setting sun.

[man] "Children, the great chief of the 17 great nations "of America has become your only father.

He has commanded us to undertake this long journey."

[narrator] The white men said that the Mandans had a new Great Father, far to the east, more powerful than the others before him.

[man] "Children, follow these counsels "and you will have nothing to fear, "and future ages will make you outnumber "the trees in the forest.

"Do these things which your Great Father advises "and be happy, lest by one false step "you should bring down upon your nation the displeasure of your Great Father."

[narrator] The Great Father was Thomas Jefferson, president of the new United States, who had just purchased from France half a billion acres between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, doubling the size of his young republic with a single stroke of his pen.

Jefferson called his expedition the Corps of Discovery.

To lead it, the president had turned to his personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis, a young army officer from Virginia.

As co-commander, Lewis picked an old army friend and fellow Virginian, William Clark, a gregarious, seasoned frontiersman.

With them were French-Canadian boatmen, three dozen army recruits from New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky, and Clark's personal servant, a slave named York.

To act as translators, Lewis and Clark hired a French trapper, Toussaint Charbonneau, and his 16-year-old wife Sacagawea, a Shoshone who had been captured by the Hidatsa as a small girl.

"Our wish is to be at peace with all.

"If we eat, you shall eat.

If we starve, you must starve, too."

Sheheke.

[narrator] The explorers spent their first winter among the Mandans, who sold them food, helped them hunt buffalo, and gave them advice on what to expect farther up the Missouri.

In the spring, the Corps of Discovery started west again.

"We were now about to penetrate a country "at least 2,000 miles in width, "on which the foot of civilized man "had never trodden.

"The good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine."

Meriwether Lewis.

[narrator] In the months to come, they passed through some of the most magnificent country on earth, spent weeks portaging around a huge waterfall, and noted animals never before described for science-- grizzly bears, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep-- and they were astonished by the massive herds of buffalo that seemed to be everywhere.

But they were falling badly behind schedule.

The distances were proving to be far greater than the explorers, Jefferson, or anyone else had ever imagined.

In early August, Lewis led a small advance party along an Indian trail that wound west into the mountains.

Coming upon an ice-cold spring, he wrote that it was "the most distant fountain "of the mighty Missouri, one of those great objects "on which my mind has been unalterably fixed for many years."

Then he climbed toward the sharp ridge behind it.

[Duncan] Of course, the mission of the Lewis and Clark expedition was to find the Northwest Passage.

That was the most important thing, and Meriwether Lewis was climbing to this ridge that he thought--was sure was the continental divide, and as he walked up this saddle in the mountains, he expected that when he got there, he might even see the ocean, but certainly he would see the western equivalent of the Great Plains and a river that would flow there, and as he got to the top, he looked out and saw more mountains... snow on them, eternal snows, and the myth of the Northwest Passage died at that moment.

[narrator] Lewis had in fact crossed the continental divide, the spine of the Rocky Mountains beyond which the rivers flow west and beyond the boundaries of the United States.

But his party was still nearly 500 miles from the Pacific, and summer was fast disappearing.

"If we do not find the Shoshones "or some other nation who have horses, "I fear the successful issue of our voyage "will be very doubtful, "not knowing how far these mountains continue or where to direct our course to pass them."

Meriwether Lewis.

[narrator] The next day, he chanced upon a Shoshone village.

The Shoshone had never seen a white man before and were suspicious of Lewis.

The fate of the expedition now lay in their hands.

Then occurred one of the most extraordinary coincidences in American history.

When the main party arrived, Sacagawea, the French trapper's wife, suddenly recognized the chief of the Shoshone.

He was her brother.

"The great chief of this nation "proved to be the brother of the woman with us.

"The squaw danced for the joyful sight, and those Indians sang all the way to their camp."

William Clark.

[narrator] With Sacagawea as their interpreter, the captains explained their need for horses and guides, and the Shoshones agreed to provide them.

