Documentary, Ken Burns The West -5 The Grandest Enterprise Under God
#Documentary #KenBurns #TheWest #usa #NorthernAmerica
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#Documentary #KenBurns #TheWest #usa #NorthernAmerica
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00:00:30I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad, surmounting every barrier.
00:00:41I see continual trains of cars winding along the plat, carrying freight and passengers.
00:00:52I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam whistle.
00:00:58I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world.
00:01:05Lo soul, seest thou not God's purpose from the first?
00:01:11The earth to be spanned, connected by networks.
00:01:15The lands to be welded together.
00:01:17Walt Whitman
00:01:20The End
00:01:25Hey, 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, 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, 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, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey
00:01:55It had taken the bloodshed and sacrifice
00:02:24of the Civil War to reunite the nation north and south.
00:02:31But when the war was over, Americans set out
00:02:34with equal determination to unite the nation east and west.
00:02:40To do it, they would build a railroad.
00:02:44Its completion would be one of the greatest technological
00:02:47achievements of the age, signaling at last,
00:02:51as nothing else ever had, that the United States
00:02:54was not only a continental nation,
00:02:57but on its way to becoming a world power.
00:03:07And when the railroad was finally built,
00:03:09the pace of change would shift,
00:03:12from the steady gait of a team of oxen
00:03:15to the powerful surge of a steam locomotive.
00:03:18The west would be transformed.
00:03:27Overnight, the railroad would turn barren spots of earth
00:03:30into raucous boom towns, North Platte and Julesburg, Abilene,
00:03:37Bear River, Wichita, and Dodge.
00:03:41The railroad would allow Civil War veterans,
00:03:46poor farmers from the east, and landless peasants from Europe,
00:03:50to have a farm they could call their own.
00:03:55There, they planted foreign strains of wheat
00:03:58in rich, matted prairie soil that had never known anything but grass.
00:04:04Railroads would carry hundreds of thousands of western longhorns
00:04:13to eastern markets,
00:04:17and turn the dusty, saddle-sore men who herded them
00:04:20into the idols of every eastern schoolboy.
00:04:23And railroads would bring onto the Great Plains the Buffalo Hunters,
00:04:32who would drive a magnificent animal that symbolized the west
00:04:36to the brink of extinction.
00:04:38And railroads would bring onto the Great Plains the Buffalo Hunters,
00:04:42who would drive a magnificent animal that symbolized the west
00:04:46to the brink of extinction, and with it, a way of life with roots reaching back
00:04:56before recorded history.
00:05:03The railroad would do all of that.
00:05:07But first, someone would have to build it.
00:05:16The Great Pacific Railway is commenced.
00:05:30Immigration will soon pour into these valleys.
00:05:33Ten million emigrants will settle in this golden land in 20 years.
00:05:39This is the grandest enterprise under God.
00:05:43George Francis Train.
00:05:46The Great Pacific Railway, the Great Pacific Railway,
00:05:48the Great Pacific Railway, the Great Pacific Railway,
00:05:50Railroads had already transformed life in the east.
00:05:54But at the end of the Civil War, they still stopped at the Missouri River.
00:06:00For a quarter of a century, men had dreamed of building a line from coast to coast.
00:06:06Now, they would attempt it.
00:06:081,775 miles of track from Omaha to Sacramento.
00:06:15It would have to be cut through mountains higher than any railroad builder had ever faced.
00:06:21Spanned deserts where there was no water anywhere.
00:06:25And crossed treeless prairies where anxious and defiant Indians would resist their passage.
00:06:32They knew from the start that if it could be completed,
00:06:36Americans would have accomplished something no other people had ever even attempted.
00:06:41In the ripeness of time, the hope of humanity is realized.
00:06:51This continental railway will bind the two seaboards to this one continental union,
00:06:57like ears to the human head.
00:07:00To plant the foundations of the union so broad and deep
00:07:04that no possible force or stratagem can shake its permanence.
00:07:11William Gilpin.
00:07:12The west couldn't be settled without railroads.
00:07:21And a railroad across the west couldn't be built without the government.
00:07:26The distances were too great, the costs too staggering,
00:07:30the risks too high for any group of businessmen.
00:07:35It was only through the government's help that anything of this
00:07:38gargantuan size could be accomplished, much as landing on the moon.
00:07:43It was not rugged individualists who built the railroad.
00:07:47It was rugged corporations who formed and financed themselves as entities.
00:07:52It was the rugged federal government that came up with the federal loans and the land grants
00:07:59that enabled it to be built.
00:08:01Amid all the romance of the building of the railroad, we tend to forget that.
00:08:05It was one of the major industrial enterprises of its age.
00:08:11In 1862, Congress gave charters to two companies to build it.
00:08:17The Central Pacific was to push eastward from Sacramento, over the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
00:08:24The Union Pacific was to start from the Missouri, cross the Great Plains, and cut through the Rockies.
00:08:32Both companies were to receive vast loans from the Treasury as they went along.
00:08:38$16,000 per mile of level track, 32,000 in the plateaus,
00:08:43and 48,000 in the mountains.
00:08:48Lobbyists got the rates doubled within a year.
00:08:54Leland Stanford, governor of California and president of the Central Pacific Railroad,
00:09:00persuaded a malleable geologist, Professor Josiah Whitney, to declare the gently sloping Sacramento
00:09:07Valley, a mountainous region, so that the Central Pacific could collect the highest possible rate
00:09:13for laying track across it.
00:09:17A grateful California legislature later named its highest peak,
00:09:22Mount Whitney, in the professor's honor.
00:09:24Congress also promised each company 6,400 acres of federal land for every mile of track it laid.
00:09:38The railroads got the right-of-way and along the right-of-way miles and miles of what was then the government's land.
00:09:44When you added it all together, it was a gift of roughly the size of California plus most of Montana.
00:09:52It was incredible.
00:09:58The Union Pacific and Central Pacific were soon locked in a race to see who could lay the most track
00:10:04and therefore get the most land and money.
00:10:08Somewhere in the west, no one knew exactly where the two lines were supposed to meet.
00:10:22It is a grand anvil chorus that these sturdy sledges are playing across the plains.
00:10:41It is in triple time, three strokes to a spike.
00:10:4621 million times are they to come down with their sharp punctuation before the great work of modern
00:10:51America is complete.
00:10:53Dr. William A. Bell.
00:10:55In Nebraska, some 10,000 men were at work on the Union Pacific, heading west.
00:11:05Most were immigrants from Ireland, but there were also Mexicans and Germans.
00:11:10Englishmen, ex-soldiers and former slaves.
00:11:14An army of workmen moving across the plains with military precision.
00:11:19There was no time for rest. A 20-car work train housed and fed the men who rose at dawn.
00:11:30A supply train carried everything needed that day, rails, ties, spikes, rods,
00:11:37all of which had to be loaded onto flat cars and run up to the rail head where the iron men were already waiting.
00:11:47Each rail weighed 700 pounds. It took five men to lift it into place.
00:11:54Two or three miles a day, every day. Six days a week, week in and week out.
00:12:02As the Union Pacific crews worked their way westward across the prairie,
00:12:10hundreds of prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, saloon keepers, gunmen followed right behind.
