The Civil War is over.
Survivors head out across the frontier.
A vast wilderness separates East and West.
Veterans become railway men
Cowboys...
Settlers.
Conquering nature, they'll unite the continent.
Their mission: to tame the "Wild West".
We are pioneers and trailblazers.
We fight for freedom.
We transform our dreams into the truth,
Our struggles will become a nation.
America: The Story of Us (アメリカ：真実の物語) Episode 6: Heartland (第6話：鉄道開拓)
Subtitle by a Japanese 「脳卒中と付き合う生活」 というタイトルのブログに 当字幕作成方を記述
1865.
The Great Plains.
Where 30 million buffalo roam.
Vast, untouched, a wilderness dividing America.
Crossing the Continent takes 6 months.
20,000 die on wagon trains.
By ship, it's an 18,000 mile journey around South America
To conquer the wilderness and unite East and West
President Lincoln green-lights a transcontinental railroad...
2,000 miles long
It will transform the nation
Triggering a tidal wave of settlement across the Great Plains.
Railroads were vital to the expansion of America
This technology connects people in a way
That never before in the history of mankind
Has there been that kind of connection.
America's ancient wilderness
Meets modern American steel and muscle.
An army of hammer-welding men
Irish immigrants.
Civil War vets.
Railway men.
Their mission: to tame the nature itself.
The biggest optical heading east from California
A 12000-foot wall of granite
The Sierra Nevada.
With the Pacific of North America Plates alive
Billions of tons of ancient rock rise up
crumpling(しわくちゃになる) like tinfoil.
Over the last 4 million years
The Sierra Nevada mountains clime more than 2 miles high
They're still growing.
13 feet in 1000 years.
One day they could rival the Himalayas.
Only a mad man could dream of running a rail road across mountain like this
They don't call him "Crazy Judah for nothing"
Obsessed with(〜で頭がいっぱいである) the railroad, he sees a way through.
Come on down, boys.
Theodore Judah makes 23 trips into the peaks.
And peg(くぎを打つ) that, boys.
plotting a path across ridges(尾根) and through mountain summits.
Building it will be the Engineering challenge of the century
Yup(yes のくだけた言い方), let's mark that
"This is the most magnificent project ever conceived(思い付く), "
"An enterprise(事業) more important to the people"
"Of the United States than any other"
"The Rail road will be built, and I will have something to do with it."
Americans love someone who can go through
Seemingly difficult or impossible things and make their dreams happen
With Judah's route approved, 2 companies begin work
The Union Pacific starts from Omaha in the East.
The Central Pacific from Sacramento in the West.
They'll meet in Utah.
It'll cost over 2 billion dollars in modern money,
But the government doesn't have enough cash
It pays the companies in federal land.
They must finish in 15 years or lose everything
We have learned in this country
You don't get anywhere in life if you don't take risks
I think America is by far the shining light of the world in so many ways
Because we are risk takers
Paid by the mile, adding curve adds profit
Corrupt investors built the railroad for every cent they can
A 9 miles curve means an extra 120 acres of federal land
And they'll end up owning an area the size of Texas
first they must conquer the Donner Pass(ドナー峠).
7,500 feet up, the highest Judah's route
Cursed by 30 feet of snow each winter.
Avalanches, tragedy...
Here just 20 years earlier
The Donner Party became trapped in the snow
And ate each other.
Now Judith's railroad cuts right through the mountain,
1,649 feet of rock must be excavated
The longest tunnel on the route
Chinese laborers dig day and night
It's easier to ship workers from China
Than to get Americans across the continent
The railroad magnate said
"The Chinese built a great wall, didn't they?"
"Let's bring the Chinese in to do this work."
Over 10,000 Chinese laborers
Earn less and do the deadliest jobs
The transcontinental railroad was built by Chinese workers
Brought over specifically to work on the railroad
And they were considered somewhere in between human and animal.
