Kevin Costner's The West

From the first days that it became a nation,

the United States has looked to expand its borders.

In the early 1800s, American settlers move west

into territories gained from the Louisiana purchase,

creating the states of Louisiana,

Missouri, and Arkansas,

while forcing native nations off their homelands.

But when they push into Texas in the early 1830s,

they must confront a native power

that's dominated the southern plains

for the last hundred years.

A nine-year-old girl, Cynthia Ann Parker

will find her herself at the center of a battle

to control the heart of the continent,

fought between three bitter rivals,

the us, Mexico, and the comanche.

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 had residents for more than 10,000 years.

But 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.

Three decades after independence,

the United States has almost doubled

in both size and population.

The original 13 states now number 17

and are home to five million Americans

and 600,000 indigenous people.

Most of the land the United States

doesn't occupy in North America,

is claimed by great britain or Spain.

But on the southern great plains,

the 300-year-old Spanish empire is struggling

against an unexpected threat to its power.

Long before the Europeans arrived in North America,

there have been Indians living on the plains.

And among those peoples were the comanches.

If you were to take a snapshot of them in let's say,

the year 1600 or 1500,

they would've been a small tribe.

You would've described them as nomadic hunter-gatherers.

Then sometime around 1625,

something happened to turn this very sort of minor

and somewhat insignificant player on the plains

into the single most powerful force on the plains.

That was the arrival of the horse.

With the Spanish, the horse arrives

in the late 16th century,

and the tribe that knows what to do with it

more than anybody else is the comanches.

The horse is what enabled for comanches to be able to go

and to build up this thing

that now historians are calling an empire.

With the help of the horse,

the comanche become master buffalo hunters.

Buffalo became even more essential

to the comanche culture and way of living

than it had been before

because they're not growing crops,

they're living off the buffalo.

Experts estimate that there was

as many as 30 million buffalo, huge herds.

You could stand still

and it would take hours for them to pass.

The buffalo were everything,

for sustenance, for shelter, the teepees,

the hides, clothing.

The buffalo is a life source.

Chasing down buffalo from horseback,

the comanche learned to fire arrows

with deadly accuracy at a full gallop,

a skill they bring to warfare

as they shield themselves behind the neck of the horse.

Their abilities to fight from horseback

were things that people had never seen before.

They had been called

the most effective and formidable light cavalry

in the history of human warfare.

And they became the scourge of the plains.

They're blowing tribes off of the southern plains

left and right.

They drove navajos and apaches nearly to extinction.

The comanche fiercely protect

their hunting grounds from all potential threats,

above all, the Spanish.

They would raid settlements and steal horses,

and raiding became a way of life.

The comanches,

they're the most successful expansionist power

on the great plains.

They're the ones

who are the most successful empire builders.

By the mid 1750s,

the comanche have halted Spanish expansion in its tracks.

With a population of 40,000,

their empire dominates an area larger than France,

some 250,000 square miles known as comancheria.

This comanche empire doesn't look like European empires.

It doesn't have a central authority.

They were broken down into bands,

but it has its own policies,

its own economic strategies, its own foreign policy,

as they work together to dominate this area.

And if you were in comancheria,

you were liable to be raided upon

and perhaps killed by the comanches almost at any moment.

As its north American empire

is under assault from comanche raids,

Spanish power in north america is in decline.

In 1821, after an 11-year rebellion,

Mexico wins independence

along with all of Spain's north American lands.

That includes the province of tejas, or Texas,

about 3/4 of which is now in comancheria.

To safeguard Texas against comanche raiding,

the new Mexican rulers look to create a human shield,

with American settlers.

In the 1820s, the Americans have been invited in.

And so Americans are moving to a foreign country

because they're gonna get free land, thousands of acres.

It's this incredibly fertile land,

and they come in by droves,

and they create a buffer against the comanches.

These Americans,

they've dealt with cherokees and chick a saw Indians,

so they think they know what Indians are.

No big deal.

And so there's a land rush,

as there will later be gold rushes in the American west.

Over the next 15 years,

more than 30,000 settlers moved to Texas

looking for opportunity and fertile land.

Among them, the Parker family.

The Parkers came to Texas

because they weren't particularly well off

and so they couldn't buy land

where land had gotten expensive.

They start in Virginia and they migrate to Illinois,

and they end up in Texas in 1833.

Land is wealth and Mexico gave the Parker men

a 16,000-acre parcel of nice rolling Savanna

that's just beyond your wildest dreams.

And they build fort Parker like a military compound

on the very edge of comanche country.

Arriving with 38 members of the extended Parker family

is nine-year-old Cynthia Ann.

Cynthia Ann's got three brothers and sisters

and her parents are god-fearing baptists.

They believe god has already willed what is going to happen

and they make their life.

To the Indians, as long as Americans are passing through,

they are useful trading partners.

But once Americans start to settle in places,

that's usually when conflict ensues.

The Parkers live out on the frontier,

so they're taking the risk.

Maybe you'll survive, maybe you won't.

While the comanche are a threat to American settlers,

it's the Americans who are now a threat to Mexico.

Mexico's outlawed slavery in 1829,

but many of the settlers who were attracted to Mexico come

for the raising of cotton

and other slavery-dependent commodities,

and they bring their slaves with them.

This is gonna create a conflict between Mexico

and its invited guests from the United States.

And by 1836, Americans in Texas revolt

in the name of independence from Mexico.

After a bloody six-month war,

including the loss of some 200 Americans at the alamo,

texan forces led by Sam Houston

defeat Mexican troops at San jacinto.

Houston's rallying cry,

"remember the alamo," enflames his troops

earning victory in just 18 minutes.

Texas declares independence from Mexico on march 2nd, 1836,

and looks to join the United States.

Texas wants to come into the union,

but the United States says, no, you can't come in,