Documentary, Ken Burns The West Part-1 The People
#TheWest #USA
#TheWest #USA
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00:00:00Do not misunderstand me, but understand me fully, and my affection for the land.
00:00:23I never said the land was mine to do with as I chose.
00:00:26The one who has the right to dispose of it is the one who has created it.
00:00:33I claim a right to live on my land, and accord you the privilege to live on yours.
00:00:41Hinmatu yalat kekt, Chief Joseph.
00:00:56Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
00:01:24E-ha, e-ha, e-ha, e-ha, e-ha, e-ha, e-ha, e-ha, e-ha.
00:01:46The West stretches from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean,
00:01:50from the Northern Plains to the Rio Grande.
00:01:54More than two million square miles
00:01:56of the most extraordinary landscape on Earth.
00:02:02Its terrain has always beckoned and repelled.
00:02:12It is a land of almost impenetrable mountain barriers.
00:02:18The Rockies and Wasatch,
00:02:20the Bitter Roots and Bighorns,
00:02:22the Sierra Nevada and Sangre de Cristo,
00:02:26the Confusions, the Crazies, and the Black Hills.
00:02:34It is a land of rivers,
00:02:36the Colorado and Columbia and Missouri,
00:02:40the Sweetwater and the Platte,
00:02:43Sand Creek and the greasy grass,
00:02:47the river that scolds all others,
00:02:50and the river of no return.
00:02:58It is a dream.
00:03:03It is what people who have come here from the beginning of time have dreamed.
00:03:09It is a dream landscape.
00:03:10It is a dream landscape.
00:03:11To the Native American, it is full of sacred realities.
00:03:16It is full of sacred realities, powerful things.
00:03:21It is a landscape that has to be seen to be believed.
00:03:25It is a landscape that has to be seen to be believed.
00:03:28And I say on occasion,
00:03:30it may have to be believed in order to be seen.
00:03:38The West is a land of endless seas of grass,
00:03:41unimaginable distances,
00:03:44infinite horizons.
00:03:49But it was never empty.
00:03:55People came from every point of the compass.
00:04:00To the Spanish, who traveled up from Mexico,
00:04:03it was the north.
00:04:06British and French explorers arrived by coming south.
00:04:10The Chinese and the Russians by going east.
00:04:18It was the Americans, the last to arrive,
00:04:21who named it the West.
00:04:27But to the people who were already there, it was home.
00:04:32The center of the universe.
00:04:40They had lived there so long,
00:04:42that their stories of creation linked them to the land itself.
00:04:47The Comanche said they came from swirls of dust.
00:04:52The Hidatsa from the bottom of a big lake.
00:04:56Among the sacred bundles of the Zunis was a stone, they said,
00:05:00within which beats the heart of the world.
00:05:03But soon there would be other myths.
00:05:13Myths of golden cities.
00:05:15Treasure for the taking.
00:05:17Souls in need of salvation.
00:05:23And another longer-lasting myth,
00:05:25myth, eventually pursued by two Americans across the vastness of the West itself.
00:05:31The myth of an elusive Northwest passage that would lead them and their nation to the sea.
00:05:38In their footsteps, more Americans followed, mountain men and missionaries,
00:05:51solitary adventurers, and wagon trains of hopeful pioneers.
00:05:58A washed-up Tennessee politician who found a second chance in the West
00:06:03and carved out a new republic of his own.
00:06:08A broad-shouldered carpenter from Vermont who declared himself chosen by God
00:06:14to lead his persecuted people to sanctuary in the desert.
00:06:20And a delicate Wellesley graduate who battled flood, disease, and financial ruin,
00:06:26yet never lost her love of the West.
00:06:32Gold was discovered and the world rushed in.
00:06:35And a peach grower from upstate New York who left his wife and daughter in search of easy riches,
00:06:50only to find nothing except what he would remember as the greatest adventure of his life.
00:06:56The West is not any one thing.
00:07:05It is a tremendous collection of stories
00:07:10of individual human beings who could at one point demonstrate the highest values of heroism
00:07:15and the lowest values of cowardice, of cruelty and nobility and all the other things that go in to make
00:07:26great stories, which is why the history of the West is one of the great stories of all time.
00:07:32The West would help ignite the Civil War and witness some of its most savage killing.
00:07:49Then, after the war was over, Union heroes who had fought to free the slaves in the East
00:07:58would try to subjugate the Indians of the West.
00:08:01Mexican Americans who had lived in the West for centuries would find themselves outnumbered in their own country,
00:08:15while a group of pioneers from the South would find in the West their own promised land.
00:08:21And native peoples would fight their last gallant wars to hold onto their lands,
00:08:32then begin a new struggle, simply to remain themselves.
00:08:46I think that the West is the most powerful reality in the history of this country.
00:08:51country. It's always had a power, an attraction that differentiated it from the rest of the United States.
00:09:02Whether the West was a place to be conquered or the West as it is today, a place to be protected and nurtured.
00:09:11It is the regenerative force of America.
00:09:15The West is a story of conquest, of competing promises and competing visions of the land.
00:09:27Many peoples laid claim to the West and many played a part in settling it.
00:09:33But in the end, only one nation would demand it all and take it.
00:09:40And in the end, by moving West, that nation would discover itself.
00:09:47When Americans tell stories about themselves, they set those stories in the West.
00:09:56The American heroes are Western heroes.
00:09:59When you begin to think of the quintessential American characters, they're always some place over the horizon.
00:10:10There's always some place in the West where something wonderful is about to happen.
00:10:17It's not what has happened, it's something wonderful is about to happen.
00:10:20And even when we turn that around, even when we say, well, something has been lost, what's lost is always in the West.
00:10:31I've been wrong.
00:10:40I'm from a country to be, well, some of them have also been lost, I've lost.
00:10:50I'm from a country to be a person to be a person to be a person to be a person to be a person.
00:10:54In the West, it's still a person to be an artist.
00:10:57Myth is such an integral part of the conception of the West.
00:11:19People think about it in terms of myth.
00:11:22Always have, I believe.
00:11:24Kiowa's story has it that eight children were playing in the woods, and there were seven
00:11:35sisters and their brother.
00:11:37The boy is pretending to be a bear, and he's chasing his sisters, who are pretending to
00:11:42be afraid, and they're running.
00:11:44And as they, a terrible thing happens in the course of the game, the boy actually turns
00:11:49into a bear.
00:11:50And when the, when the sisters see this, they are truly terrified, and they run for
00:11:56their lives, the bear after them.
00:11:58They pass the stump of a tree, and the tree speaks to them and says, if you will climb
00:12:03upon me, I will save you.
00:12:05So the little girls scamper on top of the tree stump, and as they do so, it begins to rise
00:12:13into the air.
00:12:15The bear comes to kill them, but they're beyond its reach.