They were not expected to survive
They expected to come here and work and die.
7,000 miles from home, 17-year-old Hung Leiwo,
Swaps a life in poverty in Canton
For a back-breaking work on the railroad gang
Hung Leiwo must cut through granite so tough
A rock the size of a big toe
Will support 50 tons of locomotive.
Progress slows to inches a day
To breakthrough, they need nitroglycerin.
But transporting it is banned
When 15 men are blown to pieces
In a mobile lab
Scottish chemist James Houghton mixes it on the spot
Nitroglycerin is 13 times more powerful than gun powder
So unstable, any physical shock and it will explode in his hand.
Houghton gets hazard pay(危険手当).
4,000 dollars a month in modern money
After 3 months in the mountains he turns to drink
Leaving the nitro to Chinese men like Hung Leiwo.
Irish crews won't touch it
Detonation(爆発) creates temperatures of 9,000 degrees
It's hot as the surface of the Sun
An estimated 1,500 Chinese die in explosions and rock slide
Hung Leiwo survives.
His son will be the first Chinese-American
To graduate an Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.
Once through the mountains
Track laying accelerates from 10 inches to 6 miles a day
Each spike is struck 3 times.
10 spikes to a rail
400 rails a mile
21 million hammer swings complete the railroad
May 10th, 1869.
A one word message arrives by telegraph: "Done."
A 6 month journey across the continent is cut to 6 days
The folks would once had to risk everything in a wagon train...
That is eliminated.
You can now can get on the railroad and travel from Boston to Sacramento.
That's a revolution
The Internet of the era,
The transcontinental railroad changes everything it touches
Triggering a mass migration to the Great Plains.
The Great Plains
Conquered by steel and steam.
The Transcontinental Railroad
Thread a thin line of civilization through the wilderness
People follow.
In just one year, 40,000 settlers move to Nebraska,
Fanning out across the frontier in wagon trains
When in the mid-19th century to the late 19th century
They went out and settled some hostile territory known to mankind
The Great Plains where I grew up
These were true pioneers
The government accelerated the process
With the greatest land giveaway in history
Anyone with a 10 dollar filing fee claim free land
A quarter are single women and ex-slaves.
When you see the desperate scramble in these rickety(壊れそうな) wagon trains
You realize that promise of America was land.
These are people who never in a million years
Would be an able own land in New York.
Eventually, 10% of the United States
will be given away under the "Homestead Act"(自営農地法).
"I'm not going back to Indiana to rent"
"Until I bust entirely and have to walk back."
Uriah Oblinger, Civil War vet,
Claims his 160 acres in Nebraska.
There's a catch.(うま過ぎる話の裏がある)
110 degrees summers spark prairie fires
Trees can't survive the drought on the plains
There's so little rain, nothing grows here but grass
Without lumber to build houses
the new inhabitants live in mud huts(泥壁の小屋)
built of sod(芝土), cut from the plains
Uriah dismantles his wagon to make doors and windows
They often had insects.
They invited snakes
It was pretty much like living in a burrow in the ground.
I think the pioneers did have it hard(ひどい目に遭う)
They conserved, they were frugal(質素な).
One dress lasted a long long time.
For Uriah's wife Mattie, it's a price worth paying.
"I expect you think we live miserable"
"Because we are in a sod house"
"But I'll tell you, in solid earnest, I never enjoyed myself better"
"Every liquid we strike is for ourselves and not half of someone else's"
The devout Oblingers face daily tests of their faith
With no mountains to stop the wind
The Great Plains are breeding ground for massive thunder storms
"The most objection I have to the weather here is the wind"
"There's a great deal of it during the winter and spring"
"And being nothing to brake it, one feels it more."
Not too far, honey.
The Oblingers live in "Tornado Alley"
More twisters in this region than anywhere else on Earth.
Honey! Honey!
Over 400 touch down every year
Enter at log house!