00:12:17A carnivorous horde, one man recalled, hungrier than the native grasshoppers
00:12:23and eager to devour the men's weekly pay.
00:12:25Julesburg, August 23, 1867.
00:12:33Gambling was carried on extensively and the saloons were full.
00:12:39Mostly everyone seemed bent on debauchery and dissipation.
00:12:43There appears to be plenty of money here and plenty of fools to squander it.
00:12:48I verily believe that there are men here who would murder a fellow creature for five dollars.
00:12:53Henry Morton Stanley.
00:12:57The succession of base camps the Union Pacific built, roughly 70 miles apart, all had different names.
00:13:06Elkhorn, Fremont, Oglala, Laramie, Green River and Cheyenne.
00:13:17Say you're in Wyoming, say you're at Citadel Rock on the Green River in Wyoming
00:13:23and you're looking into the distance and there's nothing.
00:13:25And behind you the track going all the way to Omaha.
00:13:30The donkey engines coming in and getting out, hauling in materials, the clatter and the bustle
00:13:37and the work around you at all times, the clanging of the sledgehammers on the rails,
00:13:41echoing in the wilderness that had never known anything like this ever.
00:13:45The sounds of the locomotives belching smoke into a previously pristine sky.
00:13:53There had never been a sound like this ever before.
00:14:06Everything the Kiowas had came from the buffalo.
00:14:21Their teepees were made of buffalo hides.
00:14:23So were their clothes and moccasins.
00:14:27They ate buffalo meat.
00:14:29Their containers were made of hide or of bladders or stomachs.
00:14:35Most of all, the buffalo was part of the Kiowa religion.
00:14:39The buffalo were the life of the Kiowas.
00:14:45Old lady horse.
00:14:52Of all the West's natural wonders,
00:14:54none surpassed the huge herds of buffalo that blanketed the plains.
00:15:00Perhaps once as many as 30 million of them.
00:15:05They had frightened Coronado's horses by their smell
00:15:08and astonished Lewis and Clark by their sheer numbers.
00:15:13One wagon train of pioneers was blocked for hours
00:15:17by a herd three miles wide and ten miles long.
00:15:20But for the native peoples of the plains, they represented existence itself.
00:15:32The buffalo, which was the animal representation of the sun,
00:15:37was the sacrificial victim of the Sundance.
00:15:41The Sundance was a great celebration, a great social occasion.
00:15:45And the Sundancers were expressing their spirit in order to gain certain power.
00:15:54They wanted to be victorious in war.
00:15:57They wanted to give thanks for something good that had come to them.
00:16:03A buffalo bull is sacrificed and its head is impaled in the Sundance Lodge or near it.
00:16:12And it's part of the ritual. You can't have a Sundance without the buffalo.
00:16:23By the late 1860s, their numbers had already declined, reduced by disease,
00:16:28competition from horse herds, and by the buffalo robe trade
00:16:32that encouraged some Indian bands to kill more than they needed.
00:16:36And now the Union Pacific hired men to hunt buffalo to feed the hungry railroad crews
00:16:45as they built their iron road across Indian lands.
00:16:52We saw the first train of cars that any of us had seen. We looked at it from a high ridge.
00:16:58Far off, it was very small, but it kept coming and growing larger all the time, puffing out smoke and steam.
00:17:08And as it came on, we said to each other that it looked like a white man's pipe when he was smoking.
00:17:15Porcupine.
00:17:15The Cheyenne and Arapaho and Lakota resented the railroad's intrusion.
00:17:33They derailed trains, ransacked freight cars, fired on surveying crews.
00:17:40The Union Pacific fell behind schedule.
00:17:46On June 26th, 1867, an army detail was overtaken by a war party.
00:17:54One of those killed was Frederick Williams, who had come all the way from England in search of adventure.
00:18:02Another Englishman, an amateur ethnologist, photographed his countryman's corpse.
00:18:07The muscles of the right arm, hacked to the bone, speak of the Cheyenne, or cut arms.
00:18:17The nose slit denoted the smeller tribe, or Arapaho.
00:18:20And the throat cut bears witness that the Sioux were also present.
00:18:25It was evident from the number of different devices that warriors from several tribes
00:18:34had each purposely left one in the dead man's body.
00:18:37Dr. William A. Bell.
00:18:44Finally, 5,000 troops were sent west to provide the railroad workers with protection.
00:18:49The crews went back to work.
00:18:54While the Union Pacific moved west again across the Great Plains,
00:19:13in California, the Central Pacific, after a fast start, had gotten stuck in the Sierra Nevadas.
00:19:23The mountains seemed impenetrable.
00:19:24And to make matters worse, Charles Crocker, whose job it was to break through them,
00:19:31could not seem to hold on to his workers.
00:19:36Three out of five stuck with him just long enough to get a free ride to the railhead,
00:19:41then set out on their own for the Nevada goldfields.
00:19:46His plans called for a workforce of 5,000.
00:19:50He had fewer than 600.
00:19:54He had fewer than 600.
00:19:56Desperate, he suggested to his superintendent of construction,
00:19:59James Strobridge, that he try the Chinese,
00:20:02who were eking out a living working the gold and silver tailings abandoned by others.
00:20:09Strobridge was against it.
00:20:11He thought the Chinese were too small, too frail.
00:20:15They had no experience building railroads.
00:20:18Crocker told Strobridge to give the Chinese a chance.
00:20:21After all, he said, they had built the Great Wall of China.
00:20:31The first Chinese began turning up in early 1865, eager to work.
00:20:38They were already organized into work gangs, each with its own head man.
00:20:42Crocker expected that these fellows would come up there, owner of ones and twos like the other nationalities.
00:20:51And he found that the Chinese sort of marched up there as one group,
00:20:55and all he had to do was to deal with the foreman of that group, because he would be the Klan leader.
00:21:05The first Chinese were in the country, and the Chinese were in the country.
00:21:08Before long, 11,000 Chinese were at work on the Central Pacific,
00:21:14and Crocker was advertising for more in China.
00:21:21But hard work alone was no match for the Sierra Nevadas.
00:21:27Strobridge worried that his Central Pacific was falling even further behind in their race with the Union Pacific.
00:21:33And soon armed the Chinese with black powder to blast their way through.
00:21:45It took 500 kegs of it a day, week after week, to carve cuts through the foothills.
00:21:51And then they came up against a face they called Cape Horn, solid rock nearly straight up and down,
00:22:052,000 feet above a raging river.
00:22:09There were no footholds, but the Chinese were told to make a ledge in the cliff, wide enough for a train.
00:22:14And what they did was that they would be lowered over cliffs, and they would drill holes,
00:22:32and then they'd set the dynamite in them, and then they'd light the dynamite,
00:22:37and then they'd pull them up by the baskets, and then they had to get out of there before the dynamite exploded.
00:22:50Huge masses of rock and debris were rent and heaved up in the commotion.
00:22:54Then came the thunders of the explosion like a lightning stroke, reverberating along the hills and canyons,
00:23:04as if the whole artillery of heaven was in play.
00:23:10Before the Central Pacific could get through the Sierras, the crews had to gouge out 15 tunnels.