00:12:18And it rears up and scores the bark all around with its claws.
00:12:24The story ends.
00:12:26The girls are born into the sky, and they become the stars of the Big Dipper.
00:12:32It's a wonderful story because it accounts for the rock, Devil's Tower, this monolith that
00:12:39rises nearly a thousand feet into the air.
00:12:42For a thousand generations, the West belonged only to Indians, perhaps more than three million
00:13:05of them, the Kalispell and Klatsop and Tonkawa, the Tiwa, Paiute and Pawnee, the Hopi, Mojave,
00:13:23Kado and Chinook, the Umatilla and the Ute.
00:13:28There were people who lived in large houses made from the tallest trees on earth, and
00:13:37people who lived in isolated shelters fashioned from brush, people who lived in skin teepees
00:13:45and towering clifftop cities.
00:13:48Some started fires to make pastures, or built dams and diverted streams to irrigate their
00:13:59crops.
00:14:01Others did not dare alter the earth they believed to be their mother, and prayed to the spirits
00:14:07of the animals they hunted.
00:14:12The Indian feels that he is related to the animal world.
00:14:16In the Kiowa oral tradition, one of the ways to indicate time long past is to say, well,
00:14:30this happened when dogs could talk.
00:14:35In some tribes, war was considered the highest calling, and wealth was measured in slaves.
00:14:42In others, women owned all the property, and when a couple married, the man joined his wife's
00:14:51family.
00:14:53While in still other tribes, the punishment for an unfaithful wife was to cut off part of
00:14:59her nose.
00:14:59The West of the American continent was as diverse as almost any place in the history of the world.
00:15:18Had people speaking seven different language families, each as different from the other,
00:15:23as each one is different from Indo-European.
00:15:26You have people who don't use in their ordinary conversation, I, my, me.
00:15:33Everything is we.
00:15:37You had societies that were intensely agricultural, like the Pueblos in the southwest.
00:15:41We have cultures in Alaska, in the sub-arctic, that didn't see sunlight for half of the year,
00:15:51and so their whole concept of time was different.
00:15:58You had cultures on the plains where each person discovered through a vision quest his or her
00:16:06own inner voice, and then came back after a week of isolation, and told the rest of the tribe who I am.
00:16:16And nobody could argue with that, because it came from within.
00:16:22You know, there's this marvelous stereotype out there, that before white people came,
00:16:27the world here was perfect.
00:16:29That people lived in a paradise in which they were the most elegant, the most moral, the most elevated of all humanity.
00:16:42That's not true.
00:16:44We were human beings, and we lived in our own societies, and we did things that all human beings do.
00:16:51And some of it was elevated and marvelous and admirable, and some of it was pretty horrible.
00:16:59People who worshipped different gods, inhabited entirely different worlds,
00:17:05and were sometimes unaware of each other's existence, were nonetheless linked together.
00:17:13Webs of ancient trading trails stretched in every direction, and covered every corner of the west.
00:17:22Buffalo robes warmed people who had never seen a buffalo.
00:17:26Cornmeal was eaten by people who had never planted corn.
00:17:32And ocean shells decorated the clothing of people who lived a thousand miles from the sea.
00:17:42In the high country, where the present states of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona come together,
00:17:50there once lived a great people, remembered now as the Anasazi.
00:17:58For centuries, their civilization thrived, trading with other cultures to the north and south, east and west.
00:18:06They dammed streams to water their crops, laid out mile upon mile of broad, straight roads across the desert.
00:18:18And built lofty towns where thousands of people lived.
00:18:22The Anasazi flourished, the Anasazi flourished, and their numbers grew.
00:18:30Then, though no one knows for certain why, they were forced to abandon it all.
00:18:37Newcomers, the ancestors of the Ute and the Navajo, eventually took over the region.
00:18:43The Anasazi were not the first people to be displaced by another in the west.
00:18:53And they would not be the last.
00:18:58People call themselves human beings, or the people, or basically us.
00:19:04And everybody else, known and unknown, was them.
00:19:10And it made dealing with the constant surprise of encountering people who spoke different languages,
00:19:18had a different ethnic look, had different religions, different political systems,
00:19:23a lot easier to deal with because they were always bizarre.
00:19:27And so when Europeans arrived on the scene, they were just another category of they.
00:19:34The hardships I endured in this journeying business were long to tell.
00:19:55Peril and privation, storms and frost, which often overtook me.
00:19:59By the unfailing grace of God, our Lord, I came forth from all.
00:20:06Albert Muñez, Cabeza de Vaca.
00:20:12On a cold morning in the autumn of 1528,
00:20:1630 years after Christopher Columbus first landed in the New World,
00:20:20a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico blew a frail boat onto the coast of Galveston Island in what is now Texas.
00:20:29A handful of Spanish soldiers staggered ashore.
00:20:33They were the first Europeans to set foot in the west.
00:20:39One of the shipwreck survivors was a nobleman named Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca,
00:20:45a hardened veteran of half a dozen wars against the enemies of Spain.
00:20:53Spain had already conquered most of South America, Central America, and all of Mexico,
00:21:00converting thousands of Indians to Christ
00:21:03and stripping the Aztec and Incan cultures of their enormous wealth.
00:21:07Now, Cabeza de Vaca's expedition was probing north
00:21:13in search of even greater treasure.
00:21:16We came here to serve God and his majesty, one conquistador wrote,
00:21:21to give light to those who were in darkness
00:21:23and to get rich, as all men desire to do.
00:21:31Cabeza de Vaca and his men were fed and housed
00:21:34by the coastal Cocos Indians who believed the strangers
00:21:38to have magical powers.
00:21:42But when dysentery, carried by the Spanish,
00:21:45killed almost half the tribe,
00:21:47the Indians turned on the soldiers.
00:21:52Cabeza de Vaca and his companions
00:21:54had hoped to come as conquerors.
00:21:58Instead, they entered the west as captives.
00:22:01My life became unbearable.
00:22:07In addition to much other work,
00:22:09I had to grub roots in the water
00:22:11or from the underground in the cane bricks.
00:22:14My fingers got so raw
00:22:16that if a straw touched them, they would bleed.
00:22:19The broken canes often slashed my flesh.
00:22:25After two years of misery,
00:22:27Cabeza de Vaca fled his captors.
00:22:29He began trading,
00:22:32carrying shells and mesquite fruit
00:22:34to the tribes of the interior
00:22:36and bringing back to the coastal tribes
00:22:39furs, flint for arrowheads
00:22:41and red ochre for face painting.
00:22:44Because he belonged to no tribe himself,
00:22:47he was welcomed wherever he went.
00:22:49By the summer of 1534,
00:22:56Cabeza de Vaca
00:22:57and the three remaining survivors
00:22:59of the expedition
00:22:59decided to try to make their way
00:23:02to Mexico City.