"Tell the folks they never seen a storm in Indiana, only playthings"
200 mile an hour winds spin into a vortex(旋風),
Sucking in air and anything not bolted down
In 1930 a man is carried a mile across the Kansas
Fish and toads rain from the sky
The Oblingers hunker down(しゃがみ込む) in their heavy sod(芝土) house
clinging to their new found independence(独立)
I think that we're a nation of people descended
from tough old coots(〈話・軽蔑的〉ばか、変わり者) and tough old broads(〈米俗・軽蔑的〉（若い）女)
And I say that with great admiration
They just wanted to control their own future
And to have children who could control their own destiny
Tornados aren't the only biblical challenge the Oblingers face
By the river of Rockies, the end of the world, it's brewing(起ころうとしている).
A prehistoric species energies to battle for the Great Plains.
Locusts
After devouring the local vegetation
They released pheromones that signal it's time to move on.
They grow long wings.
These worms head east on the wind
They join up over on the Great Plains and become a plague(疫病、災難).
In 1874, they devour(むさぼり食う) half of the crops in the West
3 trillion(兆) locusts.
Half a mile-high,
100 miles wide, 1000 miles long
As big as Colorado, they block out the Sun
Agricultural Armageddon
to men like Uriah, the locust are the wrath(天罰) of God.
By 1892, half the population of western Nebraska goes east.
Uriah stays.
You have to be brave in order to achieve in this country
Because nothing is set right there for you.
You have to take chances.
And I think bravery and fear are the same thing,
It's just a matter of how you react to that same feeling
Those who stick it out(最後までやる) get lucky
within 30 years, the locusts is extinct(死に絶えた)
Its breeding grounds in the Rockies plowed over by settlers like Uriah.
In 10 years, the Great Plains become the bread basket of the country
For the first time, America feed itself
Today 50 million tons of wheat is farmed each year
But the trees are still scarce, and to build towns settlers need wood
In Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota,
Loggers harvest over 50 million acres of trees
Green Gold.
A magnet for Scandinavian woodsmen.
Between 1825 and 1925
A third of Norway's entire population comes to America
Including Nils Haugen.
"The pay was 3 dollars a day"
"You have to have a good pair of driving boots"
"Well caulked(コーキングする) to be able to keep on top of the logs."
There's millions of dollars at stake
If the flow of logs stops, towns can't be built
Log jam.
River men's ruin
In 1886, pines to build 20,000 Homes get stopped on the St. Croix. River
150 million feet of wood.
Remove the right log, and the rest will explode downstream
Rivermen die clearing obstructions like this
Throw
In 1892, 2 billion feet of lumber will be cut in Wisconsin alone
The railroad feeds lumber into the West's construction boom
Towns are built so fast, there's no time to name streets
They're given letters and numbers
The Great Plains is also home to the most numerous species
Of large wild mammal on Earth.
30 million buffalo
Herds up to 25 miles long, race to summer breeding grounds
On a collision course with the modern world.
The railway brings a new kind of hunter to the Great Plains,
Driven by profit
Fresh from the carnage of the Civil War.
2 million rifles are in circulation
Over a million veterans trained to use them
Have a new target in their sights
Frank Mayer.
Civil War Vet.
Buffalo hunter
"I had nothing to look forward to in civilization."
"I was crazy about guns."
Mayer tracks 2,000 pound buffalo
easily capable of crushing(押しつぶす) a man
He picks them off(狙い撃ちする) from 200 yards.
"If you could kill them, what they brought was yours."
"They were walking gold pieces."
Hunters harvest the buffalo for its hide(皮革).
In 1872, they ship over one million out of Kansas alone
Worth 3 dollars apiece back East.
On a good day, Mayer earns more than the President
Factories use long strong strips of buffalo leather as drag belts
Small pieces become coats and shoes
To meet demand,
Hunters kill 8,000 buffalo a day for their hides(皮革) alone
For Americans this is progress, because this is a natural resource.
