The American Civil War is over.
Its survivors head out across the frontier.
But eastern and western North America are separated by a vast wilderness.
Veterans become railway men
Cowboys...
Settlers.
Together they will conquer nature.
And tame the "Wild West".
In 1865.
30 million buffalo roam the Great Plains.
A vast, untouched wilderness dividing America.
Crossing the Continent takes 6 months.
20,000 die on wagon trains.
By ship, it's an 28,000 km journey around South America
To unite East and West
President Lincoln green-lights a transcontinental railroad...
Over 3,,000 km 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 steel and muscle.
An army of hammer-welding men
Irish immigrants.
Civil War vets.
Railway men.
The biggest optical heading east from California
The mountains of Sierra Nevada.
Where the Pacific of North America Plates collide.
Millions of tons of ancient rock rise up
Over the last 4 million years,
The mountains have risen more than 3 km high.
They're still growing.
Nearly 4 meters every 1000 years.
Only a mad man would dream of running a rail road across mountain like this
And"Crazy Judah" is what they called railway engineer.
Theodore Judah
His job is to plot a way through.
Come on down, boys.
Theodore Judah makes 23 trips into the peaks.
And peg that, boys.
plotting a path will be the engineering challenge of the century.
Yup, let's mark that
"This is the most magnificent project ever conceived, "
"An enterprise 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 funds.
So 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
The railway companies are paid by the mile
And unscrupulous they add curves just to increase their profits.
A 14 km curve means an extra 50 of federal land
first they must conquer the Donner Pass.
More than 2 km up, the highest point on Judah's route
It has 9 meters snow drips in winter.
And avalanches.
Who got trapped here by snow 20 years earlier.
The pass is named after Donner Party.
And resorted to cannibalism
Judith's route cuts through the mountain.
500 meters of rock must be excavated.
The longest tunnel on the route
Emigrants Chinese laborers dig day and night
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 most dangerous 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.
17-year-old Hung Leiwo,
Swaps a life in poverty in Canton
For work on the railroad gang
The granite of the Sierra Nevada is among the hardest on earth.
Progress slows to 15 centimeters a day
To breakthrough, they need nitroglycerin.
But it is so dangerous, transporting it is illegal.
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.
He soon tuns to drink
Leaving the nitro to Chinese men like Hung Leiwo.
Irish crews won't touch it
Detonation creates temperatures of 5,000 degrees celsius.
As hot as the surface of the Sun.
An estimated 15,00 Chinese workers die in explosions and rock slides.
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 25 cm. to nearly 10 km a day.
Each spike is struck 3 times.
10 spikes to a rail
250 km rails a km.
21 million hammer swings.
On May 10th, 1869.
A one word message arrives by telegram
"Done"
A 6 month journey 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 transcontinental railroad changes everything it touches
Triggering a mass migration to the Great Plains.
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 can claim free land
A quarter are single women and ex-slaves.
When you see the desperate scramble in these rickety 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".
"I'm not going back to Indiana to rent"
"Until I bust entirely and have to walk back."
Civil War veteran Uriah Oblinger
Claims 65 hectors in Nebraska.
But there is a catch.
Baking summer heat sparks prairie fires.
Trees can't survive the drought on the plains
There's so little rain, nothing grows here but grass
Without timber to build houses
the new inhabitants build mud huts from prairie turf called-Sod.
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
They conserved, they were frugal.
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 generate 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.
Over 400 every year.
"Tell the folks they never seen a storm in Indiana, only playthings"
380 km an hour winds spin into a vortex.
Sucking in air and anything not bolted down
In 1930 a man is carried a km and half across the Kansas.
Fish and toads rain from the sky.
The Oblingers take refuse in their heavy sod house
clinging to their new found independence.
I think that we're a nation of people descended
from tough old coots and tough old broads
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 ancient plague is brewing.
It emerges to battle for the Great Plains.
Locusts
After devouring the local vegetation
They released pheromones that signal it's time to move on.
And grow long wings.
Swarms then head east on the wind
They join up over on the Great Plains to become a plague.
In 1874, they devour half of the crops in the West
3 trillion locusts.
Nearly a kilometer high,
160 km wide, 16,00 km long
They block out the Sun
to men like Uriah, the locust are the wrath of God.
By 1892, half of the population of western Nebraska goes back 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
But those who stay are rewarded.
within 30 years, the locusts is extinct
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.
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 200,000 sq km of trees
Green Gold.