00:23:04They wandered on foot for two years
00:23:07through Texas,
00:23:09across the Rio Grande,
00:23:11moving from one tribe to the next.
00:23:14Throughout his journey,
00:23:18Cabeza de Vaca
00:23:19had expected to find
00:23:21only cruel savages.
00:23:23But he met tribes
00:23:25that impressed him
00:23:26with their gentleness
00:23:27and their generosity to strangers.
00:23:30And when they asked for his help,
00:23:33he responded in kind,
00:23:35speaking of Christ
00:23:36wherever he could.
00:23:37Some Indians came
00:23:41begging us
00:23:42to cure them
00:23:42of terrible headaches.
00:23:45Surely extraordinary men
00:23:46like us, they said,
00:23:47embodied powers over nature.
00:23:50When we made the sign
00:23:51of the cross over them
00:23:52and commended them to God,
00:23:54they instantly said
00:23:56all pain had vanished
00:23:57and gave us prickly pears
00:23:59and chunks of venison.
00:24:04Soon, Cabeza de Vaca
00:24:06and his companions
00:24:07found themselves escorted
00:24:09from village to village
00:24:10by an army
00:24:11of some 600 admiring Indians.
00:24:15If they were to be converted
00:24:17to Christianity,
00:24:18Cabeza de Vaca
00:24:19had come to believe,
00:24:20they must be won by kindness
00:24:22the only certain way.
00:24:26He becomes a cure.
00:24:28He becomes a healer.
00:24:30He becomes an emissary of God.
00:24:32And Cabeza de Vaca
00:24:33becomes, in effect,
00:24:34a leader of Indian peoples.
00:24:37He moves through the southwest,
00:24:39trudging through the desert
00:24:40from community to community.
00:24:43And then the dream stops.
00:24:48In the spring of 1536,
00:24:52Cabeza de Vaca
00:24:53and hundreds of Indians
00:24:54finally entered Mexico
00:24:56and came upon a column
00:24:58of Spanish soldiers
00:24:59who had come north,
00:25:01destroying crops,
00:25:02looting villages,
00:25:03looting villages,
00:25:03seizing slaves.
00:25:07With heavy hearts
00:25:09we looked out
00:25:09over the once lavishly watered,
00:25:12fertile and beautiful land,
00:25:15now abandoned and burned,
00:25:16and the people thin and weak,
00:25:19scattering and hiding in fright.
00:25:24Cabeza de Vaca's Indian followers
00:25:26were confused.
00:25:27How could he and these Spaniards
00:25:31belong to the same people?
00:25:34Cabeza de Vaca healed the sick.
00:25:37They killed the healthy.
00:25:39He wanted nothing.
00:25:42They took everything.
00:25:45Sure that the Spanish
00:25:47would enslave his Indian escorts,
00:25:50Cabeza de Vaca urged them to flee.
00:25:52Then he set out again
00:25:54for Mexico City.
00:25:57As soon as he was gone,
00:25:59the Spanish seized
00:26:00many of his Indian friends.
00:26:06Cabeza de Vaca's journey
00:26:08through this extraordinary world
00:26:09ends up in a very ordinary world,
00:26:12a world of Spanish slavers
00:26:14and Indian victims.
00:26:16But in between,
00:26:18in that moment,
00:26:20there was a vision
00:26:21of how something else
00:26:22might have happened
00:26:23that never would
00:26:24really fully happen,
00:26:26but would appear
00:26:27in glimpses again and again
00:26:29as Indians and whites
00:26:30interacted in the continent.
00:26:40Always,
00:26:41when people came into this
00:26:43landscape
00:26:45we call the West,
00:26:47they brought with them
00:26:49a necessity
00:26:50to imagine it.
00:26:54One of the reasons
00:26:55for this, I think,
00:26:57is simply the vastness.
00:27:01When one looks at
00:27:02the Grand Canyon,
00:27:04for example,
00:27:05it's endlessly mysterious.
00:27:09You know,
00:27:09you feel the silence
00:27:11coming up
00:27:12and enveloping you
00:27:14and you know
00:27:16that there are places
00:27:16there where
00:27:17no one has ever been.
00:27:27Holy Catholic
00:27:29Caesarean Majesty,
00:27:30I have done all
00:27:32that I possibly could
00:27:33to serve your Majesty
00:27:34and to discover
00:27:36a country
00:27:36where God,
00:27:37our Lord,
00:27:38might be served
00:27:39and the royal treasury
00:27:40increased
00:27:41as your loyal servant
00:27:44and vassal,
00:27:46Francisco Vázquez
00:27:47de Coronado.
00:27:52Six years
00:27:54after Cabeza de Vaca
00:27:55returned to Mexico City,
00:27:57the Spanish viceroy
00:27:58sent yet another
00:27:59expedition northward.
00:28:02They were searching
00:28:03for seven cities
00:28:05said to be filled
00:28:06with gold and treasure.
00:28:07In command of the expedition
00:28:12was the ambitious
00:28:13governor of a Mexican province,
00:28:15Francisco Vázquez de Coronado.
00:28:20For more than four months,
00:28:22Coronado followed
00:28:23old Indian trails
00:28:25across deserts
00:28:26and through the mountains.
00:28:31Finally,
00:28:32exhausted and hungry,
00:28:34he reached an adobe settlement
00:28:35that he hoped
00:28:36was the first
00:28:37of the fabled
00:28:38seven cities of gold.
00:28:41It was really
00:28:42the Pueblo of Hawicu,
00:28:44home to an agricultural people
00:28:46called the Zuni.
00:28:51The people of the Pueblo
00:28:52saw them coming,
00:28:54the sun slanting off
00:28:55their helmets,
00:28:56riding on monstrous animals
00:28:58none of them
00:28:59had ever seen before.
00:29:00What was going on
00:29:03at Zuni
00:29:03was a summer solstice ritual
00:29:06and these kinds
00:29:08of rituals
00:29:08are always regarded
00:29:09as private.
00:29:11And so when Coronado
00:29:12came in,
00:29:14while these rituals
00:29:14were in progress,
00:29:16Zuni priests,
00:29:17Zuni elders,
00:29:19sketched a cornmeal line
00:29:20between Coronado's men
00:29:22and the people
00:29:24at Zuni,
00:29:26a line which Coronado
00:29:27was not supposed
00:29:28to cross.
00:29:30Coronado's men
00:29:30who were literally
00:29:32starving to death
00:29:33by that time
00:29:34just blew right in.
00:29:38The Zunis fought back.
00:29:41They grew so bold
00:29:43that they came up
00:29:44almost to the heels
00:29:45of our horses
00:29:45to shoot their arrows.
00:29:47On this account,
00:29:48I saw that it was
00:29:49no longer time
00:29:50to hesitate
00:29:50and as the priests
00:29:52approved the action,
00:29:54I charged them.
