Kevin Costner's the West (2025) s01e08 Episode Script

1
As the United States
prepares for its first centennial,
the war in the west
between native nations
and the United States is not yet over,
but its eventual outcome seems clear.
The tribes that once
thrived in the great plains,
the sioux, the Cheyenne, the a rap a ho,
are now mostly confined to reservations.
Bison are on the verge of extinction,
and the vast grassland
that once sustained them
now offers opportunity
for a new wave of western
immigrants, cattle ranchers.
Their arrival will reshape
the northern plains,
igniting a life and death struggle
for the control of the open range.
People live on myths,
and the myths that really
stick in the American experience
are the myths of the west.
The mountains were taller,
the deserts were harsher,
the snows were deeper.
American west conjures wonder,
possibility, opportunity.
The figure of the mountain man.
Notorious outlaws.
The cowboy.
The discovery of gold in California.
This train of wagons
trailing across the prairie.
Everybody has a reason
for wanting this land.
But most of that land
was already occupied.
We have been residents
for more than 10,000 years.
This is a clash of two different ways
of seeing life itself,
fighting for the future of your
homeland on the one side,
and fighting for the
destiny of the new republic
on the other side.
The history of the
west is a creation story.
It's the creation of what we
think of as modern america.
The west is a place
where anything is possible.
It is the essence of the American dream.
The core of this is, what
are we to be as a nation?
The reckoning is coming.
The west is this canvas
on which American dreams
become larger than life.
In 1866, the end of the civil war
brings a new wave of settlers west,
seeking fresh opportunity
and fresh profit on government lands
across america's great plains.
This is federal property
known as the open range.
The grass is free at this point.
Settlers have come to recognize
that this enormous grassland,
which provided forage for tens of millions
of head of buffalo,
might be just as good
for American cattle.
This realization dawns
as Americans in the north
develop a new taste for beef
thanks to a booming post-war economy
and fast growing cities.
And it becomes very quickly
central to the American diet
and the American identity.
When immigrants come to america,
one of the first things they write home is,
"you will not believe it,
but I'm having beef
twice, three times a week."
The first place to meet this
growing demand is Texas.
While their owners fought in the civil war,
the cattle proliferated here.
When they return,
they found some 5 million
longhorns grazing freely
on open lands.
This is chiefly Spanish criollo cattle
that's being interbred
with English herefords,
known as the Texas longhorn.
Growing demand means serious money
and a steer worth $4 in Texas can sell
for up to 50 in New York,
but first they must reach the
nation's meat packing center
in Chicago.
That means driving herds
hundreds of miles across Texas
to the nearest rail
hub in abilene, Kansas,
grueling work that falls on the shoulders
of what will become an American icon.
The birth of the cowboy
is really the cattle drive,
massive herds of cattle
that needed to be protected
by cowboys that would
make sure they kept moving.
You would round up in Texas,
and you would go up
the famous chisholm trail,
but you had to be Hardy.
You'd get left behind if you got sick.
And the reality is, being a
cowboy was a terrible job.
It was really hard.
You were poorly paid.
About 20%, maybe even more
of American cowboys
were African Americans.
It's also work that exposes
cowboys to wild animals,
hostile natives.
You're absolutely expendable,
which is why you find
such a high proportion
of African Americans in this work.
It is far less glamorous
than Hollywood would memorialize it.
Today, there are a lot of
people who wear cowboy hats
who don't go anywhere near cows,
don't go anywhere near
horses, but people live on myths.
Built on the backs of cowboys,
the cattle business booms,
and with the completion
of the transcontinental railroad in 1869,
transporting beef across
the country gets easier
and even more profitable.
One of the most remarkable
things was connecting the east
to the west with the
transcontinental railroad,
and you can't exaggerate
how significant that is.
Before the railroad, it
costs as much to send a ton
of goods 30 miles over land as it does
to send it 3,000 miles across the ocean.
That changes everything.
Now, people moving west,
they weren't moving laboriously
by the wagon.
Now they can get on the train.