00:23:16They worked in shifts around the clock, but averaged just eight inches a day.
00:23:27And they had to keep at it in every kind of weather.
00:23:32Snowstorms, 44 in number, varied in length from a short snow squall to a two-week gale.
00:23:41The heaviest storm of the winter began February 18th at 2 p.m. and snowed steadily until 10 p.m. of the 22nd,
00:23:54during which time six feet fell.
00:23:59John R. Gills.
00:24:00Charles Crocker had to punch the line through the Sierras that winter, the winter of 66.
00:24:18And the Chinese then had to build the railroad, lay the tracks.
00:24:23So they built these tunnels under the snow to keep advancing the line.
00:24:30And sometimes there would be snow slides.
00:24:33An entire crews of Chinese would be trapped under tons of snow.
00:24:39And their bodies would be left there and found the following spring.
00:24:45Sometimes the bodies were found with the picks and the shovels still in their hands.
00:24:53And they would be trapped in the middle of the snow.
00:24:56No one kept a precise count.
00:24:59But more than 1,200 Chinese died, digging and blasting for Charles Crocker and the Central Pacific.
00:25:07When somebody died, you just didn't dig a grave for him and put him down in the grave.
00:25:13You went to a lot of trouble to get his remains back to the village that he came from.
00:25:19And that's why he came from, because the Chinese doesn't want to be buried anywhere.
00:25:23He wants to be buried where his ancestors were buried, because he wants to stick together.
00:25:32Finally, in 1868, after three long years of back-breaking, dangerous labor,
00:25:39the Central Pacific crews did what few had believed anyone could do.
00:25:44They broke out of the High Sierras.
00:25:50John Chinaman, with his patient toil, directed by American energy and backed by American capital,
00:25:57has broken down the Great Barrier at last, and opened over it the greatest highway yet created
00:26:06for the march of commerce and civilization around the globe, Territorial Enterprise.
00:26:13The hardest part was behind them.
00:26:16The Central Pacific was back in the race.
00:26:18We Hadassahs believed that only man and first creator split up the job of creation.
00:26:38They made the river and the plains and the badlands.
00:26:41To populate them, first creator made the buffalo.
00:26:50But only man created a white man and the spotted cows the white man raised.
00:26:59When first creator saw what only man had done, he said,
00:27:02You are foolish to make these things.
00:27:06The white man are a queer kind of men and they will always be greedy.
00:27:13That is so, said only man.
00:27:16And so he opened a hole in the earth and sent all the spotted cows down underground.
00:27:23But when the buffalo are all gone, he said,
00:27:34the spotted cows will come again and cover this earth as the buffaloes did.
00:27:49That is so, said only man.
00:28:02Above all things, the plainsman had to have a sense.
00:28:06An instinct for direction.
00:28:09Few men have this instinct.
00:28:12Yet in the few, it is to be trusted as absolutely as the homing instinct of a wild goose.
00:28:19I never had a compass in my life.
00:28:23I was never lost.
00:28:26Charles Goodnight.
00:28:31Charles Goodnight was used to tough times.
00:28:35A dirt farmer's son, he had ridden bareback all the way from Illinois to Texas at the age of nine.
00:28:43And had been working full time to support his widowed mother since he was 11.
00:28:49At 19, he and his brother went into the cattle business.
00:28:54Still too poor to buy their own herd, they agreed to watch over someone else's,
00:28:59receiving every fourth calf as pay.
00:29:04Goodnight had managed to collect 180 head of his own by the time the Civil War broke out.
00:29:09But he left his cattle to join the Texas Rangers and fight for the Confederacy.
00:29:17When he returned to his ranch at the end of the war, he found the cattle business in ruins.
00:29:21Texas herds had multiplied wildly from three and a half million to six million.
00:29:30So many that beef prices fell to nearly nothing.
00:29:32It looked like everything worth living for was gone.
00:29:41The entire country was depressed.
00:29:44There was no hope.
00:29:45The only way to survive as a cattleman, Goodnight decided, was to take his herds north to better markets.
00:29:58The Indian reservations, Colorado mining camps,
00:30:01and the Union Pacific Railroad crews now working their way across Wyoming.
00:30:09To reach them, he and his partner, Oliver Loving, with 18 cowboys and 2000 cattle,
00:30:16blazed a new trail in 1866.
00:30:18And when the long drive was done, the partners cleared $24,000, more than they had ever dreamed of getting.
00:30:33They hurried back to Texas to buy more cattle, then headed right back up the newly named,
00:30:39Goodnight Loving Trail, before anyone else could beat them to it.
00:30:48Loving was a man of religious instincts and one of the coolest and bravest men I've ever known,
00:30:55but devoid of caution.
00:30:58Loving pushed on ahead to get in the partners' bid for new government contracts.
00:31:05But Comanches caught him on the open plain, shot him in the wrist and side, and chased him to a river bank,
00:31:13where he held them off for several days before he crawled to safety in the night.
00:31:18He was picked up by a passing wagon and taken to an army hospital, but it was too late to save him.
00:31:30The night Loving died, he called his partner to his side.
00:31:36His mind turned back to Texas, and at last he said,
00:31:40I regret to have to be laid away in a foreign country.
00:31:45I assured him that he need have no fears.
00:31:48That I would see that his remains were laid in the cemetery at home.
00:31:52He felt this would be impossible, but I told him it would be done.
00:32:03Goodnight ordered his men to fashion a tin casket out of flattened cans.
00:32:08They put Loving's wooden coffin inside, covered it with charcoal, sealed the top, and placed it in a wagon.
00:32:18Flanked by a cowboy escort, Goodnight started back south for Texas.
00:32:27Word of their profits had spread throughout cattle country,
00:32:31and other outfits were already streaming north.
00:32:35Headed now for the nearest railheads from which they could ship their steers east,
00:32:40a new industry had been born.
00:32:45But in February of 1868, Charles Goodnight, the man who had helped start it all,
00:32:51was headed in the other direction.
00:32:53Keeping his promise to his dead partner, he was taking Oliver Loving home.
00:33:06Railways multiplied and spanning the continent are essential domestic institutions.
00:33:27More powerful and more prominent than law, or popular consent, or political constitutions,
00:33:34to thoroughly complete the grand system which fraternizes us into one people.
00:33:41William Gilpin.
00:33:46By the spring of 1869, the competition between the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific
00:33:52was converging on northern Utah.
00:33:56Rival armies of railroad men vied to cover the most ground,
00:34:00and earn the most money for their employers, before the two lines finally met.
00:34:07They tried to outdo one another, first laying five miles of track in a single day,
00:34:14then six, then seven, and then ten miles.
00:34:18A pace of railroad building such as the world had never seen.
00:34:22No fixed rendezvous point had ever been established.
00:34:30Grading crews for the two companies, working far ahead of the track layers,
00:34:35passed each other in opposite directions, and pushed on for hundreds of miles.
00:34:41Sometimes working so close to one another, that explosions set off by one work gang,
00:34:47spattered its rivals with dirt.
00:34:53Finally, the government intervened, and picked Promontory Summit, 56 miles west of Ogden,
00:35:00as the place where the two lines would meet.
00:35:03The race across the west was coming to a close at last.