From the Indian's perspective
They couldn't understand what the white people were doing
But, of course, they knew that the decimation of those buffalo herds
Would change their lives forever.
The Plain Indians depend on buffalo and worship them.
"The buffalo were our strength from whence(どこから) we came"
"And whose breast we suck as babies all our lives"
Black Elk is 6 years old when the railroad arrives
Unlike the white hunters
His people waste none of their kill
Sinews(筋肉、腱) become bow strings
Bones are cups and spoons
Skin is clothing, tepees(テント) and coffins(棺)
Native Americans and buffalos have co-existed since the last ice-age
Black Elk's ancestors hunted them on foot
There were no horses to ride
The modern horse isn't native to North America
Spanish conquistadors brought them from Europe in 1493.
Some escaped to the Great Plains.
Perfect horse habitat(生息環境).
400 years later, over a million Mustangs run wild
Taming horses transformed the life of the Plains Indian.
They become expert horsemen
The battle cry went up
Hokahey! Which means "To charge" and the hunters went in for the kill
On horseback, the bow is the weapon of choice
And the time it takes to reload a gun
A warrior can ride 300 yards,
And fire 20 arrows.
Buffalo can run at 35 miles an hour
Hunts cover hundreds of miles over many days
It can take 15 arrows to kill a buffalo
White hunters like Frank Mayer use a single cartridge.
He aims for the lungs
A clean killed drop a buffalo without disturbing the herd.
30 million are killed in a little over a decade
After hunters take the hides
train loads of men arrived to pick their carcasses〔動物の死体〕.
They make buttons from bones
And grind down skeletons for fertilizer and porcelain(陶材)
The primary resource keeping Native Americans alive
Is gone
Facing starvation, they're forced on to reservations
My great-great-grandmother, Grandma Big Eagle was alive.
When buffalo hunting ended. They weren't just
Saying good-bye to kind of food stuff
They were saying good-bye to a way of being in the world
And I think for them to look back on that
Was just unspeakably sad
In 1889, just 85 wild buffalos
Exist in the whole United States
The men who ride the great iron horse are taming the wilderness
The railroad will bring another modern American icon to the Great Plains.
The last of the great frontier's man
The cowboy
1865.
The Civil War leaves cities on the Eastern seaboard(沿岸地域) stripped of resources
The country's booming population needs food
In Texas, over 6 million cattle roam wild
Worth 4 dollars a head here, but back East they're worth 40.
By 1868, the railroad spreads from the East
Crossing Kansas, but it hasn't reached Texas.
There's still 1,000 miles of Wild West between the herds and the railroad
For that kind of cattle drive, America needs a new kind of hero
The cowboy.
After the Civil War,
60% of the South's population lives in rural poverty
In search of work, a new kind of adventurer heads west
To cattle towns like Abilene, Wichita and Dodge City.
one farmhand(農場労働者) heading to Texas.
Is Teddy Blue Abbott
23-year-old Teddy Blue is the son of a Nebraska homesteader,
"My father wanted to tie me down and make a farmer out of me."
"Never"
"I run away from home to become a cowboy."
The cowboy mentality is a spirit of individuals
I have a communion(〔思想や感情の〕共有) with land, with my horse
It symbolizes resistance to the authority.
Teddy Blue is one of 35,000 cowboys
Who will drive cattle to the railroad in Kansas.
Standing in their way, 1000 miles of untamed West
Unforgiving(容赦のない) terrain(地域)
And gangs of rustlers(牛泥棒).
For only a dollar a day, cowboys must be skilled horsemen and cattle wranglers(家畜の世話をする人)
The lasso(投げ縄) dates back to the ancient Egyptians.
