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9 Episodes 1996 - 1996
Episode 1
Sun, Sep 15, 199683 mins
To the Europeans, the West was a wilderness to be conquered, a wilderness filled with boundless treasure, souls to be saved and new horizons to explore. Beginning with America's purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1804, a young country prepared for its own epic march across the terrain of the West.
Episode 2
Mon, Sep 16, 199685 mins
A look at the pivotal years from 1806-1848, when hopeful Americans began moving west in significant numbers. The disparate American trails soon merged into a single path and, regardless of their individual reasons for going there, Americans soon determined to make the West their own.
Episode 3
Tue, Sep 17, 199686 mins
From 1848 to 1856, the rush Westward accelerated into a frenzy with the famed Gold Rush. It began with a sawmill worker, James Marshall, who reached down into a stream bed of the American River in California and came up with the future of the West in the palm of his hand. He had discovered gold and in the next year alone 50,000 fortune seekers swarmed into the Sierra Nevada.
Episode 4
Wed, Sep 18, 199685 mins
For those who ventured there from somewhere else, the West had come to symbolize hope and new beginnings. But during the years 1856 to 1868, western pioneers brought with them the nation's oldest and most divisive issue - slavery - and the rough frontier supplied the sparks that ignited the Civil War, and a brave Mexican-American rancher declared his own republic in southern Texas.
Episode 5
Thu, Sep 19, 199685 mins
After the Civil War, the transcontinental railroad links East and West, and carries homesteaders, buffalo hunters, and cowboys into the west.
Episode 6
Fri, Sep 20, 199686 mins
By 1877 only a few groups still resist America's westward push. The Lakota Sioux fight to protect their sacred Black Hills, but their victory over Custer at Little Big Horn does not prevent the end of their traditional way of life.
Episode 7
Sat, Sep 21, 199686 mins
The conquest of the West is nearly finished: In only 10 years, the native peoples are confined to reservations, allowing four-and-a-half million settlers to claim their land.
Episode 8
Sun, Sep 22, 199659 mins
As settlers race to claim tribal lands, Native Americans take up the Ghost Dance, to restore a lost way of life; the new century marks a new era in the West, an age of aqueducts and smelters.
Episode 9
Sun, Sep 22, 199664 mins
In 1893, the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the New World was celebrated in Chicago. It was called The World's Columbian Exposition, and it was so large, so ambitious, so self-congratulatory, that it took an extra year just to get everything ready. Twenty-four million people paid their way into the fair, more than had ever attended any other event in the history of the world. All the western states struggled to outshine one another -- including the brand-new states of North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington. The California pavilion was shaped like a Spanish mission. On display inside were a goddess made entirely of figs and a conquistador built of prunes. For its exhibit hall, Montana reconstructed a mountain man's cabin. Kansas showed off a gigantic mural made of grain, and an entire herd of buffalo -- stuffed. In a speech given at the fair, a young, unknown historian named Frederick Jackson Turner declared for the first time that the frontier had finally closed. There were 63 million Americans in 1893. Seventeen million of them now lived west of the Mississippi. Only 90 years earlier, when Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory, he had estimated it would take a hundred generations for the United States to people the West. Americans had done it in less than five. But beyond the fairgrounds, beyond Chicago, in the real West, for every story that was coming to an end, another was about to begin.