00:35:12On May 10, 1869, everything was ready.
00:35:19A telegrapher stood by to signal to both coasts, and all points in between, the driving of the final spike.
00:35:26To everybody, keep quiet. When the last spike is driven at Promontory Point, we will say done.
00:35:37Don't break the circuit, but watch for the signals of the blows of the hammer.
00:35:42We understand. All are ready in the east.
00:35:47Four spikes, two gold, one silver, and the fourth a blend of gold, silver, and iron,
00:35:54were to be tapped gently into position with a silver maul to mark the occasion.
00:36:01And then a final spike, an ordinary one, but wired to the telegrapher's key,
00:36:06was to be hammered into the ground.
00:36:09Almost ready.
00:36:12Hats off. Prayer is being offered.
00:36:15We desire to acknowledge thy handiwork in this great work.
00:36:18The spike will soon be driven.
00:36:20Upon us here assembled.
00:36:22And that mighty enterprise may be unto us as the Atlantic of thy strength,
00:36:27and the Pacific of thy love.
00:36:29Through Jesus the Redeemer. Amen.
00:36:33We have got done praying.
00:36:35The spike is about to be presented.
00:36:38The final spike was slid into place.
00:36:43Leland Stanford of the Central Pacific was to have the honor of driving it home.
00:36:47The signal will be three dots for the commencement of the blows.
00:36:53Stanford swung the hammer high above his head, brought it down, and missed.
00:37:00The telegrapher closed the circuit anyway.
00:37:03Done.
00:37:04In Washington, a great cheer went up from the big crowd in front of the telegraph office,
00:37:13and an illuminated ball dropped from the dome of the Capitol.
00:37:19At Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell was rung, gingerly,
00:37:24so that its crack would not worsen.
00:37:27And in San Francisco, a huge banner was unfurled that proclaimed,
00:37:32California annexes the United States.
00:37:35The vast distances of the West had at last been conquered.
00:37:43A journey that had once taken months could now be accomplished in a matter of days.
00:37:53Once the rails were joined at Promontory, I think you can say that we began for the first time,
00:38:01truly to think of ourselves as a continental nation.
00:38:05It was a kind of a reach of the national consciousness into a place
00:38:13that had once only been occupied by dreams and myths and imagination.
00:38:19And here was the great technological marvel of its time,
00:38:24crashing through those mythic barriers and going into a very real place.
00:38:29That moment at Promontory Point was a moment of tremendous significance,
00:38:40because on either side of that moment were vastly different worlds, radically different worlds.
00:38:48It foretold the whole story of technology, the coming of the machine,
00:38:54and what could be more symbolic of that new age, you know,
00:38:59than the completion of the railroad and the driving of the golden spike.
00:39:03And nothing would ever be the same in the West.
00:39:09Our camp is united, we all labor hard, and if we are faithful, we'll gain our reward.
00:39:28Our leader is wise, and a great leader too, and all things he tells us we're right glad to do.
00:39:36Hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hoor
00:40:06the Transcontinental Railroad now ran right through Utah.
00:40:11And it began bringing thousands of new settlers
00:40:14into Young's kingdom, non-believers,
00:40:17who threatened his authority
00:40:19and deplored the Mormon practice of plural marriage, polygamy.
00:40:25The Mormons must have viewed the completion
00:40:27of the Transcontinental Railroad with incredible ambiguity.
00:40:31On the one hand, they were a very commercial people.
00:40:34They understood precisely how important the railroad
00:40:38was going to be to the growth of business and industry in Utah.
00:40:42On the other hand, being able to sustain their way of life
00:40:46depended almost absolutely on a powerful degree of isolation.
00:40:51The railroad destroyed that.
00:40:53The railroad opened up the gates.
00:40:55The railroad let the world in and sometimes let the Mormons out.
00:40:59And it had to have been a terrible blow to the base
00:41:03of the society's competence in itself.
00:41:09In 1870, some 5,000 Mormon women held an indignation meeting
00:41:14in the Salt Lake Tabernacle.
00:41:17They were protesting against those non-believers
00:41:20who had dared criticize plural marriage.
00:41:23The world says polygamy makes women inferior to men.
00:41:29We think differently.
00:41:31Polygamy gives women more time for thought, for mental culture,
00:41:36more freedom of action, a broader field of labor,
00:41:40and leads women more directly to God, the fountain of all truth.
00:41:45Emeline Wells.
00:41:50One of the keynote speakers at the rally was a determined,
00:41:53hard-working woman named Emeline Wells.
00:41:57Born in Massachusetts and graduated from a select girls' school,
00:42:01Wells had converted to Mormonism and moved to Nauvoo, Illinois,
00:42:06where she lost her first child and was abandoned by her husband,
00:42:11all before the age of 16.
00:42:14A second husband died.
00:42:16Then she became the seventh wife of Daniel Wells,
00:42:20the mayor of Salt Lake City.
00:42:23Now she lived in her own small house and helped to support herself
00:42:27and her family when Wells' finances suffered.
00:42:32I have no strong arm to lean upon,
00:42:34no protection or comfort in my husband,
00:42:37she wrote privately in her diary.
00:42:40And yet, her commitment to plural marriage was unshakable.
00:42:47I actually think that some of the great feminists
00:42:50were women in polygamy.
00:42:52My great-great-grandmother is among them.
00:42:54If there was a woman who excelled in teaching,
00:42:58you know, she had her own life.
00:43:00If there was another woman who excelled in cooking or farming,
00:43:03she had her life.
00:43:04And everyone had kind of their own focus.
00:43:07There was a tremendous sense of sisterhood.
00:43:09And in many ways, the men were immaterial.
00:43:15Throughout the United States, women were denied the right to vote.
00:43:19And Wells, as the outspoken editor of a popular Mormon newspaper
00:43:23for women, wanted to change that.
00:43:27The Woman's Exponent, Volume 1, Number 1.
00:43:32Millions of intelligent women are deprived of the vote
00:43:35simply because nature qualified them to become mothers
00:43:38and not fathers of men.
00:43:41They may own property, pay taxes,
00:43:44assist in supporting the government,
00:43:46rend their heartstrings in giving for its aid the children of their affections,
00:43:50but they are denied all right to say who shall disperse those taxes,
00:43:55how that government shall be conducted,
00:43:57or who shall decide on a question of peace or war,
00:44:02which may involve the lives of their sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands.
00:44:07In her push for the vote in Utah, Wells found a most unlikely ally,
00:44:16the Mormon patriarch himself, Brigham Young.
00:44:20He was certain that adding Mormon women to the voters' roles
00:44:24would only strengthen his hold on Utah.
00:44:26On February 12, 1870, with Young's backing,
00:44:35the Utah Territorial Legislature granted women the right to vote.
00:44:40Two days later, they exercised it.
00:44:44Young's niece voted first, followed by one of his daughters.
00:44:50Eventually, Emmeline Wells joined the leadership
00:44:53of the National Suffrage Movement,
00:44:55determined to win for all American women,
00:44:58the right now enjoyed in Utah.
00:45:01But she never stopped lobbying for another cause
00:45:04just as precious to her,
00:45:06the right to remain a plural wife.