That obviously opens up
enormous field of opportunity
for ordinary families moving west,
but it also opens
opportunities for big businesses.
Thanks to the railroad,
cattle ranching soon expands north
from Texas all the way to Wyoming,
where livestock can graze
freely across the open range.
The open range is grazing
lands that aren't fenced,
and so they're not staked
out by any particular divide,
and that means the
cattle can roam freely.
If you had the resources
to acquire a herd,
and bring it to a place
where it was free range,
you were sittin' pretty.
In 1877, Americans hoping
to prosper in the cattle
boom are encouraged
by a new congressional
law, the desert lands act,
aimed to boost settlement
in the high, dry plains.
The act lets anyone buy
up to 320 acres of land
for just $1.25 an acre.
It was designed to fill the American west
with honest people who
would sink down roots
and have their families, build
a school, and some churches,
goes back to Thomas Jefferson,
the smallholder is the heart
of the American republic.
Soon, hundreds of homesteaders flock
to Wyoming, hoping to
make it as cattle ranchers.
The idea is that if you
can get your cows out there
and fatten them up to
feed on this open grassland,
that's gonna increase your profits.
You didn't have to pay for anything.
The animals take care of themselves.
They're wandering
around, but you need a way
to know which cattle are yours,
and which cattle belong to
your friend, or your enemy.
The solution is cattle branding.
You burn a symbol in the animal's side,
and people knew it was yours.
But branding is not a perfect solution
on the open range, where
herds could interbreed,
making it hard to know who
owns which unbranded calves.
These unmarked calves
are called mavericks,
and according to common
practice, if you find one,
and brand it, it's yours.
It's a long tradition where
if you find stray cattle
that are not branded,
what was called a Maverick,
you can take that calf
and give it your own brand.
It is basically a free calf.
By 1880, a calf is one of
the most valuable assets in america.
A herd of 10,000 cattle
can net a yearly profit
worth $20 million today.
As fortunes amass, the
cattle business changes.
The cattle industry in Wyoming begins
with small time operators,
but very quickly, larger
ranches are funded
with corporate money,
with stocks sold in New York,
and Boston, and Philadelphia,
and sold in Edinburgh, and Berlin,
because of this global industrial market.
These ranch owners get
a reputation as aristocrats.
They're called the cattle barons.
But surprisingly,
the great cattle barons
didn't own any land.
They might've owned a tiny, little bit,
but they were just extractors
using the convenience
of the public domain to line their pockets.
They were living the good life with cigars,
and Brandy, and
amiable women, let's say,
in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Thanks to such easy profits,
Wyoming's capital, Cheyenne,
builds its own millionaire's row
in the 1880s.
Its streets are lit up by some
of america's first electric lights.
In 1882, it becomes the
wealthiest city per cap it a
in the world.
Wyoming's elite ranchers are determined
to maintain their wealth and power.
The most powerful
ranchers in Wyoming create
the Wyoming stock growers association,
and in the whole state, cattle
ranching is the foundation
of power, and so the Wyoming
stock growers association
functionally becomes the government
of the territory of Wyoming.
Then in 1886,
Wyoming's cattle ranchers
are dealt a terrible blow
in what comes to be
known as the great die-up.
Winter of 1886-1887 was
one of the worst winters ever
to hit the plains.
Cattle died by the thousands.
People would find vast
herds frozen to death.
Investors in London,
investors in Scotland,
investors in Boston, New York, all say,
"this is not a good business.
We don't wanna be involved here.
Liquidate your herds,
send them to Chicago.
We're outta the business."
Ranches go under.
Cattle industry's in a free fall.
Any cattle barons left standing
are now ready to fight
for every last dollar.
The great cattle barons get
the legislature of Wyoming
to pass a law saying that
every Maverick belongs
to the Wyoming stock
growers association,
so that anytime there's
an unidentified calf,
it can't be claimed by
one of the homesteaders
or a small rancher.
The Maverick act made the possession
of unbranded cattle illegal.
So the small ranchers
are breaking the law
every time they pull one
of their own calves back
from the herd.