00:29:54The Indians fled
00:29:59from the Spanish guns
00:30:01whose thunderous sound
00:30:02they had never heard before.
00:30:05Coronado quickly
00:30:06overran the town,
00:30:08set up a wooden cross
00:30:09and demanded
00:30:10that the Zuni
00:30:11immediately convert
00:30:12to Christianity.
00:30:17But he discovered
00:30:18that the Zunis
00:30:19had no gold.
00:30:20Over the next few weeks,
00:30:27Coronado would destroy
00:30:2813 villages.
00:30:31He punished
00:30:32all who resisted him
00:30:33precisely as rebellious
00:30:35subjects would have
00:30:36been punished in Spain,
00:30:38burning 100 men
00:30:39at the stake
00:30:40and killing still more
00:30:42as they tried to flee.
00:30:43There was the decree
00:30:47that would be read
00:30:48when the Spanish
00:30:50came into a new
00:30:51native community
00:30:52that said,
00:30:52in Latin,
00:30:54everybody here
00:30:55must fall down
00:30:55and worship Jesus Christ
00:30:56and if you don't,
00:30:57we will take it
00:30:58that you are
00:30:59worshippers of the devil
00:31:00and you will be wiped out
00:31:01and you basically
00:31:02have five minutes.
00:31:03That spring,
00:31:13still convinced
00:31:14that great riches
00:31:15could be found
00:31:16over the next horizon,
00:31:18Coronado sent expeditions
00:31:19into the surrounding
00:31:20countryside.
00:31:24One group marched
00:31:25to the Gulf of California.
00:31:30Another crossed
00:31:31the Painted Desert
00:31:32into the land
00:31:33of the Hopis
00:31:34and a third
00:31:37marched for 20 days
00:31:39to the edge
00:31:40of a great gorge,
00:31:42the Grand Canyon
00:31:43of the Colorado.
00:31:46Nothing in their experience
00:31:47had prepared them
00:31:48for its sheer size.
00:31:52Captain Melgosa,
00:31:53with Juan Galeras
00:31:54and another companion,
00:31:56kept descending
00:31:56in sight of the men
00:31:58left above
00:31:58until they were lost
00:32:00to view.
00:32:01The men
00:32:02who remained above
00:32:03estimated that some rocks
00:32:04jutting out from the canyon
00:32:06must be about as high
00:32:07as a man.
00:32:09At four o'clock,
00:32:11they returned
00:32:12and swore
00:32:12that when they reached them,
00:32:14they were found
00:32:15to be taller
00:32:15than the highest tower
00:32:17of Seville.
00:32:19But once again,
00:32:21they found no gold.
00:32:26Coronado then heard
00:32:28of yet another city
00:32:29called Quivira,
00:32:31far to the north,
00:32:33filled with treasures
00:32:34beyond his wildest dreams.
00:32:37He led his men toward it,
00:32:39out onto the great plains,
00:32:42through an ocean of grass
00:32:43so vast and featureless
00:32:45they had to navigate
00:32:46with a sea compass.
00:32:47Who could believe
00:32:50that 1,000 horses
00:32:51and 500 of our cows
00:32:53and more than 5,000 rams
00:32:55and ewes
00:32:56and more than 1,500 men
00:32:58in traveling over those plains
00:33:00would leave no more trace
00:33:02when they had passed
00:33:03than if nothing had been there?
00:33:06Nothing.
00:33:06In the end,
00:33:11Quivira turned out
00:33:12to be just a Wichita village
00:33:14on the bank
00:33:15of the Arkansas River,
00:33:16a cluster of huts
00:33:18surrounded by bean fields,
00:33:21its inhabitants
00:33:21no wealthier
00:33:23than the other Indians
00:33:24Coronado had encountered.
00:33:30The country itself
00:33:32is the best I have ever seen
00:33:33for producing
00:33:34all the products of Spain.
00:33:36But what I am sure of is
00:33:38that there is not any gold
00:33:40nor any other metal
00:33:41in all that country.
00:33:44Francisco Vásquez de Coronado.
00:33:49Finally,
00:33:50Coronado ordered
00:33:51his exhausted men
00:33:52to begin the long march
00:33:54back to Mexico.
00:33:56His search for the seven cities
00:33:58of gold had lasted three years,
00:34:01led him across a quarter
00:34:02of the West,
00:34:03and earned him nothing.
00:34:06The Cut-Nose
00:34:19the Cut-Nose
00:34:31the Cut-Nose
00:34:31the Cut-Nose
00:34:32the deal in the Indian world
00:34:48What Goeese returned from a faraway country?
00:34:56Names in the Indian world are very important,
00:35:01as important or more important, I think,
00:35:04than in any other society that I know.
00:35:08Naming is...
00:35:11It coexists with meaning.
00:35:13It is indivisible with being.
00:35:16If something has a name, it is said to be.
00:35:21If it does not have a name, its being is suspect.
00:35:25I was taken, when I was an infant,
00:35:29to Devil's Tower by my parents,
00:35:32and when I was brought back to Oklahoma,
00:35:35where my grandmother lived,
00:35:37an old man came to visit,
00:35:40an old man whose name was Paul Ho,
00:35:43which means old wolf,
00:35:45and he picked me up in his hands,
00:35:47and he began to tell stories.
00:35:48And this was the name-giving process.
00:35:52And at the end, when he stopped talking,
00:35:54he looked down at me and he said,
00:35:55And now you are Tsoai Thali.
00:35:58That's my Indian name, and it means rock tree boy.
00:36:01Tsoai is what the Kaya was called Devil's Tower.
00:36:04And I was given that name to commemorate my having been taken to this very sacred place.
00:36:11There was conquering bear and one who yawns,
00:36:23child of the wolf and son of star,
00:36:30rock forehead and man on a cloud,
00:36:36owl woman,
00:36:38soft white corn,
00:36:40and the blind man's daughter.
00:36:45Yellow smoke,
00:36:46the whirlwind.
00:36:48thunder rolling from the mountains.
00:37:00Soon, other men, with other kinds of names,
00:37:05would begin to converge on the Indian world.
00:37:10Sir Francis Drake of England.
00:37:15Robert Cavalier SÅ“ur de La Salle from France.
00:37:21Vitus Bering sailing for Russia.
00:37:26And they were only the beginning.
00:37:28The West is an interrupted dream.
00:37:40Different groups of people that have come to the West
00:37:45have interrupted the natural evolution of the groups that they found there.
00:37:51And so we have a constant meeting in the West,
00:37:55a constant migration and meeting of groups.
00:37:59And the real story, I think,
00:38:01lies in how those groups affect each other.
00:38:04By 1680, as English colonists were crushing Indian resistance in New England,
00:38:28the Spanish were firmly in control of most of the pueblos of the South.