00:45:10All honor and reverence to good men,
00:45:20but they and their attentions are not the only source of happiness on the earth,
00:45:25and need not fill up every thought of woman.
00:45:29And when men see that women can exist without their being constantly at hand,
00:45:35it will perhaps take a little of the conceit out of some of them.
00:45:40Emmeline Wells.
00:45:52Following the lead of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific,
00:45:56other rail lines soon spread throughout the West,
00:46:01the Kansas Pacific, Northern Pacific, and Denver Pacific,
00:46:05the Texas and Pacific, the Denver and Rio Grande,
00:46:08the Acheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe.
00:46:14And as the railroads moved on to the Great Plains,
00:46:17they brought with them people who had never seen the West,
00:46:20or its most magnificent animal, the buffalo.
00:46:25At first, they shot the buffalo for sport,
00:46:28banging away at the huge herds from the windows of passenger cars.
00:46:34One church group from Lawrence, Kansas,
00:46:36organized a two-day hunting excursion to raise money for the congregation.
00:46:41300 people signed up.
00:46:48When the white men wanted to build railroads,
00:46:51or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle,
00:46:54the buffalo still protected the Kiowas.
00:46:57They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens.
00:47:02They chased the cattle off the ranges.
00:47:05The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them.
00:47:11Then the white men hired hunters to do nothing but kill the buffalo.
00:47:17The buffalo didn't belong to anybody.
00:47:32If you could kill them, what they brought was yours.
00:47:35They were walking gold pieces.
00:47:38Frank H. Mayer.
00:47:45Frank Mayer was hanging around Dodge City, Kansas,
00:47:48in the heart of buffalo country, looking for work,
00:47:51when he met two hunters who offered to show him their brand-new trade.
00:47:55I was young.
00:47:57I needed adventure, he remembered.
00:48:00Here was it.
00:48:02The new rail lines meant that buffalo robes and buffalo meat
00:48:08could be taken to eastern markets in greater numbers at lower costs.
00:48:13And manufacturers had perfected techniques for turning stiff buffalo hides into soft leather.
00:48:21Ideal for shoes, cushions, carriage tops, and the belts that turned machinery in eastern factories.
00:48:30Frank Mayer was determined to be among the first to profit from the buffalo boom.
00:48:37He sank everything he owned into a hunting outfit.
00:48:40Wagons, mules, camp equipment, and firearms.
00:48:45Then he headed out onto the plains.
00:48:54When I went into the business, I sat down and figured that I was indeed one of Fortune's children.
00:48:59Just think, there were 20 million buffalo, each worth at least $3.
00:49:0660 million.
00:49:08At the very outside, cartridges cost 25 cents each.
00:49:13So every time I fired one, I got my investment back 12 times over.
00:49:19I could kill 100 a day.
00:49:22That would be $6,000 a month.
00:49:25Or three times what was paid, it seems to me, the President of the United States.
00:49:32Was I not lucky that I discovered this quick and easy way to fortune?
00:49:38I thought I was.
00:49:40Frank H. Mayer.
00:49:42We had a motley array of neighbors.
00:50:00On one side, a German who could scarce speak English, married to a Bohemian who could speak
00:50:06little English and no German.
00:50:09On another side, a family of Swedes fresh from the old country.
00:50:13On an adjoining farm, a Scotsman with a Missouri wife.
00:50:18Nearby, a family from Iowa.
00:50:20Another family from Illinois.
00:50:22Some old, some young, some illiterate, some well-educated.
00:50:27Yet all engaged in the same enterprise.
00:50:31As more and more railroads expanded into the West, an intense competition between them began.
00:50:41Settlers were sought who would provide business for their freight trains
00:50:46and buy the land the railroads had been given as government subsidies.
00:50:52You can lay track to the Garden of Eden, said the head of the Northern Pacific.
00:50:56But what good is it if the only inhabitants are Adam and Eve?
00:51:02Western states also contended with one another for new residents.
00:51:07The Homestead Act promised 160 acres of public land to any person who filed a claim, paid a
00:51:15$10 fee and agreed to work the property for five years.
00:51:19In the 1870s, Kansas grew by more than half a million people.
00:51:25Nebraska's population quadrupled.
00:51:28200 Scottish families settled on the Kansas-Nebraska border.
00:51:34The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society lured Jews from Eastern Europe
00:51:40to Oregon, Colorado, Kansas, the Dakotas.
00:51:44German-Russian Mennonites, Swedish, Dutch, French, Bohemian, Irish, and Norwegian families
00:51:53were soon scattered across the plains.
00:51:59In the villages of Europe, you might be only a few steps away from your neighbor.
00:52:07Certainly within hearing distance, you could hear the village's church bells ringing on a Sunday morning.
00:52:12Suddenly here, they were isolated many miles from neighbors and from villages
00:52:18with long periods of time between any kind of interaction.
00:52:22They had wind sickness, they called it, from the constant blowing of the wind.
00:52:27They planted trees around their houses, not simply for the shade or for the beauty,
00:52:31but to protect them from the immensity of the landscape.
00:52:38They started towns like Lindsborg and Hafnungstall, New Alexanderwall and Dannebrog,
00:52:46some with the same street plans as their old villages in Europe.
00:52:52And they planted wheat they had brought along from as far away as Russia.
00:52:57It flourished as no other domestic crop ever had before on the semi-arid plains,
00:53:03and would one day help make the United States the agricultural wonder of the world.
00:53:09The men had farmed, in many cases, most of their lives.
00:53:16They'd had to struggle against roots and rocks and all these things that made farming difficult.
00:53:22They looked around them here, and there were thousands, tens of thousands,
00:53:27hundreds of thousands of acres without a root or a rock.
00:53:31They could put their plow in the ground and go miles and miles straight ahead,
00:53:35without worrying about a hill.
00:53:38This was grass, ground, earth that had never been turned in all of history,
00:53:43except maybe by a buffalo's horn.
00:53:48They said the first time a plow went through that ground,
00:53:51it sounded like the opening of a giant zipper from the grassroots tearing
00:53:55as the plow went through it.
00:53:58To them, this was a dream come true.
00:54:15We seldom stopped to think how desperately lonely it was.
00:54:21One of the tales I liked the best was about a woman who lived out in West Texas.
00:54:27She seldom saw anybody up in the panhandle.
00:54:31A cowboy came through one time and brought her a sack that had three chickens in it.
00:54:38And she could not bring herself to kill those chickens.
00:54:42She said, you will never know what good company they were.
00:54:46There was some core of that woman that embraced this raw country.
00:54:54But you see, it was her lot.
00:54:58Her husband goes off to round up the cattle on whatever adventure that he might have been on,
00:55:06and it was her lot to keep the homestead, to run the ranch, to care for his family.
00:55:15And so I think of that woman often with those three chickens.
00:55:20And I bet they were good company.
00:55:24Surely the hand of Providence must be in this, as it seems this desert, as it has been termed so long,
00:55:35has been specially reserved for the poor of our land,
00:55:39where they can find a home for themselves and families,
00:55:43and where they can enjoy the companionship of their loved ones,
00:55:46undisturbed by those that have heretofore held them under the most exclusive control.