Mexican ranchers(牧場の労働者) have been using them for centuries
And pass their skills on to cowboys north of the border
Cattle brought over by the Spanish in 1493
Had bred(飼育された) with settlers' cows from English
Breeding a new breed, the "Texas Longhorn".
after centuries roaming the plains, they're wild and easily spooked(驚く)
Teddy Blue hears what every cowboy dreads(恐れる)
Stampede(家畜が集団で驚いて逃げ出すこと).
Over 4 cattle drives, Teddy Blue buries 3 pals(仲間).
A tough job for tough man
1 out of 3 cowboys is Hispanic or African-American
After the Civil War, thousands of freed slaves head to Texas looking for work
One is a 23-year-old, from Alabama
Matt Love.
It's his first chance to be judged for his skills,
Not just the color of his skin
"The guys on the team were broad-minded as plains"
"It's every creed for himself"
"And every friend for each other till the end."
"Many of the cowboys, to the surprise of most of us,"
"Happend to be African Americans."
Black people had dream of conquering
The imagination just like white people do
The West: vast, wild, lawless.
With herds worth up to 200,000 dollars
Cowboys guard the cattle with their lives
And their guns.
Guns are a way of life in Texas.
Then and now.
Even today, Texans own over 51 million firearms
"It's very intrinsic to the American culture and the American identity"
"We always had a pistol or a rifle."
"And I think it's part of "Don't try to tell me what to do".
"I'll fight off my enemies on my own."
The cowboy's gun of choice,
The Colt 45
The fastest handgun in the West.
6 shots without reloading.
Colt produces over 30 million guns
The most popular being the iconic 45.
In 1873, a Colt 45 cost 17 dollars,
Half a cowboy's monthly salary
6 rounds(一斉射撃) of bullets, half a day's pay
Frontier men would say, Abraham Lincoln may have freed all men,
But Sam Colt made them equal.
Cowboys drive 5 million cattle
From Texas to the railroad in Kansas
The largest migration of livestock in US history.
But one simple invention will soon threaten the cowboy's entire way of life
Barbed wire(有刺鉄線).
In just 20 years,
2.5 million new settlers flood into the West.
New farms cover half a billion acres of open range.
A new battle rages: cattle rancher verses homesteader
Cowboys like Teddy Blue
And farmers are on a collision course
"They'd plant the crop next to the trail"
"When the cattle got into their wheat"
"They'd come out waving a shotgun yelling for damages"
Boundary disputes are violent
Often deadly.
One farmer is determined to find a cheap and effective way
To keep livestock off his land.
Joseph Glidden.
When we think about innovation in America
We often think about a big audacious projects like the Apollo project,
But there's another strain(傾向) to American innovation
That's the local inventor.
And individual genius with some passion in the middle of the night
Coming up with that big transformative idea
In the fall of 1873, Glidden has a breakthrough
Using a coffee grinders he crudely fashion some steel barbs.
His problem: how to secure them
Glidden's solution: bind the barbs between two links of wire
His design cut the price of fences by 70%.
Within 10 years, Glidden sells enough to go around the world 25 times,
Carving the plains into countless ranches and farms
And blocking the cattle trails
The open range is closed forever
This single invention made possible the settling of the West much sooner and more efficiently
Than it would have occurred otherwise.
Teddy Blue rides one of the last cattle drives to the railroad
the heyday(全盛期) of the cowboy on the open range lasts only 20 years
But settling the Great Plains
Will mark the end of one way of life...
And the birth of another.
1876.
A century of government policies target Native Americans
371 treaties keep them separate, isolated, remote
Most of America's 300,000 tribe's people
Now live on Government assigned lands, Reservations.
But resistance is still fierce.
I think probably the darkest spot in our history, for me at least
Is what happened to Native Americans.
We came here and confiscated(没収する) their homeland.
I think we have a real sense now of what our part was in that,
One that I would love to see redefined and rewritten.
Across the Great Plains, the federal government acquires
Millions of acres of the Native Americans' traditional hunting grounds
To make way for the iron horse
The Sioux are forced deep into the Black Hills.