00:38:33Each pueblo had built its own church,
00:38:38and priests had baptized thousands of Indians.
00:38:42The Spanish had established a colony they now called New Mexico,
00:38:47centered around its growing capital, Santa Fe.
00:38:53The indigenous peoples on their side saw what the Spanish offered
00:38:57as just another power to add to their own.
00:39:00They conceded readily that the Spaniards must be very powerful people
00:39:05because they had guns, they had horses.
00:39:07So they were happy enough to add the Spanish saints.
00:39:12But without replacing their own, without giving up the visions and dreams of their own forebears,
00:39:21this is what the friars would have nothing of.
00:39:24For the friars, it was their way or no way at all.
00:39:28European diseases had torn through the pueblo peoples, killing a third of them.
00:39:39Summer after summer, it had refused to rain.
00:39:42With the drought came famine and raids by their enemies, the Apache and the Navajo.
00:39:49All these misfortunes coming at once convinced a priest of the Tewa Pueblo, called Popeye,
00:40:00that the ancient spirits were displeased.
00:40:03He began preaching that the foreigners must be driven out.
00:40:08The Spanish redoubled their efforts to blot out the Pueblo's traditional faith.
00:40:16Ritual dances were forbidden.
00:40:19Religious objects burned.
00:40:28Twice the Spanish had Popeye flogged publicly.
00:40:33But they could not silence him.
00:40:38Finally, 47 religious leaders were imprisoned in the palace of the governors in Santa Fe
00:40:44for speaking out against the Spanish.
00:40:48Three were hanged.
00:40:52It was probably the final insult.
00:40:55They understood once and for all, then,
00:40:58that the Spaniards meant to have nothing less than total victory.
00:41:03Popeye began traveling from village to village, spreading his message that all the Pueblo Indians
00:41:12must forget their long-standing differences, band together, and rid themselves of Spain.
00:41:22Three Pueblo leaders, loyal to Spain, begged the Spanish governor for help.
00:41:28The Indians of this kingdom are allied for the purpose of rebelling.
00:41:34They plan to kill the priests and all the Spaniards, even women and children,
00:41:41thus to destroy the total population of this kingdom.
00:41:45On a prearranged day, Pueblos all across New Mexico rose and overthrew the Spanish.
00:41:58At Taos, Santa Clara, and Picuriz, Querez, Hopi, and Santa Cruz,
00:42:05they killed the friars, leveled their churches.
00:42:08Twenty-one priests were killed.
00:42:11So were at least 400 settlers.
00:42:15Survivors found sanctuary in Santa Fe, huddled inside the Palace of the Governors.
00:42:26Twenty-five hundred Indians surrounded them, cut off their water, burned the rest of the capital,
00:42:32and sang the Catholic liturgy in Latin to mock them.
00:42:37After eleven days of siege, the surviving Spanish fought their way out and fled to Mexico.
00:42:46The Indians did not pursue them.
00:42:50That was the whole object of the revolt, to get the hated Spaniards to leave.
00:42:57And when they achieved that objective, they sat back and were content.
00:43:02For the moment, it was enough that the land was theirs again,
00:43:09that they could once again practice their faith without fear of punishment.
00:43:14Popay had led the most successful Indian revolt in all of North American history.
00:43:20But Indian independence did not last long.
00:43:25The Spanish eventually returned and overwhelmed the pueblos.
00:43:32But they grew more tolerant of Indian religion.
00:43:36Indians and Spaniards began to intermarry.
00:43:40Think of two world views coming together
00:43:45with completely different conceptions of the universe and of nature.
00:43:52And a lot of times when we speak of the meeting of cultures,
00:43:58we forget that beyond the initial clash emerges a new view of the world.
00:44:06And I think that's what we Chicanos represent today.
00:44:10The National Anthem of the World
00:44:12Chicanos
00:44:14Chicanos
00:44:16Chicanos
00:44:18Chicanos
00:44:20Chicanos
00:44:22Chicanos Chicanos
00:44:24It has a shaggy neck and a tail almost touching the ground.
00:44:49Its hooves are round.
00:44:51This animal will carry you on his back and help you in many ways.
00:44:58Those far hills that seem only a blue vision in the distance take many days to reach now.
00:45:03But with this animal, you can get there any short time.
00:45:08So fear him not.
00:45:11Remember what I have said, sweet medicine.
00:45:19According to Cheyenne tradition, there was once a prophet named Sweet Medicine who taught
00:45:25his people how to conduct themselves.
00:45:28He set up a council of 44 chiefs to speak for all the Cheyenne and presented them with four
00:45:35sacred arrows, two to subdue their human enemies, two to make the buffalo fall before them.
00:45:43And he brought them a warning.
00:45:46Strangers called Earthmen would one day appear among them, light skinned, speaking an unknown
00:45:52tongue.
00:45:54And with them would come a strange animal.
00:45:57It would change the Cheyenne way of life and that of every other Indian people, forever.
00:46:04It was the horse.
00:46:17Apache and Navajo raiders got them first.
00:46:20When the Spanish were driven out of New Mexico, the thousands of horses they left behind spread
00:46:26across the west.
00:46:31By the 1690s, the horse was being used by tribes of the southern plains.
00:46:37By 1700, it had transformed the lives of the Kiowa and Comanche along the eastern foothills
00:46:43of the Rockies.
00:46:46At the same time, the horse reached the Shoshone in Bannock in what is now Idaho.
00:46:51The Nez Perce stole some from them and soon had herds that numbered in the thousands in
00:46:58the lush Wallowa Valley of the Pacific Northwest.
00:47:04It must have been the realization of an ancient dream.
00:47:09To be elevated, to be severed from the earth, cut free.
00:47:14What a sense of life that must have been, different to anything they'd ever known.
00:47:20And with the horse, their ancient nomadism was realized to the fullest extent, and they
00:47:27had conquered their oldest enemy, which was distance.
00:47:34The Great Plains now became a crowded meeting ground for some 30 tribes from every direction.
00:47:45The horse became the most precious symbol of wealth and prestige, a valuable prize to steal
00:47:51from your enemies, and a faster way to reach them.
00:47:57A man's bravery was measured by the size of his horse herd, and by the number of times
00:48:03he had touched an enemy in battle, called Counting Kuh.
00:48:10Within each tribe, warrior societies flourished, the black mouths, the bow strings, the dog soldiers.
00:48:20For the horse, life must have been hard.
00:48:24A person would have to give virtually every hour of his waking time to solving the simple
00:48:30problem of survival.
00:48:32Well, how am I going to get enough food for myself and my family today?
00:48:37But with the horse, a hunter could acquire enough food in one day to last him months.
00:48:44So he was suddenly given a margin of freedom that he could never have imagined.
00:48:51And so what he did with it, of course, was to celebrate it in terms of the warrior ideal.