00:55:54Uriah Oblinger.
00:55:58In the summer of 1872, a Union veteran named Uriah Wesley Oblinger left his rented farm in Onward, Indiana,
00:56:07and set out with his brother and two brothers-in-law for Nebraska,
00:56:11to claim the homestead to which his military service entitled him.
00:56:17His wife, Maddie, and infant daughter, Ella, were to wait at home until he sent for them.
00:56:23October 6th, 1872.
00:56:29Dear wife and baby.
00:56:31Well, I suppose the first question you would ask me now would be,
00:56:35how do you like Nebraska?
00:56:38Wife, you can see just as far as you please here,
00:56:41and almost every foot in sight can be plowed.
00:56:46The longer I stay here, the better I like it.
00:56:50They're mostly young families, just starting in life the same as we are.
00:56:55And I find them very generous indeed.
00:56:58We'll all be poor here together.
00:57:01I am hunting a home for us where we can enjoy ourselves,
00:57:06without being bothered doing as other people say.
00:57:09I can get along well enough through the week,
00:57:13but when Sunday comes, I feel a little lonesome without you.
00:57:18Give baby a kiss, yes, two of them, and take one yourself.
00:57:28After more than a year of separation, Uriah Oblinger's long wait ended.
00:57:34His wife Maddie and daughter Ella, along with a crate containing all their worldly goods,
00:57:41and another filled with live chickens, finally arrived aboard the morning train.
00:57:47Uriah took them to their new home, built from prairie sod with his own hands,
00:57:53to begin their new life.
00:57:55Dear mother and father, at home in our house, an Assad at that.
00:58:05We moved in last Wednesday, Uriah's birthday.
00:58:09It is not quite so convenient as a nice frame,
00:58:12but I would as soon live in it as the cabins I have lived in.
00:58:16I ripped our wagon sheet in two, have it around the sides and have several papers up.
00:58:21It looks real swell.
00:58:23The only objection I have is that we have no floor yet.
00:58:28Maddie Oblinger.
00:58:31What a pleasure it is to work on one's own farm,
00:58:35for you can feel that it's yours and not for someone else.
00:58:39I would rather live as we do than have to rent and have someone bossing us.
00:58:46Well, we have just come in from the truck patch
00:58:48and found the gophers had about clean the peas off all the vines.
00:58:52But our squash vines are full of bloom.
00:58:55We brought in beets just now that measured one foot in circumference,
00:58:59and potatoes almost as much as I said.
00:59:01Dear Grandpa, I have learned my letters and can spell
00:59:05Axe and Cat and Dog and Girl.
00:59:08I bother Ma and Pa considerable to get them to learn me.
00:59:12I'm learning Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
00:59:15Lots of love and kisses, Ella.
00:59:18Uriah is repairing the minutes of the Last Literary Society,
00:59:23which was held last Saturday night.
00:59:25They have some big times debating.
00:59:28I go once in a while to hear them spout.
00:59:31We had rather a nice time over the holidays.
00:59:34We had a Christmas tree at the schoolhouse.
00:59:36We all went to a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve,
00:59:39and each of us girls got a new red dress and a doll
00:59:43and a string with candy and raisins on it.
00:59:46From your grandchild, Ella.
00:59:49I suppose you would like to know if we have been grasshoppered again.
00:59:54They were here several days pretty thick
00:59:57and injured the corn considerable.
01:00:00Nebraska would have had a splendid crop
01:00:02if the grasshoppers had stayed away a while.
01:00:05Maddie Oblinger.
01:00:07The Oblingers had two more daughters, Stella and Maggie.
01:00:16But after six years on the prairie, things had not gotten easier.
01:00:21And by 1879, Maddie was pregnant again.
01:00:26She was confined Tuesday evening about four o'clock.
01:00:33And about eight o'clock, she took a fit very sudden
01:00:36and never spoke after the first one.
01:00:41The doctors were compelled to perform a surgical operation
01:00:44by relieving her of the child.
01:00:49The Lord called for Sister Maddie this evening at 4.15 o'clock.
01:00:54And she is now resting with the angels in heaven.
01:01:00The child is also dead
01:01:03and will be buried with her sometime Sunday.
01:01:07Uriah said he could not stand to write now.
01:01:12I don't know what he will do yet.
01:01:15It's left him and his three little girls
01:01:17in a sad condition, without a mother.
01:01:22Giles S. Thomas.
01:01:27Dear Father and Mother,
01:01:29I try to bear the trouble cheerfully,
01:01:32though the task is hard at times.
01:01:36I hardly know how to manage.
01:01:45Uriah eventually took the train back east to Minnesota and remarried.
01:01:51But he never gave up his dream.
01:01:54He returned to the plains to start over.
01:01:57Nebraska, then Kansas, then Nebraska again.
01:02:03He spent the last few months of his life
01:02:06being cared for by his daughter, Ella.
01:02:09The same girl, now grown,
01:02:12he had once been so anxious to bring out to Nebraska with her mother.
01:02:17Here was all these cheap longhorn steers overrunning Texas.
01:02:32And here was the rest of the country crying out for beef
01:02:35and no railroads to get them out.
01:02:38So they trailed them out across hundreds of miles of wild country.
01:02:44Teddy Blue Abbott.
01:02:46From the southernmost tip of Texas,
01:02:50cattle trails pointed north.
01:02:52The Shawnee, the Chisholm, the Western, the Goodnight Loving.
01:02:58They all led to railheads,
01:03:00where the cattle were loaded into freight cars bound for eastern markets.
01:03:05In less than two decades,
01:03:08six million steers and cows were herded north.
01:03:11So many, one trail driver said,
01:03:14that in places the dust was knee-deep to the cattle.
01:03:19The men who brought them to the railroads were given a new name, cowboys.
01:03:25They were a mixed group.
01:03:28Former Confederate cavalrymen and immigrants who had only recently learned to ride.
01:03:34There were Indian cowboys and African Americans.
01:03:37And Mexican vaqueros whose ancestors had introduced cattle to the west centuries earlier.
01:03:44A cowboy, one Westerner observed, is just a plain, bow-legged human who smelled very horsey at times.
01:03:58In person, the cowboys were mostly medium-sized men.
01:04:02Quick and wiry, and as a rule, very good-natured.
01:04:06In fact, it did not pay to be anything else.
01:04:09In character, their like never was or will be again.
01:04:13Teddy Blue Abbott.
01:04:15Edward C. Abbott was born in Cranwich, England,
01:04:21and brought to the west by his parents as a boy.
01:04:26Hoping the open air would improve his frail health,
01:04:29his father let him help drive a herd of cattle from Texas to Nebraska
01:04:34when he was just ten years old.
01:04:37The experience, Abbott said later, made a cowboy out of me.
01:04:41Nothing could have changed me after that.
01:04:46My family and I went separate ways, and they stayed separate forever after.
01:04:52My father was all for farming, and all my brothers turned out farmers except one.
01:04:57And he ended up the worst of the lot, a sheep man and a Republican.
01:05:04The cowboy's average age was 24.
01:05:09They were paid so badly and worked so hard
01:05:13that two-thirds of them made only one trail drive
01:05:16before finding something better to do.
