Kevin Costner's The West

- What do we see when we think of the West?

A gunfight between some small town sheriff

and a gang of outlaws?

Maybe a cowboy playing his banjo under the stars,

or a wild herd of buffalo

hunted by a party of Comanche or Lakota.

For me, it's an image,

from a movie I saw at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood

when I was just seven years old.

A birch bark canoe skimming across a mirrored lake

guided by a man who knows he's free,

living by his wits, answering to no one.

Whatever we see,

the West has a power like nowhere else

to fire the imagination and stir the soul.

But if we choose to look a little closer,

we can see beyond these images

to another kind of story,

of people who come to make a home

no matter who's already there,

of a nation that claims an entire continent

no matter what the cost,

and of a land that shows us bounty,

yet all too often gives us blood.

These stories will captivate us,

inspire us, and shock us.

And that's why we have to tell them.

Because though the United States was founded in the East,

the country we know today was forged in the West.

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.

- 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.

- The final shots of the Revolutionary War

mark a new era for Britain's former colonies.

The United States wins not only independence,

but a vast tract of new land,

a place they call the West.

- The United States, of course, when it is founded,

is on the East Coast

and really no farther than the Appalachian Mountains.

And then in the Treaty of Paris

that settles the Revolutionary War in 1783,

the British cede all their holdings

from the East Coast all the way to the Mississippi River.

The Americans are euphoric because

they've not only defeated the British,

but the British have ceded

this enormous sweep of land in the bargain.

Most of that land

is not the United States, in reality.

It was already occupied by scores of Indian nations

and by millions of Indian people.

- The suggestion that this was somehow a wilderness

or an uninhabited virgin land is one of the most enduring

and troubling fallacies in American history.

- There were already relatively stable trade relationships

between the various Indigenous Nations with the British,

but settlers didn't just want to trade and leave.

They wanted to stay.

- To live on a piece of land that's been a dream of people

all over the world forever,

these Anglo-Americans who've been hemmed in

on the Atlantic side of the Appalachian,

suddenly the war has been won;

this immense territory is being granted

to the United States, and there's a deep desire

to go out into this fertile land.

- But where so many settlers see opportunity,

some of the founding fathers see risk.

Benjamin Franklin calculated

that the American population was doubling

roughly once per generation.

If this is the case, and if most of 'em are farmers,

you gotta double the size of the United States,

about every generation.

It was the question for Washington,

"Where are we gonna expand into?"

- Washington has two major concerns

with regard to this new land.

The first is about security,

the British were still on the border.

But the greater risk is the enthusiasm

of the American settlers themselves.

They see this as free land, they don't want to pay for it.

- There's no playbook for George Washington.

No one had done this before.

He knows that he is setting a precedent for the future,

and that's an enormous pressure on him.

I mean, the country's population is expanding continually,

and the West is so important.

What he fears is that settlers

are just going to put down their claims

wherever they want,

and in a willy-nilly anarchic fashion,

trampling on the interests of Native Peoples

who are out there, and creating conflict

with those Native Peoples.

By the mid 1780s,

armed settlers have already blazed a trail west

from Virginia into Kentucky,

forcing the Shawnee and the Delaware off their homeland.

Before they can push any further,

Congress lays down new laws

to govern the land above the Ohio River,

and gives this region a name: The Northwest Territory.

- The year that the Constitution was written, 1787,

the Northwest Ordinance is passed by the Congress

and the Northwest Ordinance has emphatically

that the Americans have a duty to show

the utmost good faith to the Indigenous People,

and not to take their lands without due compensation

and without actual negotiation.

And so, the idea is for the US

to buy lands from the Indians

and then sell it in very large chunks

to these, essentially,

aristocrats and land speculators.

And the theory is this is gonna work really easily.

George Washington is thinking,

once the Indian tribes see the superior ways

of white civilization and agriculture,

they'll immediately take it up.

And so they'll be happy to just sell those lands to us

and, you know, become white farmers essentially.

- Early American capitalists, politicians,

people of means, hope to petition the government,

get tens of thousands of acres

in order to sell it to small-time landholders,

understanding that they don't yet control that land.

- By contrast, many settlers have a mind of their own.

They want land and they want it now,

and they want it as cheaply as possible.

In fact, they want it for free.

- Despite all of Washington's plans,

some settlers see this new land as the spoils of war,

and they're not afraid to take it.

- Many of the people who come out here are squatters.

They're ahead of the law,

they're ahead of legal right,

but they're not to be blamed necessarily

because they're fulfilling their own dream of happiness,

but they go out and they find a a little clearing

or cut down the trees to build a farm.

- When people saw the American West as opportunity,

the Indians were nowhere in that picture,

except as something to overcome.

What we have to keep reminding ourselves

is this was their land.

- The Northwest Territory is already home

to at least 50,000 Native Americans

from more than a dozen tribes,

including the Delaware, the Shawnee,

the Wyandot, and the Miami.

- So, from the settlement of the French and Indian War,

all the way through the American Revolution

and into the 1780s,

this region is embroiled in an ongoing conflict.

Native Peoples across the Ohio River Valley

are increasingly incensed that the American settlers

are flooding into their homelands.

- For the Indigenous People, it's an ancestral claim.

For the settlers, it's free land,

the opportunity to strike out on one's own.

Both are willing to fight and to die for it.

As the late 1780s

bring an onslaught of settlers,

these Native Nations will not only make a stand.

Miami leader, Little Turtle, will lead them into war.

Once the skirmish starts,

it's going to build until somebody

suffers enough to stop.

- For centuries, the thousand-mile Ohio River