The Wyoming stock growers association
hire stock detectives who will
patrol the range to make sure
that the mavericking
policies are being enforced.
And the penalty for
stealing cattle is death.
As tensions rise between
Wyoming's cattle barons
and its small ranches over mavericks,
a new technology makes
things even more challenging.
Advertised as lighter than
air, stronger than whiskey,
and cheaper than dust, barbed wire.
The devil's rope, as the
indigenous people call it,
will allow people to
secure their homestead.
It's dry in the American west,
and there's not a lot of wood,
so it's hard to build a fence,
until the invention of barbed
wire makes it pretty easy
to build a fence.
You can just unspool this barbed wire
to make sure your livestock stayed in,
and nobody came and stole from you.
It was the hot invention.
At the same time, it
undermines the whole notion
of the open range system.
All of a sudden, there is
no unfettered movement
of grazing cattle.
Everything was now cut and parceled
into these chunks of land
guarded by sharp wire.
The fences threaten the
cattle barons' livelihoods,
which depends on
free access to the grass.
The cattle barons are
determined to take action.
Two independent ranchers
are the first ones in their sights,
Jim averell and Ellen Watson.
Jim averell and Ella
Watson were beginning
to prosper a little,
running a ranch for cattle.
Ella Watson was very
angry that the cattle barons,
the stock growers
association, was starting
to make it impossible for her
and her husband to make a living.
But their homestead is right on the river,
a prime watering hole in the middle
of a cattle baron's range.
It was fenced, and so he
couldn't use that land anymore,
land that had made him rich.
He needed to get them off that land.
And so the cattle barons decided
to eliminate averell and Watson,
so they send out a hit squad.
The moral legitimacy is on
the side of the homesteaders,
and none of the legitimacy is on the side
of the great cattle barons,
who are misusing power
for their own greed.
Averell and Watson are accused
of stealing cattle, a
practice called rustling.
And the stock detectives
take them from their ranch,
and they lynched them.
Extrajudicial hanging, vigilantism.
The cattle barons believed
that this is the first important
step in warning the people
of Johnson county
to desist from rustling.
For the people who
knew Watson and averell,
this is an outrage, this is murder.
The powerful cattle barons have money,
and they controlled
most of the newspapers.
So the headlines in most
of the Cheyenne papers
present, "rustlers are lynched,
and they deserved it, they were thieves".
And they say Ellen
Watson is "cattle Kate,"
a notorious prostitute
who was being paid
with stolen cattle.
And that averell was her pimp.
She is branded as an
outlaw, when the truth
of the matter is, she was
just a woman trying to get by.
The news terrifies small
homesteaders in Wyoming,
but some realize if they want to survive,
they must band together and fight back.
One of them is Nate champion.
Nate champion grows up in Texas.
He works in various
places as a ranch hand
as the cowboy riding the ranges.
He knew how the business worked.
Champion moved to Johnson county
in the 1870s to set up his own ranch,
and has grown his
herd to over 200 cattle,
but right now, the future looks bleak.
Homesteaders fear being murdered,
or falsely prosecuted for
fencing off their own land.
People are dying and
there's a real climate of fear.
Nate champion's one of the few people
that does not get
completely scared off by this.
Champion and some of
his compatriots realized
they weren't gonna be
able to stay in business
unless they could
somehow break the power
of the cattle barons,
and so they establish
their own association,
the northern Wyoming
stock growers association.
It's gonna have its own set
of rules, and its own roundup,
and crucially that roundup
is gonna be one month
before the Wyoming stock
growers association roundup.
Champion and the homesteaders know
the risk, and going up against
the powerful stock growers
is a make or break decision.
The big time ranchers know
this is an existential threat.
If this roundup happens before them,
there's gonna be a
lot of unbranded cattle
that they think should be
theirs that are gonna go
to Nate champion and his friends.
They have to stop it from happening.
So the cattle barons hire
frank canton to lead the effort
to suppress the roundup.
Now canton, he had a
kind of checkered past,
murder, robbery, all sorts of crimes.