01:05:19They owned their saddle, but not the horse they rode,
01:05:23and they rode it day and night.
01:05:26For a man to be stove up at 30 may sound strange to some people,
01:05:32but many a cowboy has been so bunged up that he's had to quit riding that early in life.
01:05:39My advice to any young man or boy is to stay at home and not be a rambler,
01:05:46as it won't buy you anything.
01:05:49James Emmett McCauley.
01:05:51If a storm come and the cattle started running,
01:05:57you'd hear that low rumbling noise along the ground.
01:06:00Then you'd jump for your horse and get out there in the lead,
01:06:03trying to head them and get them into a mill before they scattered to hell and gone.
01:06:07It was riding at a dead run in the dark,
01:06:11with cut banks and prairie dog holes all around you,
01:06:14not knowing if the next jump would land you in a shallow grave.
01:06:20The singing was supposed to soothe the cattle, and it did.
01:06:36The two men on guard would circle around with their horses on a walk,
01:06:40if it was a clear night and the cattle was bedded down and quiet,
01:06:43and one man would sing a verse of a song,
01:06:45and his partner on the other side of the herd would sing another verse.
01:06:48And you'd go through a whole song that way.
01:06:52I had a crackerjack of a partner in 79.
01:06:55I'd sing and he'd answer and we'd keep it up like that for two hours.
01:06:59But he was killed by lightning.
01:07:03After up to four straight months in the saddle,
01:07:06often in the same clothes every day,
01:07:09eating every meal at the chuck wagon,
01:07:12drinking nothing but coffee and water,
01:07:14the cowboy's job was finally done.
01:07:17He was paid for his work and turned loose in town.
01:07:22Now come along, boys, and listen to my tale,
01:07:25and I'll tell you how my trouble's on the Chisholm Trail.
01:07:28Come a-tie-yi, yippee-yi, yippee-yi,
01:07:30come a-tie-yi, yippee-yi.
01:07:32I started up the trail October 23rd,
01:07:35left go Texas with a tune you heard.
01:07:38Come a-tie-yi, yippee-yi, yippee-yi,
01:07:40come a-tie-yi, yippee-yi, yippee-yi, yippee-yi.
01:07:55I bought some new clothes and got my picture taken.
01:07:58I had a new white Stetson hat that I paid $10 for
01:08:01and new pants that cost $12,
01:08:02that cost $12, and a good shirt and fancy boots.
01:08:06Lord, I was proud of those clothes.
01:08:10When my sister saw me, she said,
01:08:11take your pants out of your boots and put your coat on.
01:08:13You look like an outlaw.
01:08:16I told her to go to hell, and I never did like her after that.
01:08:24Cowboys were big spenders.
01:08:27But while businesses profited, all the cow towns
01:08:30soon became wilder than their permanent residence like.
01:08:35Abilene Chronicle.
01:08:37The marshal has posted up printed notices,
01:08:40informing all persons that the ordinance
01:08:42against carrying firearms or other weapons in Abilene
01:08:46will be enforced.
01:08:48That's right.
01:08:49There's no bravery in carrying revolvers
01:08:52in a civilized community.
01:08:56Gun control ordinances were common.
01:08:58Cowboys, who insisted on carrying their six shooters in town,
01:09:02risked fines and imprisonment.
01:09:06To make sure the laws were obeyed, some cow towns
01:09:10resorted to hiring notorious gunmen, Wyatt Earp, Bat
01:09:14Masterson, and Wild Bill Hickok, to keep the peace.
01:09:20Morally as a class, cowboys are fall-mothed,
01:09:23blasphemous, drunken, lecherous, utterly corrupt.
01:09:28Usually harmless in the plains when sober,
01:09:31they are dreaded in the towns, for then liquor
01:09:34has an ascendancy over them.
01:09:37Cheyenne Daily Leader.
01:09:40One by one, the cow towns would declare themselves
01:09:43off-limits to the Texas herds and the cowboys who came with them.
01:09:48Then I went home.
01:09:51After I got home, my father said to me one night,
01:09:54you can take old Morgan and plow the West Ridge tomorrow.
01:09:58Like hell I'd plow the West Ridge.
01:10:01And when my father woke up next morning,
01:10:03Teddy was gone.
01:10:05I crossed the Laramie Plains.
01:10:18I see in glimpses afar, or towering immediately above me,
01:10:24the great mountains.
01:10:25I see the Wind River and the Wasatch Mountains.
01:10:30I see the Monument Mountain and the Eagle's Nest.
01:10:34I pass the promontory, I ascend the Nevadas.
01:10:40I see the clear waters of Lake Tahoe.
01:10:44I see forests of majestic pines.
01:10:48Marching through these, and after all,
01:10:50in duplicate, slender lines.
01:10:54Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel,
01:10:58tying the eastern to the western sea.
01:11:01The road between Europe and Asia.
01:11:06Walt Whitman.
01:11:07From the time of Columbus, explorers had searched in vain
01:11:16for a passage that would connect the Atlantic with the Pacific.
01:11:20The centuries-old dream had finally come true.
01:11:26No such passage existed, so the Americans had built one.
01:11:32If you were looking for the definitive symbol of the conflict
01:11:44between the cultures that had existed in the American West
01:11:49for at least 10,000 years, and maybe longer,
01:11:53and the culture that was just a building east of the Mississippi River,
01:12:00this culture of technology, of commerce,
01:12:03of grasping after tomorrow before it arrives.
01:12:07You couldn't come up with two more powerful symbols
01:12:11than the railroad and the buffalo,
01:12:14because when the railroad met the buffalo,
01:12:18the Iron Age met the Stone Age,
01:12:23the machine arrived in the garden,
01:12:27and the West was changed forever.
01:12:30There was a man who killed a buffalo bull to no purpose,
01:12:47only he wanted its blood on his hands.
01:12:51It was a great, old, noble beast,
01:12:55and it was a long time blowing its life away.
01:13:00On the edge of the night,
01:13:02the people gathered themselves up in their grief and shame.
01:13:08Away in the West, they could see the hump and spine
01:13:11of the huge beast which lay dying along the edge of the world.
01:13:18They could see its bright blood run into the sky
01:13:21where it dried, darkening, and was at last flecked
01:13:26with flakes of light.
01:13:34The thing we had to have, we businessmen with rifles,
01:13:38was one-shot kills.
01:13:41We based our success on the overwhelming stupidity
01:13:44of the buffalo, unquestionably the stupidest game animal
01:13:48in the world.
01:13:50If you wounded the leader, the rest of a herd,
01:13:53whether it was three or 30,
01:13:55would gather around her and stupidly mill.
01:14:01All you had to do was pick them off one by one.
01:14:05I once took 269 hides with 300 cartridges.
01:14:12Adventurous?
01:14:14No more than shooting a beef critter in the barnyard.
01:14:18It was a harvest.
01:14:19We were the harvesters.
01:14:23Frank H. Mayer.
01:14:36Frank Mayer and thousands of other buffalo hunters
01:14:40swarmed onto the plains.
01:14:42Some stopped shooting just long enough to cool their overheated
01:14:46rifle barrels with canteens of water.
01:14:50When the water ran out, they urinated down the barrel
01:14:53and kept shooting.