00:48:57You know, I have leisure.
00:48:59I can go and hunt, and I can visit my enemies and count Kuh.
00:49:05I can be brave, and I can attain glory.
00:49:16I longed to join the war parties I watched going out.
00:49:22In the evenings, I wandered through the village until I found a teepee where some old man
00:49:26was telling stories of famous raids.
00:49:30I would sit outside, my ear pressed to the skin wall.
00:49:33I hated this quiet life.
00:49:37After hunting buffalo until I grew bored, I would often sit alone on some high ridge
00:49:41and think about the honors a man could win.
00:49:45Two leggings.
00:49:49The dog soldiers were the elite military organizations in the tribe.
00:49:55They were the last line of defense for the people.
00:50:00And so they were greatly esteemed.
00:50:03The warriors in the society were outfitted with a sash, a particular sash, which trailed
00:50:10the ground.
00:50:12And each member carried a sacred arrow.
00:50:15And in time of battle, the dog soldier would impale the sash to the ground and stand the
00:50:21ground to the death.
00:50:24They had a song, which only the members could sing, and only in the face of death.
00:50:29So you can imagine that children, when they saw a dog soldier go by, must have just, wow,
00:50:37look at that guy, now he's a dog soldier.
00:50:41A man could not even quarter a girl unless he had proved his courage.
00:50:49That was one reason so many were anxious to win good war records.
00:50:54They were all afraid of what people, and especially the women, would say if they were cowardly.
00:50:59The women even had a song they would sing about a man whose courage had failed him.
00:51:04If you are afraid when you charge, turn back.
00:51:09The desert women will eat you.
00:51:12It was hard to go into a fight, and they were often afraid.
00:51:16But it was worse to turn back and face the women.
00:51:21John stands in timber.
00:51:25As a Lakota woman, four generations ago, I would have cut off the arms and the legs and
00:51:32heads of the enemies that my husband killed, and I would have put them on a stick, and I
00:51:37would have paraded them in the scalp dance that evening when we honored our men.
00:51:45Women used to get out and show, you know, that they were emotional, worried about their warriors
00:51:52going off, and while they were gone, they always watched.
00:51:58When the horses get together, they make a lot of dust.
00:52:03And when they'd see this, well, they knew that they were coming back from a hunt or a fight,
00:52:09you know.
00:52:10They recognized their family member, and it's the way they, they loolooed for them.
00:52:20That's the way they did it, didn't they?
00:52:27Then they danced, all jolly and happy after they fed their warriors, and everybody spruced
00:52:34up and got out, and they had a big victory dance.
00:52:38That's when women all get in line and dance around.
00:52:42On the southern plains, the Comanches began driving their enemies, the Apaches, out of
00:52:50the grasslands and into the deserts and mountains of New Mexico.
00:52:55In the north, the Lakota, or the Sioux as their enemies called them, pressed even farther westward,
00:53:03pushing the Cheyenne ahead of them, and displacing other tribes as they expanded across the Missouri.
00:53:09Of course, the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapahoes, and other tribes never let us rest.
00:53:19So there was always war.
00:53:22When our enemies were not bothering us, our warriors were bothering them.
00:53:28So there was always fighting going on somewhere.
00:53:33We women sometimes tried to keep our men from going to war.
00:53:38But this was like talking to winter winds.
00:53:43Pretty shield.
00:53:46The warriors came out on a high cliff to the east, and saw an enemy village down there,
00:53:54a crow village.
00:53:55But nobody seemed around.
00:53:57Just as they got there, they smelled this awful smell, and when they went into the village
00:54:03and examined the first teepees, they found them full of dead people laying there wrapped
00:54:09up.
00:54:10So they got out of there and started back.
00:54:13But before they reached their own village, one of them got sick and died too.
00:54:18And when they got in, the rest of them came down with smallpox also.
00:54:22It killed many of them.
00:54:26John Stanson timber.
00:54:30Smallpox.
00:54:31Smallpox.
00:54:32Cholera.
00:54:33Tuberculosis.
00:54:34Measles.
00:54:35Diphtheria.
00:54:36European diseases against which they had no immunity, now raced from people to people.
00:54:46What must it have been like to live in a community and suddenly a disease that you had never seen
00:54:52before, for which your medicines were not effective, and which had horribly ugly symptoms,
00:55:00wiped out everybody you saw?
00:55:04Was it witchcraft?
00:55:05Was it a punishment?
00:55:07Was it the end of the world?
00:55:09Who knew what was going on?
00:55:12And those people who didn't die, they were left stragglers.
00:55:16If they were children, they had, you know, they were very dependent on anybody who else survived.
00:55:21It was a total holocaust.
00:55:26And it wasn't the cavalry.
00:55:29It was a series of pandemics that wiped out most people before Europeans ever encountered
00:55:35them.
00:55:36And it was Chengdu in?
00:55:39Oh, dear.
00:55:43The
00:55:45Melagonal family that had never suffered from sugar, was found together as acoon in
00:55:46that knew beforeekoyun Marrero Taric.
00:55:48Oh, dear.
00:55:49After that, a place where they did the family and Parkcan appeared, we
00:56:00Know that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island very near to the terrestrial
00:56:15paradise which was peopled with black women without any men among them because they were
00:56:22accustomed to live after the fashion of Amazons.
00:56:27There reigned in this island a queen, very large in person, the most beautiful of all
00:56:33of them.
00:56:35Her name, Calafia, Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo.
00:56:47In 1533 a Spanish expedition sent north from Mexico had discovered what its members assumed
00:56:54was a large island.
00:56:57They named it California, after a mythical land of Amazons they had read about in a
00:57:02popular novel.
00:57:06But the cost of colonizing the Southwest had proved so high that Spain made no effort to
00:57:12settle the new territory.
00:57:17For the next two and a half centuries California remained essentially untouched by Europeans,
00:57:24home to more than 300,000 Indians living in hundreds of small bands.
00:57:32Then in 1767 it all began to change.
00:57:37Rumors reached the Spanish that Russian traders were building outposts along the Pacific coast.
00:57:44To protect Spanish interests Mexico City decided to establish a chain of forts and
00:57:50missions in California and sent a column of soldiers north.
00:57:58With them went a missionary, Father Junipero Serra.
00:58:05Serra was a former teacher of philosophy, badly handicapped by an ulcerated leg, and further
00:58:11weakened by his habit of scourging his own flesh in atonement for the sins of others.
00:58:17But nothing could quell his missionary zeal.
00:58:22By May of 1769 Serra had arrived in California and met his first potential converts.
00:58:30I found myself in front of twelve of them, and I saw something I could not believe.
00:58:39It was this.
00:58:40They were entirely naked as Adam in the garden, before sin.