But he reinvented himself,
first as a sheriff in Johnson county,
and them as the henchman
for the cattle barons.
He is in cahoots with big stock growers,
and ultimately becomes
a stock detective.
In the spring of 1882,
canton and his men find
Nate champion at his cabin.
Nate champion is in bed.
Champion reaches under his
pillow and pulls up a revolver,
and starts shooting.
There's a gun fight.
Champion hits a couple of them.
They flee,
and they're not able
to get Nate champion.
Once the coast is clear,
champion finds a literal smoking gun.
He does the minimal forensics
to realize that it belongs
to frank canton, a key
player for the cattle barons.
So now Nate champion is in a position
to bring down frank canton.
This is a real problem for
the stock growers association.
If one of these stock
detectives ends up in court,
they will be forced to testify
against their employers.
Nate champion could blow
the lid off the whole thing.
In 1890, as tensions
between homesteaders
and stock growers intensify,
Wyoming enters the union
as the 44th state, with
Cheyenne as its capital.
Cattle barons are appointed
to important positions in the government,
hold meetings in the capitol,
and have a hand in
electing the state's governor,
and its two senators.
All three of them are Republicans.
President Benjamin
Harrison is also a republican,
so these are people
who know each other,
so they're optimistic that
they'll get some cooperation.
As the cattle barons consolidate
their power, the nation
itself is in the midst
of a fight between workers
and the millionaires who employ them.
Thousands of miles away
in homestead, Pennsylvania,
Andrew carnegie is in the midst
of crushing the steel workers union.
He sees these unionized
workers as people
that are undermining his
ability to make his millions,
and so he does everything
in his power to crush them,
including hiring a private
army of 300 pinkertons.
Mark twain described
the years between 1875
and 1900 as the gilded age,
a result of the industrial revolution
where people at the top
enjoyed enormous wealth
and power at the expense
of factory workers in the east,
and small farmers in the west.
These enormous natural
resources of the country,
this vast amount, the whole lot of it,
is coming into the ownership of a smaller
and smaller group of people.
At this point, the wealthy
have the power to be able
to incite violence at a mass
level against the smaller guys,
and at times, they do.
As it is in the east,
so it goes in the west,
but the cattle barons go even further
and hire private armies to
take out their worst enemies.
The cattle barons make a list
of 70 individuals up in Johnson county
that must be eliminated,
by which I mean eliminated,
and the number one they
want to get is Nate champion.
The list included many homesteaders
in Nate champion's northern Wyoming
stock growers association,
and anyone whose
homestead is in the way.
This is not just a bunch of ranchers,
or hired hands, or cowboys.
The kill list is of prominent people
of Johnson county, sheriffs, and judges,
and city council members,
and newspapermen,
so it's a civil war effectively.
The stock growers association
decides they're gonna need
to get some hired guns for this.
They recruit 25 desperadoes,
gunmen from Texas,
with the promise of
$5 a day for expenses,
and $50 for every rustler that they kill.
Now, to us, they look like hit men.
To them, they were bringing
justice to Johnson county,
a place that, in their minds,
had descended into anarchy.
People in Johnson county
are gonna call them invaders,
because they're coming to
basically invade Johnson county,
to take over, and to kill people.
The hired guns travel
from Texas by a private train
to meet the cattle
barons and frank canton.
They're then equipped
with horses, with rifles.
They have a wagon that's got
tons of ammunition, and food,
and even dynamite, and off they go,
headed for the heart of Johnson county.
On the way, they find out
that Nate champion is
staying on the kc ranch,
which is right on the way to buffalo,
and they thought, if they
could ambush champion,
they would get one of their
key suspects off their list,
cutting the head off the snake.
As they near the kc ranch,
the invaders cut the
telegraph lines to prevent news
of their arrival from
getting to Johnson county.
On April 9th, 1892,
the cattle baron's vigilante
army quietly surrounds
the kc ranch.
Nate champion is staying at the kc ranch
along with one of his
friends and two other men.