Lewis and Clark had no time to rest.

Frost already covered the ground each morning.

The Shoshone told them of a steep hunting trail across the Bitterroots, but it was rocky, heavily timbered, and with little game to shoot.

Despite the risks, Lewis determined to try it.

On foot and on horseback, they headed across what one of the men called "the most terrible mountains I ever beheld."

"September 16, 1805.

"Began to snow about three hours before day "and continued all day.

"The snow in the morning-- "4 inches deep on the old snow, "and by night, we found it from 6 to 8 inches deep.

"I have been as wet and as cold in every part as I ever was in my life."

"To describe the road of this day "would be a repetition of yesterday, except the snow, which made it much worse."

[narrator] For 11 days, desperate with hunger, sometimes entirely lost, they tried to follow the old trail along the mountain ridges through swirling snow.

They shot and ate a coyote, a raven, frantically splashed after crayfish in a stream, chewed even their candles, and finally stumbled down out of the mountains, more dead than alive.

There they were found by the Nez Perce.

[Allen Pinkham] The Nez Perces could have killed them easily.

They could have wiped them out, but once they knew the intent of Lewis and Clark, that there was going to be no harm done to them, then of course they became very friendly, and they were willing to help.

[narrator] The Nez Perce gave the starving strangers dried salmon and the roots of the camass plant to eat, told them it was now possible to reach the sea by water and allowed the Americans to fell five trees from which to make canoes for the journey.

Lewis and Clark moved fast now down the clearwater, then the snake, through currents one member of the expedition remembered "swifter than any horse could run," and finally onto the broad Columbia.

By late October, they were seeing signs that they were nearing the coast.

Some Indians wore blue jackets and round hats bartered from British and American sailors who had been trading along the Pacific Coast for decades.

"The Indians inform us "that they speak the same language with ourselves "and give us proofs of their veracity "by repeating many words of English "as musket, powder, shot, knife, damned rascal, son of a bitch, et cetera."

[narrator] By November, the river started to widen still further.

[Duncan] You can imagine what it must have been like for Lewis and Clark.

They'd been gone for a year and a half, longer than they thought.

They weren't even in United States territory any longer.

They're coming down the Columbia, and suddenly the water turns salty, and they start feeling some tidal motion, and it was the only time that William Clark ever got emotional in two and a half years in the wilderness.

"November 7th, Thursday, 1805.

"A cloudy, foggy morning.

Some rain."

"We set out early, "the fog so thick we could not see across the river."

[narrator] Then the fog lifted, and the Corps of Discovery finally saw the end of their long trail and a glimpse of their young country's future.

"We are in view of the ocean... "this great Pacific Ocean... "which we have been so long anxious to see.

O!

The joy..." William Clark.

[narrator] For nearly 300 years, Europeans from different nations had been entering the West from different directions, pursuing different myths.

Yet each intruder had laid claim to the region, as if he were the first to discover it, as if the people already living there, whose world they had changed forever, did not exist.

A conquistador had etched his name for Spain on El Morro Rock in New Mexico.

On behalf of France, a nobleman had buried a lead tablet with his name on it on the Northern Plains.

A Scottish explorer had painted his name on a rock to claim the northwest coast for Great Britain.

Now it was the Americans' turn.

At a point overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Oregon, Clark took his knife and carved a message in the bark of a tree-- William Clark, December 3, 1805, by land, from the United States.

His nation was not yet 30 years old, but the United States already claimed half of the West.

In 40 more years, Americans would have it all.

[Momaday] If you could take a photograph at that time, you have one world, and it is a world that is full of good things as far as the Indians are concerned.

Game is plentiful.

Their way of life is clearly established in terms of that landscape, but just off the picture plane, you know, there are these things that are about to descend upon that world, and for the Indian, they are very bad.

The culture is severely threatened because of people from outside who are coming in... and their attitude is that even this world is not big enough for both of us.