00:58:46We spoke a long time with them, and not for one moment while they saw us clothed could
00:58:52you notice the least sign of shame in them.
00:58:56Father Junipero Serra.
00:59:00Father Serra and his followers helped establish 21 missions in all.
00:59:07San Diego, San Gabriel, San Antonio de Padua, San Jose, and on a magnificent bay in Northern
00:59:16California, San Francisco.
00:59:20Established in 1776, the year 13 colonies along the Atlantic coast declared their independence
00:59:27from Britain.
00:59:29Near the mission at San Gabriel in Southern California, a town sprang up in 1781, settled
00:59:38by people whom the missionary fathers considered lazy and corrupt, interested mainly in drinking,
00:59:44gambling, and pursuing women.
00:59:48It was Los Angeles.
00:59:50The friars believed themselves engaged in holy work.
01:00:06They thought it their duty to round up the Indians.
01:00:09To teach them to weave, make bricks, tend crops, herd cattle, and to give up their old ways.
01:00:19The friar felt that if he didn't save these people, they were going to go to hell.
01:00:24And so his motive was, get these people baptized, get them to believe in Jesus Christ and his church,
01:00:30and get them to become Christians so that they can go to heaven.
01:00:34Otherwise, they're in the grasp of the devil.
01:00:38And this was a very serious responsibility for a friar.
01:00:43Just imagine if an Iroquois holy man or a Lakota medicine person suddenly arrived in Paris,
01:00:51told everybody that Catholicism was devil worship and that they must burn every trapping that they had of Catholicism
01:01:00and completely changed their worldview.
01:01:03I don't think the French would have been as polite.
01:01:06But in fact, most missionaries did pretty well.
01:01:11People treated them with respect.
01:01:13People gave them a place to live.
01:01:15Oftentimes, people went to their services.
01:01:19Sometimes they even believed what they said.
01:01:22The Mission Indians, called neophytes by the friars, were crowded into barracks.
01:01:29Hand-picked Indian overseers with whips drove them from task to task, even to and from mass.
01:01:42The neophytes tried again and again to escape into the interior.
01:01:47But soldiers were sent to hunt them down.
01:01:51During the mission period, from San Francisco to San Diego,
01:01:59three out of four of the coastal Indians perished.
01:02:05They live well free, a puzzled friar said.
01:02:09But as soon as we reduce them to a Christian and community life,
01:02:13they fatten, sicken, and die.
01:02:19The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River and such principal stream of it,
01:02:38as by its course and communications with the waters of the Pacific Ocean,
01:02:44may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent.
01:02:52Those who come after us will fill up the canvas.
01:02:56We begin.
01:02:58President Thomas Jefferson.
01:03:02For centuries, the Mandans of the Upper Missouri River had been one of the most prosperous
01:03:20tribes on the Great Plains on the Great Plains, living in permanent villages and growing crops in such abundance,
01:03:38that other tribes came great distances to trade with them.
01:03:42Europeans came too, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Spaniards.
01:03:51Each time, they brought flags and claimed that the Mandans and their land had been added to their empires.
01:04:02But the Mandans believed they had merely added the French, English, and Spanish to their list of customers.
01:04:08Each country was searching for the Northwest Passage,
01:04:17a water route believed to connect the Missouri River with the Pacific,
01:04:21and the riches of the Orient that lay beyond.
01:04:24Whichever nation found it first, and then controlled it, would control the destiny of the continent.
01:04:34From the time of Columbus, the Europeans were looking for the fastest route they could
01:04:38to India and China.
01:04:41There was still this notion that there must be an easy way across,
01:04:44that it couldn't be this big a land, and particularly there must be a water route across.
01:04:55On October 24, 1804, the Mandans looked down from the bluffs of the Missouri
01:05:01and saw the largest boat they had ever seen, 55 feet long, 22 oars at its sides,
01:05:08and a cannon mounted in the bow.
01:05:12They hurried down to see it.
01:05:16Strangers stepped onto the shore,
01:05:17and their two leaders spoke to the Mandans.
01:05:21Children, your old fathers, the French and the Spaniards, have gone beyond the Great Lake
01:05:27toward the rising sun. Children, the great chief of the...
01:05:31They were explorers, not traders, they said, on their way from St. Louis to find the great ocean
01:05:38toward the setting sun.
01:05:39Children, the great chief of the 17 great nations of America has become your only father.
01:05:48He has commanded us to undertake this long journey.
01:05:53The white men said that the Mandans had a new great father, far to the east,
01:05:57more powerful than the others before him.
01:06:00Children, follow these counsels and you will have nothing to fear,
01:06:06and future ages will make you outnumber the trees in the forest.
01:06:11Do these things which your great father advises, and be happy,
01:06:16lest by one false step you should bring down upon your nation the displeasure of your great father.
01:06:22The great father was Thomas Jefferson, president of the new United States,
01:06:31who had just purchased from France half a billion acres between the Mississippi River
01:06:37and the Rocky Mountains, doubling the size of his young republic with a single stroke of his pen.
01:06:46Jefferson called his expedition the core of discovery.
01:06:52To lead it, the president had turned to his personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis,
01:07:00a young army officer from Virginia.
01:07:04As co-commander, Lewis picked an old army friend and fellow Virginian, William Clark,
01:07:11a gregarious, seasoned frontiersman.
01:07:15With them were French-Canadian boatmen, three dozen army recruits from New Hampshire,
01:07:21Pennsylvania and Kentucky, and Clark's personal servant, a slave named York.
01:07:29To act as translators, Lewis and Clark hired a French trapper, Toussaint Charbonneau,
01:07:35and his 16-year-old wife, Sacagawea, a Shoshone who had been captured by the Hidatsa as a small girl.
01:07:43Our wish is to be at peace with all.
01:07:52If we eat, you shall eat.
01:07:55If we starve, you must starve too.
01:07:59Shehiki.
01:08:00The explorers spent their first winter among the Mandans, who sold them food, helped them hunt buffalo,
01:08:12and gave them advice on what to expect farther up the Missouri.
01:08:15In the spring, the core of discovery started west again.
01:08:27We were now about to penetrate a country at least 2,000 miles in width,
01:08:32on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden.
01:08:35The good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine.
01:08:42Meriwether Lewis
01:08:47In the months to come, they passed through some of the most magnificent country on earth,
01:08:52spent weeks portaging around a huge waterfall,
01:08:55and noted animals never before described for science.
01:09:00Risley bears, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep.
01:09:06And they were astonished by the massive herds of buffalo that seemed to be everywhere.
01:09:15But they were falling badly behind schedule.
01:09:20The distances were proving to be far greater than the explorers,
01:09:23Jefferson, or anyone else had ever imagined.
01:09:30In early August, Lewis led a small advance party along an Indian trail that wound west into the mountains.