Two of the guys go out to get water,
and they don't come back.
Nate champion and his
friend, Nick ray, realize
that, "where are they?
Something's going on here."
Ray decides he's gonna go look.
Suddenly, champion,
he knows what's going on,
and the question is, can he get out alive?
He's outgunned here by 50 to one,
but he actually hits three of them,
and he does manage to keep
them at bay for several hours.
And so, a standoff ensues.
He was holed up in his cabin.
There wasn't a lot he could do.
He could give up,
but he knows that might
mean certain death.
Nate champion is under siege,
and yet he starts to take a diary,
and write down what's happening.
I see 12 or 15 men.
One of them looks like frank canton.
You start to think that
even though he's very alone,
he feels like he's part
of something bigger.
He's gonna provide evidence
that the cattlemen
were behind the attack
so that, if he was gonna die,
at least he wasn't gonna die in vain.
At one point, a friend of his rides by
and exchanges gunfire with
these hired invader gunmen.
He realizes that something
really bad is going on here,
and so, he galloped
back to buffalo to get help.
Frank canton and his hitman suspect
that rescuers from buffalo
will soon be on their way,
and they better get Nate champion fast.
They take this cart,
which they light on fire,
and then push very
firmly toward the cabin.
Cabin catches on fire
and Nate champion is shooting, writing.
The house is all fired.
Boys, there's bullets coming in like hail.
Don't think they intend to
let me get away this time.
It's 1892 and what will become known
as the Johnson county war is underway.
In a remote Wyoming cabin,
small time cattle rancher,
Nate champion, is fighting a hit squad
hired by cattle barons, and
he's running out of options.
The cabin where Nate
champion is holed up
catches on fire, it's
filling up with smoke.
He's surrounded by dozens of killers.
There's no way out.
Astonishing that he
writes a journal at that time.
I think I'll make a break for it.
They're still shooting
at all around the house.
Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again.
Champion knows that this
isn't gonna end well for him.
He makes a run for the ravine.
There are all these
people shooting at him.
And Nate champion
is gunned down in a hail of bullets.
Frank canton finds Nate's diary.
He tears out a page, and
leaves a warning on Nate's body.
That note is a key part of the story,
because killing Nate champion, in a way,
it's an act of terrorism.
More than about enforcing
the law or finding justice,
it's about scaring people.
It's about telling people what'll happen,
even if they think they're
gonna get away with it,
and it's about telling
people what's gonna happen
if they cross the Wyoming
stock growers association.
Johnson county is
not gonna be welcome
to people like Nate champion anymore.
When Nate champion's friends discover
that he's been murdered,
they sound the alarm,
and they're gonna go after the invaders.
The sheriff of Johnson
county, red Angus,
is able to round up 250 men.
It's gonna be the townspeople
and the homesteaders
against the big cattle ranchers.
Canton and his men have
lost the element of surprise.
Now the whole county is out to get them.
Frank canton's men
decided they would hole up
at the ta ranch to figure
out what they were gonna do,
now that their plan
had sort of fallen apart.
Sheriff Angus and his posse
track canton's invaders to the ranch.
Homesteaders surround the ranch.
For the second time in as many days,
we were gonna have a siege.
Invaders, to save themselves,
barricade themselves in,
set up sharpshooter positions,
and this begins a several day standoff.
Ranches at this time were
designed to be defended,
because the earliest
ranches were part of a process
of taking land violently
from native peoples.
Now, the thing to know
about these kind of showdowns
in the American west,
is we all have this image
we get from television or the movies,
where everybody's an incredible shot.
They can shoot a bird outta the sky.
In reality, people's guns were unreliable.
There were a lot of
fights where people were
just shooting and nobody was getting hit.
The siege at the ta ranch is going
to take place over several days,
and while that's
happening, posse is growing,
and it's gonna get up
to around 400 people.
But the invaders have created
a problem for themselves.
The original plan was
to surprise everyone
in Johnson county,
and part of that plan had
been cutting the telegraph lines.