01:14:57Up and down the plains, those men ranged.
01:15:01Behind them came the skinners with their wagons.
01:15:06They piled the hides and bones into the wagons until they were full
01:15:11and then took their loads to the new railroad stations
01:15:15to be shipped east to market.
01:15:18Sometimes there would be a pile of bones as high as a man
01:15:23stretching a mile along the railroad track.
01:15:28The old lady horse.
01:15:3232 million pounds of buffalo bones made their way from the plains
01:15:37to eastern factories, where they were ground into fertilizer.
01:15:43Buffalo horns were turned into buttons, combs, knife handles.
01:15:49Hooves became glue.
01:15:54All across western Kansas, the slaughter went on.
01:15:58Perhaps as many as three million buffalo killed
01:16:01in the two years since the coming of the railroad.
01:16:08Where there were myriads of buffalo the year before,
01:16:11there were now myriads of carcasses.
01:16:14The air was foul with a sickening stench,
01:16:17and the vast plain which only a short 12 months before
01:16:22teemed with animal life was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.
01:16:29Colonel Richard Irving Dodge.
01:16:37Many Americans grew alarmed at the extent of the slaughter.
01:16:41In the spring of 1874, Congress passed a law
01:16:45to protect the buffalo.
01:16:47But President Ulysses S. Grant refused to sign it,
01:16:51and the killing continued.
01:16:54Hunters had already moved south of Kansas,
01:16:57onto hunting grounds reserved by treaty for the Indians.
01:17:02The government did nothing to stop them,
01:17:04and even provided the hunters with free ammunition.
01:17:13You white people make a big talk, and sometimes war.
01:17:18If an Indian kills a white man's ox
01:17:20to keep his wife and children from starving,
01:17:24what do you think my people ought to say and do
01:17:26when they themselves see their buffalo killed by your race,
01:17:30when you are not hungry?
01:17:32Little Robe.
01:17:33The Indians sensed that we were taking away their birthright,
01:17:42and that with every boom of a buffalo rifle,
01:17:45their tenure on their homeland became weakened,
01:17:49and that eventually they would have no homeland and no buffalo.
01:17:55So they did what you and I would do if our existence were jeopardized.
01:18:01They fought.
01:18:05In the summer of 1874, the Kiowas, Comanches, Arapahoes,
01:18:10and Southern Cheyenne rose up and drove out the Hunters,
01:18:14and any other whites they came across.
01:18:19General Philip Sheridan ordered a massive campaign,
01:18:22deploying five columns of troops to pursue the Indians relentlessly
01:18:27during the summer and fall, depriving them of rest,
01:18:32or the opportunity to hunt.
01:18:43By the next spring, virtually all of the resisting bands
01:18:47on the Southern Plains, desperate now for food,
01:18:51had been driven back onto the reservations.
01:18:53The buffalo hunters went right back to work.
01:19:06Within a year, the herd on the Southern Plains
01:19:09had virtually disappeared.
01:19:14One by one, we put up our buffalo rifles and left the rangers.
01:19:18And there settled over them a vast quiet.
01:19:23The buffalo was gone.
01:19:28Maybe we served our purpose in helping abolish the buffalo.
01:19:33Maybe it was our ruthless harvesting of him
01:19:36which telescoped the control of the Indian by a decade or maybe more.
01:19:42Or maybe I'm just rationalizing.
01:19:44Maybe we were just a greedy lot who wanted to get ours,
01:19:49and to hell with posterity, the buffalo, or anyone else.
01:19:53Just so we kept our scalps on and our money pouches filled.
01:19:58I think maybe that is the way it was.
01:20:02Frank H. Mayer.
01:20:03It would be hard to imagine anything more deeply hurtful
01:20:19than the loss of something ineffably sacred.
01:20:24One can only guess and imagine.
01:20:30We can't, uh, we can't know what that is, uh, now.
01:20:34But certainly a confusion, uh, first of all, I suppose.
01:20:39Why is this happening?
01:20:41Why are you killing the buffalo?
01:20:43That's, we do that, of course, but we do it, uh, in order to survive,
01:20:47and we do it in a sacred manner.
01:20:50But this wholesale slaughter must have been first confusing,
01:20:54and then, um, you know, um, a devastation,
01:21:00a wound in the, in the heart that, uh, we cannot conceive of now.
01:21:10The buffalo saw that their day was over.
01:21:14They could protect their people no longer.
01:21:17Sadly, the last remnant of the great herd gathered in council
01:21:22and decided what they would do.
01:21:27One young woman got out very early,
01:21:30and peering through the haze,
01:21:33she saw the last buffalo herd appear like in a spirit dream.
01:21:38Straight to Mount Scott, the leader of the herd walked.
01:21:47Behind him came the cows and their calves,
01:21:50and the few young males who had survived.
01:21:55As the woman watched, the face of the mountain opened.
01:21:59Inside Mount Scott, the world was green and fresh,
01:22:05as it had been when she was a small girl.
01:22:08The rivers ran clear, not red.
01:22:12Into this world of beauty, the buffalo walked.
01:22:17Never to be seen again.
01:22:19ever to be seen again.
01:22:28So they did twice their handsumaks.
01:22:37• collections of Martin grave – Under Frogs now,
01:22:39you're going to be wrecked best.
01:22:42So you're one man, you're going to look at it.
01:22:43It's already one man, you're going to get to know,
01:22:44espere.
01:22:45Now come along, boys, and listen to my tale, and I'll tell you how my trouble's on the Chisholm Trail.
01:22:54Come a-tie-ye, yippee-yippee-ye, yippee-ye, come a-tie-ye, yippee-yippee-ye.
01:22:59I started up the trail October 23rd, left old Texas with the two you heard.
01:23:05Come a-tie-ye, yippee-yippee-ye, come a-tie-ye, yippee-yippee-ye.
01:23:09Oh, a ten-dollar horse and a forty-dollar saddle, I'm a-go to punch in them long-horned cattle.
01:23:15Come a-tie-ye, yippee-yippee-ye, yippee-ye, come a-tie-ye, yippee-yippee-ye.
01:23:20Woke up one morning on the Chisholm Trail with a rope in my hand and a cow by the tail.
01:23:25Come a-tie-ye, yippee-yippee-ye, yippee-ye, come a-tie-ye, yippee-yippee-ye.
01:23:39Well, we rounded them up and we put them on the cars and that was the last of the old two bars.
01:23:46Come a-tie-ye, yippee-yippee-ye, yippee-ye, come a-tie-ye, yippee-yippee-ye.
01:23:51Then I went to the boss for to draw my rope.
01:23:54He had it figured nine dollars in the hole.
01:23:56Come a-tie-ye, yippee-yippee-ye, yippee-ye, come a-tie-ye, yippee-yippee-ye.
01:24:00So I sold old Bollie and I hung up my saddle and I bid farewell to the longhorn cattle.
01:24:11Come a-tie-ye, yippee-yippee-ye, yippee-ye, come a-tie-ye, yippee-yippee-ye.
01:24:15Come a-tie-ye, yippee-ya, yippee-ye, yippee-ye, yippee-ye.
01:24:25Move.
01:24:31Move.
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