As a young boy, Black Elk witnesses the coming of the railroad
And the destruction of the buffalo herds
Now age 12, he's about to be part of the Sioux nation's last triumph
"White men come in like a river"
"They told us that they wanted only a little land."
"But our people knew better"
Gold is discovered in the Black Hills(ブラック・ヒル：スー族の聖地だったが白人勢力が奪い、白人がリンカーンなどの大統領彫像を彫つた。)
100,000 prospectors rush in to seek their fortunes
The federal government wants to clear the area.
On a reconnaissance(偵察) mission with the 7th cavalry（騎兵隊）
Lieutenant Colonel George Custer stumbles across the Sioux camp
Near the Little Bighorn River.
Custer makes a fateful decision
With 700 soldiers Custer charges the Camp
With 7,000 Native Americans
Within 3 hours all the men in Custer's regiment are dead.
The Sioux win the battle...
But will lose the war.
In response, US soldiers force 3,000 Sioux warriors on to reservations
The rest scatter in small bands.
Over the next 14 years, the Plains Indians struggle to survive,
Until the incident that finally defeats the Great Sioux Nation.
Wounded Knee(ウンデッドニー事件) is a great, great scar on the American landscape
December 29, 1890.
The last band of independent Sioux surrender beside Wounded Knee Creek.
As the cavalry disarms them, a gun goes off accidentally
It triggers a massacre.
Within minutes, over 200 Sioux warriors, women, and children
Are dead.
Now 27, Black Elk survived.
"When I look back now, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered"
"As plain as when I saw them when I was still young"
"And I see that something else died there"
"A people's dream died there"
"It was a beautiful dream."
The railroad has transformed North America
In just 30 years, 30,000 miles of track across the continent
More than the rest of the world put together
Thousands of new towns spring up around railroad stations
One every 8 miles
5 rail lines link the East and West Coast
The railroad even changes time itself
Until now, Americans set their clocks by the Sun
8000 different times along 500 rail lines
Scheduling trains becomes impossible
On November 18th, 1883,
The continental US is reduced to just 4 time zones
Standard time is born
The railroad is now the largest employer in America
Nearly a million workers
One is a 23-year-old station agent from rural Minnesota
Richard Sears.
With the US adjusting to new railroad times,
Sears turns entrepreneur, and buys a batch of pocket watches
He offers them to other station agents, and waits.
Bingo!
And order comes through, followed by another, and then another.
Within 6 months,
Sears sells all his watches, 2,500.
Earning 10 times his railroad salary
Realizing he can use the railroad for sales and distribution
Sears jumps on the opportunity with an idea that will transform the nation:
The mail-order catalog
I think Americans are naturally entrepreneurial
If you worked hard, and if you had good ideas
And you were willing to make short term sacrifices
You could succeed in this country
10 years after selling his first watch
Sears publishes a 700 page catalog
Now based in Chicago, he processes over 35,000 orders a day
Delivering refrigerators, pianos,
One year, over 100,000 sewing machines
Using the railroad, Sears can sell virtually anything,
Anywhere in the country
What really transformed this country wasn't just the westward migration
And development of cities in the East,
But the ability to move products across great distances,
Linking together what it had previously been very desperate little settlement
That had to be largely self-sufficient
By the end of the 19th century, America has 200,000 miles of railroad track
Linking the local markets and creating a national economy
Over the next 40 years, the amount of freight carried by rail
Shoots from 55 to nearly 700 million tons.
Resources from the Midwest feed the country's growing industries in the East.
The United States overtakes Britain as the largest manufacturer on earth.
Soon producing 30% of the world's goods
The railroads laid the basis
For the creation of the single largest market in world economy
And this made it possible for the United States
To become the global economic power that it did by the end of the 19th century
In 20 years, the US population doubles to 80 million.
The number of cities triples.
7 million Americans leave the country for the nation's booming urban centers
Where buffalo once roamed
Now rises the modern world.