That had seemed like
a good idea at the time,
but they made a mistake,
because they had no
way to get word back
that they were in trouble.
Trapped and surrounded,
canton manages to send a runner out
through the blockade to plea for help.
He reaches the governor of Wyoming,
who sends a telegram
to Washington, DC.
Meanwhile, the people
of Johnson county
are moving these siege
weapons in towards the cabin.
They're going to send in dynamite.
It's gonna be the death
of the entire invading army.
This is going to be a massacre.
In Johnson county, Wyoming,
a simmering conflict
between cattle barons
and small ranchers has
erupted into violence.
Hired assassin, frank canton,
and his men faced a posse
of angry citizens bent on revenge,
but he has managed to
send out a plea for help
to powerful allies,
thousands of miles away.
The two senators from
Wyoming, alerted by the telegraph
that this is happening,
literally go from their homes
in Washington DC to the white house
in the middle of the night.
President Harrison,
who's at home asleep,
they get someone to
go in, and wake him up,
and tell him there's an
insurrection underway,
a violent insurrection
underway in Wyoming.
And the word insurrection
is a powerful one
for Americans in the 19th century,
because all of these people had lived
through the American civil war,
and they feared more than
anything a loss of authority
of the United States
government, and the possibility
for a meaningful insurrection.
Realizing the stakes,
president Harrison wastes no time.
Benjamin Harrison sends
a telegram to fort mckinney,
which is in Johnson county,
and the us military rides to
the rescue of the invaders.
President Benjamin
Harrison's from one of
the oldest aristocratic
Virginia plantation families.
His great-great-grandfather
was one of the founding fathers.
His grandfather, William Henry Harrison,
who was also briefly a president,
and so we see this aristocrat
helping out the cattle barons.
This is a pretty tight-knit group,
and the cattle barons
have a lot of influence.
At the ta ranch, literally
the cavalry arrives,
a visible form of the
United States' authority.
Canton surrenders to the us cavalry.
He's lost two of his men,
both killed by tripping
over their own guns.
Canton and 45 others are
escorted back to Cheyenne
where they're put in jail
to await trial for murder.
Homesteaders believe that
the United States government
is gonna bring those men to justice,
and that they're gonna get justice
for people like Nate champion,
and they believe that
they can create a world
in which they have a say in it.
They find the hit list of
the 70 names of people
who were to be assassinated.
That's a pretty good piece of evidence.
We might imagine that's a smoking gun,
but we also have to
remember the perspective
of the cattle barons.
It's not a smoking gun if those
people are, in fact, thieves.
They believed they were
doing the right thing for them.
The miscarriage of
justice was the attempt
to convict these people,
to hold them to account
for rightfully ridding Johnson
county of cattle thieves.
The cattle barons hire
expensive attorneys
to defend the invaders,
but they don't stop there.
In the weeks that follow,
witnesses disappear,
trial dates are pushed back,
until eventually, the
county runs out of money.
They remain in custody for
approximately four months.
At the end of that time period,
they are given back their weapons,
and released on their own recognizance.
They're all acquitted.
Nobody has to pay any
price for this violence.
They go to a big party that's thrown
for them at the Cheyenne club,
and they're feted with champagne,
and given commemorative
rings, treated as heroes.
In the end, all the men
who participate in the invasion
are paid for what they did.
They're paid for their time in jail,
and for their involvement in the killings.
And are even given a bonus
for getting Nate champion.
The hired gunman get back on the train,
go back to Texas, and
they get away with it.
And it's immediately clear
that justice is never going to be done,
that this is official
military coverup extending
to the highest reaches of
the American government,
to the president of the
United States himself,
protecting capitalists
who are illegally trying
to protect their way of life
against legitimate homesteaders.
We call it the Johnson county war.
It's a civil war,
and it's one of the greatest miscarriages
of justice in American history.
Most of the newspaper coverage
of this Johnson county
war is heavily in favor
of the cattle barons, and
depicts the homesteaders
as, you know, crazy,
violent, you know, bandidos
that need to be suppressed
in the interest of law and order.
