Kevin Costner's The West

From their first movement through the Appalachians,

Americans pushed westward driven by their desire

for opportunity and land.

At every turn, they must fight

with the original occupants,

causing generations of conflict with Native Nations.

When gold was found in Montana in 1862,

thousands of Americans charged overland

claimed by the Lakota Sioux.

As their leader Red Cloud,

and a young warrior named Crazy Horse counterattack,

the Lakota will face the US Army,

and achieve a victory that will astonish the nation.

People live on myths,

and the myths that really in the American experience

are the myths of the West.

The mountains were higher, the deserts were harsher,

the snows were deeper.

The American West evokes wonder,

possibility, opportunity.

The figure of the mountain man.

Notorious outlaws.

The cowboy.

The discovery of gold in California.

This train of wagons pulling across the prairie.

Everyone has a reason to love this land.

But most of that land was already occupied.

We've been residents for over 10,000 years.

But this is a clash of two different ways

of seeing life itself.

Fighting for the future of your country, on the one hand,

and fighting for the destiny of the new republic

on the other.

The history of the Western is a creation story.

It is 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 should we be as a nation?

The reckoning is approaching.

The West is this canvas on which

American dreams grow larger than life.

In the summer of 1862,

The United States is consumed by civil war.

The conflict plunges Washington into debt,

and with each bullet fired,

the federal government moves closer to a financial crisis.

Then, a potential solution emerges in an unexpected place.

In 1862, when gold was discovered in Montana,

it was great news for Lincoln and for the entire Union.

Lincoln later said that war is a terrible thing,

and this war is the most terrible of all,

and the skies were hung with black.

But it wasn't just the cost in lives,

it was the cost of maintaining the military.

California was already contributing

its gold to the Union,

but now Montana could contribute its gold as well.

It was a huge boost for the union,

when that boost was absolutely necessary.

One of the most important factors

in the entire history of the West is the discovery of gold.

Every time this happens,

white civilization briefly goes mad.

Thousands upon thousands

and thousands of people set out in search of gold.

At the time of the gold strike,

Montana was not yet a state.

For Americans, it was an unknown wilderness,

part of the vast and sparsely populated

The Great Plains have a forbidding image

in the minds of American settlers,

in the middle decades of the 19th century.

For American farmers, the Great Plains,

and this is seen on many maps of the time,

is still part of the great American desert.

And the Americans look at this great prairie,

which is the center of the North American continent,

and see, it's land that can be left to the Indians.

Forces transforming the West elsewhere,

have largely bypassed this part of the Northern Plains

and is now dominated by the Lakota Sioux,

who control more than 740,000 square kilometers of land,

an area almost the size of Mexico.

The Lakota are native to western Minnesota,

and they're not as strong, they're not as numerous.

But through the acquisition of the horse

at the beginning of the 18th century,

they moved to the Great Plains,

and were very successful

in harvesting bison.

Bison are the primary food source

for Plains Indians like the Lakota,

and they use every single one of them.

Bones as tools and weapons, skins for clothing and shelter.

But along the southern edge of Lakota territory,

where thousands of migrants follow the Oregon Trail westward,

the bison population is rapidly declining.

These wagon trains are cutting down trees,

they're muddying the water.

They are actually destroying bison migration areas,

and permanently altering the ecosystem for the worse.

In a treaty signed in 1851,

the Lakota and other Plains Nations,

agree to allow these migrants to pass freely.

In return, they will be granted permanent sovereignty,

over their lands by the United States.

At Fort Laramie,

the federal government begins a process of recognition

native control and authority throughout

vast portions of the northern plains,

and recognition of the boundaries of several Native nations.

But in 1863, frontiersman John Bozeman

began guiding miners along a new route.

Forking northwest from the Oregon Trail at Fort Laramie,

it shortens the trip to the new goldfields by six weeks,

and crosses the Lakota's most prized land.

The pristine Powder River Basin.

In the 1860s, this region

became the last best place for the Lakota.

Not only does it have massive herds of bison,

but it also has rivers,

and it was a place where the Lakota

came from all over to live.

The Bozeman Trail

transects some of the most valuable hunting grounds

the Lakota had,

and when you create a trail like this,

it's really going to bother the bison,

and he's going to make them go away.

And so, the conflict arose between Americans searching for gold,

and the Lakota, who had been told in 1851

by the U.S. government,

that this land was theirs forever,

and suddenly it's no longer forever.

The Lakota decide to stand up to them,

Among them is a war chief of the Ogallala band, Red Cloud.

Red Cloud says, we will fight

to protect this homeland.

Red Cloud is recognized

as one of the great leaders of the Lakota.

He is one of the great leaders in American history.

Red Cloud orphaned at a young age,

when his father died of alcoholism.

He was raised by his uncles,

and driven to be the best man he could be

for the Lakota.

He will rise to military success

through attacks on American settler trains,

in which he distinguishes himself

as a fighter at a very young age.

Over the next two years,

Red Cloud launches raids along the Bozeman Trail,

sparking widespread fear among travelers bound for Montana.

And with Union troops fighting in the Civil War,

he faces almost no opposition.

Infrastructural forms of federal government,

basically nonexistent,

in many places in the post-secession Western North America.

That's how limited the federal government is,

during the Civil War era.

But that begins to change

with the surrender of the South in 1865.

At this very moment,

The United States begins to turn its eyes toward the West,

and think about incorporating these wide spaces

in what is the United States.

And the defining struggle for that,

is that it belongs to the Native peoples who live there.

By 1866, some 2,000 miners had already made their way

along the Bozeman-Montana trail.

And despite the red cloud the raids, there are more on the way.

To protect them, General Ulysses S. Grant

assigns a Union war hero,

to lead the army west of the Mississippi.

William Tecumseh Sherman.

From the beginning, Sherman has few soldiers.

At the end of the war,

the last thing people want to do,

is support large armies, whether financially or otherwise.

They are also very focused

on rebuilding the South,

which also included the occupation of the South

by US Army forces.

And so, there was less political support

for maintaining a large army and sending it

to participate in the war in the West.

From a peak of over a million,

the U.S. Army has been reduced to about 38,000 men,

with the majority deployed to the South.

Even so, Sherman decides to build three forts,

at key points along the 500-mile Bozeman Trail.

He assigns the task to a Civil War officer

with engineering talent and no combat experience,

Colonel Henry Carrington.

He was very good at recruiting,

he was very good at administration.

What he never did during the Civil War was fire a gun.

American combat forces emerge from the Civil War

with a sense of superiority.

They're a modern army, they have mechanized weapons,