01:09:40Coming upon an ice-cold spring, he wrote that it was the most distant fountain of the mighty Missouri,
01:09:47one of those great objects on which my mind has been unalterably fixed for many years.
01:09:53It was the most important part of the river, and it was the most important part of the river.
01:09:56Then, he climbed toward the sharp ridge behind it.
01:10:01Of course, the mission of the Lewis and Clark expedition was to find the Northwest Passage.
01:10:05That was the most important thing.
01:10:07And Meriwether Lewis was climbing to this ridge that he thought was sure was the continental divide.
01:10:16And as he walked up this saddle in the mountains, he expected that when he got there, he might even see the ocean.
01:10:23But certainly, he would see the western equivalent of the Great Plains and a river that would flow there.
01:10:30And as he got to the top, he looked out and saw more mountains.
01:10:35Snow on them, eternal snows, and the myth of the Northwest Passage died at that moment.
01:10:41Lewis 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.
01:10:56But his party was still nearly 500 miles from the Pacific, and summer was fast disappearing.
01:11:08If we do not find the Shoshones or some other nation who have horses,
01:11:12I fear the successful issue of our voyage will be very doubtful.
01:11:16Not knowing how far these mountains continue, or where to direct our course to pass them.
01:11:23Meriwether Lewis
01:11:34The next day, he chanced upon a Shoshone village.
01:11:38The Shoshone had never seen a white man before.
01:11:41And were suspicious of Lewis.
01:11:44The fate of the expedition now lay in their hands.
01:11:48Then occurred one of the most extraordinary coincidences in American history.
01:11:54When the main party arrived, Sacagawea, the French trapper's wife,
01:12:00suddenly recognized the chief of the Shoshone.
01:12:04He was her brother.
01:12:07The great chief of this nation proved to be the brother of the woman with us.
01:12:12The squall danced for the joyful sight,
01:12:15and those Indians sang all the way to their camp.
01:12:19William Clark
01:12:20With Sacagawea as their interpreter, the captains explained their need for horses and guides,
01:12:29and the Shoshones agreed to provide them.
01:12:32Lewis and Clark had no time to rest.
01:12:39Frost already covered the ground each morning.
01:12:43The Shoshone told them of a steep hunting trail across the bitter roots.
01:12:47But it was rocky, heavily timbered, and with little game to shoot.
01:12:52Despite the risks, Lewis determined to try it.
01:12:56On foot and on horseback, they headed across what one of the men called
01:13:10the most terrible mountains I ever beheld.
01:13:12September 16th, 1805.
01:13:21Began to snow about three hours before day and continued all day.
01:13:26The snow in the morning four inches deep on the old snow,
01:13:29and by night we found it from six to eight inches deep.
01:13:34I have been as wet and as cold in every part as I ever was in my life.
01:13:38To describe the road of this day would be a repetition of yesterday,
01:13:46except the snow which made it much worse.
01:13:51For eleven days, desperate with hunger, sometimes entirely lost,
01:13:57they tried to follow the old trail along the mountain ridges through swirling snow.
01:14:03They shot and ate a coyote, a raven,
01:14:07frantically splashed after crayfish in a stream,
01:14:10chewed even their candles,
01:14:13and finally stumbled down out of the mountains, more dead than alive.
01:14:22There, they were found by the Nez Perce.
01:14:27The Nez Perses could have killed them easily.
01:14:29They could have wiped them out.
01:14:32But once they knew the intent of Lewis and Clark,
01:14:34that there was going to be no harm done to them,
01:14:38then of course it became very friendly and they were willing to help.
01:14:42The Nez Perce gave the starving strangers dried salmon and the roots of the camas plant to eat,
01:14:49told them it was now possible to reach the sea by water,
01:14:52and allowed the Americans to fell five trees from which to make canoes for the journey.
01:14:58Lewis and Clark moved fast now, down the clear water, then the snake,
01:15:09through currents one member of the expedition remembered,
01:15:12swifter than any horse could run, and finally, onto the broad Columbia.
01:15:22By late October, they were seeing signs that they were nearing the coast.
01:15:25Some Indians wore blue jackets and round hats, bartered from British and American sailors,
01:15:33who had been trading along the Pacific coast for decades.
01:15:36The Indians inform us that they speak the same language with ourselves,
01:15:42and give us proofs of their veracity by repeating many words of English,
01:15:47as musket, powder, shot, knife, damned rascal, son of a bitch, et cetera.
01:15:55By November, the river started to widen still further.
01:16:07You can imagine what it must have been like for Lewis and Clark.
01:16:11They'd been gone for a year and a half, longer than they thought.
01:16:16They weren't even in United States territory any longer.
01:16:19They're coming down to Columbia, and suddenly the water turns salty,
01:16:23and they start feeling some tidal motion.
01:16:27And it was the only time that William Clark ever got emotional in two and a half years in the wilderness.
01:16:36November 7th, Thursday, 1805.
01:16:41A cloudy, foggy morning. Some rain.
01:16:48We set out early, the fog so thick we could not see across the river.
01:16:53Then the fog lifted,
01:17:00and the Corps of Discovery finally saw the end of their long trail,
01:17:05and a glimpse of their young country's future.
01:17:07We are in view of the ocean, this great Pacific Ocean, which we have been so long anxious to see.
01:17:19Oh, the joy.
01:17:22William Clark.
01:17:23For nearly 300 years, Europeans from different nations had been entering the West from different directions,
01:17:36pursuing different myths.
01:17:37Yet each intruder had laid claim to the region, as if he were the first to discover it, as if the people already living there,
01:17:49whose world they had changed forever, did not exist.
01:17:53A conquistador had etched his name for Spain on El Morro Rock in New Mexico.
01:18:04On behalf of France, a nobleman had buried a lead tablet with his name on it on the northern plains.
01:18:10A Scottish explorer had painted his name on a rock to claim the northwest coast for Great Britain.
01:18:24Now, it was the American's turn.
01:18:28At a point overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Oregon,
01:18:31Clark took his knife and carved a message in the bark of a tree.
01:18:37William Clark, December 3rd, 1805, by land, from the United States.
01:18:46His nation was not yet 30 years old, but the United States already claimed half of the West.
01:18:55In 40 more years, Americans would have it all.
01:19:01In 40 more years, Americans would have it all.
01:19:13If you could take a photograph at that time, you have one world.
01:19:18And it is a world that is full of good things, as far as the Indians are concerned.
01:19:25Game is plentiful.
01:19:26Game is plentiful.
01:19:29Their way of life is clearly established in terms of that landscape.
01:19:33But just off the picture plane, you know,
01:19:37there are these things that are about to descend upon that world.
01:19:41And for the Indian, they are very bad.
01:19:46The culture is severely threatened
01:19:48because of people from outside who are coming in.
01:19:55And their attitude is that even this world is not big enough for both of us.
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