The wealthy and influential
had power in Johnson county,
and were able to control the narrative
to justify their actions.
Johnson county war is just
one example of many where,
in various parts of the west,
at various times, the little guys show up,
and they begin to make
a life for themselves,
but the rich and
powerful, with their capital
and access to government,
gain a tremendous advantage
and the little guys end up losing.
While the cattle barons escape justice
for their invasion of Johnson county,
they can't stem the tide of new settlers
carving up the open range.
This is kind of the death knell
of the cattle baron vision.
There are too many people
coming in and starting farming,
too many people coming in
and starting smaller ranches,
both in Johnson county
and across the plains.
There's not gonna be enough free land
to scatter your cattle far and wide,
so ranching becomes smaller scale.
It also becomes less profitable.
The Wyoming stock growers
association has somewhat
of a change of heart, and they decide
to admit these small cattle operators
into their association.
The era of the open range ends,
and smaller family ranches
become more common.
It's this moment where
suddenly there's a sense of,
"wow, maybe the
resources have run out,
and now we're fighting
over them among ourselves."
For some people who
are still making a go
of it in the west, in places
like Wyoming, this is the time
to seize the last little
bit of opportunity left
that is presented by the west.
Near the end of the 19th century,
the us government makes
a surprising announcement
that signals the end of an era.
In 1890, the census
department tells Americans
that the frontier is effectively closed.
The frontier at that point is defined
by two people per square mile of land,
and so the us has reached a population
that's beyond that.
The frontier as a category
has now been removed
from the census forms,
because it's no longer useful.
The closing of the frontier
has an important impact
on the American psyche,
because the American
people have conquered the west
with spectacular success.
Who will we be,
now that our manifest
destiny has been settled,
now that we've achieved
this ultimate goal?
There's no longer the sense
of continuous abundance,
continuous opportunity,
and so it's a defining moment
in the history of america.
As it enters the 20th century,
america has expanded to 44 states,
and its size has
quadrupled since the end
of the revolutionary war,
but native nations have been pushed
into ever smaller territories.
The most astonishing fact
of the 19th century in
america is the rapidity
with which white people
took the entire continent.
Jefferson actually believed
it might take 800 or 900 years
for us to reach the Mississippi
river, or the Missouri.
In one century, this juggernaut
just overwhelmed everything.
In that process, a complex
and enduring myth is born.
We, as a country,
grew up very, very fast.
Our distinct American
character was a result
of this march westward.
When people went west,
they could start over again.
The self-reliance, the perseverance,
and the determination it took
to succeed in the west
became part of our conception
of what it means to be an American.
I think an important thing to understand
about why Americans
are so fascinated by stories
about the west is that
fascination starts at the time.
It starts in the 1890s.
Americans are trying to
tell a collective story about
who they are as a country,
stories of cattle ranching, of settlement,
of railroads, of homesteads.
That gave all Americans
something they felt
like they could have a stake in.
In many ways, the idea of
the west is really the birth
of the American dream,
pursuing opportunity, seeking a new life,
but part of that is that
there are consequences.
And there are many
other people that have
to pay the price of ambition.
In the end, the legacy of the creation
of the American west, and
the story of western expansion
is a legacy of destruction, of
a conquest, of dispossession,
but also, there's so much to inspire us.
The story of the west is heroic.
There are the peacemaker heroes.
There are the natives of the resistance.
And even though we have
a kind of more somber view
of the heroics today,
because we know the cost,
it was an age of heroes.
Our country is a beautiful, magnificent,
abundant place to live,
and we're still here to tell the story.
Eventually, the open space that
so many battled over is
fenced off piece by piece,
contained by barbed wire,
and joined to the east
by a railways and roads.
The frontier, so much a
part of the American dream,
is finally closed.
But when we look back,
we can see the story
of the west is much
more than just a story
of American settlement.
There's a legacy of conquest, of course,
a fact that we should
never fail to include,
but we have to also recognize
the resourcefulness it took
for our ancestors to cross this country.
It's that legacy of courage and hope
that defines america today.