The region becomes 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 to be able to keep on top of the logs."
Keeping the logs flowing is a multi-million dollar business.
A log jams spells ruin.
In 1886, pines to build 20,000 homes get stuck on the St. Croix. River
45 million meters of wood.
Remove the right log, and the rest will explode downstream.
The wrong one can mean death.
Throw
In 1892, nearly a billion meters of lumber will be cut in Wisconsin alone.
It feeds the 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 30 million buffalo
Herds up to 40 km long, race to summer breeding grounds.
On a collision course with the modern world.
In 1870s the railroad brings a new kind of hunter to the Great Plains.
They are driven by profit,
And fresh from the carnage of the Civil War.
2 million rifles are in circulation.
A million veterans have a new target in their sights.
Veteran Frank Mayer.
Becomes a buffalo hunter.
"I had nothing to look forward to in civilization."
"I was crazy about guns."
Mayer hunts 900 kilo buffalo easily capable of crushing a man.
He picks them off from 180 meters.
"If you could kill them, what they brought was yours."
"They were walking gold pieces."
Hunters the buffalo for its hide.
In 1872, they ship over one million out of Kansas alone
Their worth 3 dollars each back East.
On a good day, Mayer earns more than the President.
Long strips of buffalo leather are used in factories as drive belts.
Other pieces become coats and shoes.
To meet demand,
Hunters kill 8,000 buffalo a day just for their hides.
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 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 become bow strings.
Bones are cups and spoons.
Skin is made into clothing, tepees and coffins
Native Americans and buffaloes have co-existed since the last ice-age.
Black Elk's ancestors hunted them on foot, before there were horses to ride.
The modern horse rides in America 1493.
Brought by Spanish conquistadors.
Some escaped to the Great Plains.
The perfect horse habitat.
400 years later, over a million 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
In the time it takes to reload a gun
A warrior can ride 250 meters.
And fire 20 arrows.
Buffalo can run at 55 km an hour
Hunts can cover hundreds of kilometers over many days.
It can take 15 arrows to kill a buffalo
White hunters like Frank Mayer use a single shot.
He aims for the lungs
A clean killed drop a buffalo without disturbing the herd.
In just over a decade 30 million buffalo are killed.
After hunters take the hides
train loads of men arrive to pick their carcasses.
They make buttons from bones
And grind down skeletons for fertilizer and porcelain.
The primary resource keeping Native Americans alive
Soon vanishes.
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 a 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 buffaloes
Exist in the whole United States.
Their place is no taken by the great iron horses.
Wondering cattle!
And the iconic horseman who will herd them.
The cowboy
When it ends in 1865, there follows a period of reconstruction.
The Civil War devastates Southern- Eastern seaboard.
The country's booming population also needs food.
In Texas, over 6 million cattle roam wild.
Worth 4 dollars a head here, 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 16,00 km of Wild West between the herds and the railroad
For that kind of cattle drive, America needs a new kind of frontiers man.
The cowboy.
After the Civil War,
60% of the South's population lives in rural poverty.
In search of work and adventure young men from all over the U.S.
Flocked west to cattle towns like Abilene, Wichita and Dodge City.
one farmhand 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 with land, with my horse
It symbolizes resistance to authority.
Teddy Blue is one of 35,000 cowboys.
Who will drive cattle to the railroad in Kansas.
Through 16,00 km of unforgiving terrain.
And gangs of rustlers.
For only a dollar a day, cowboys must be skilled horsemen and cattle wranglers.
The lasso dates back to the ancient Egyptians.
Mexican ranchers 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 with settlers' cows from English
Creating a new breed, the "Texas Longhorn".
After centuries roaming the plains, they're wild,
And prone to stampede.
Over 4 cattle drives, Teddy Blue buries 3 friends.
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 a first chance for him to fill his 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,"
"Happened 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.
In Texas guns become a way of life.
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,
Is the iconic Colt 45.
The fastest handgun in the West.
It fires 6 shots without reloading.
Colt starts making them in 1873.
Colt 45 cost 17 dollars,
Half a cowboy's monthly salary.
6 rounds of bullets, half a day's pay
Frontier men have a saying, Abraham Lincoln may have freed all men,
But Sam Colt made them equal.
Altogether 5 million cattle herd
From Texas to the railroad in Kansas
The largest migration of livestock in US history.
But one simple invention heralds the end of the cowboy's way of life.
Barbed wire.
In just 20 years,
2.5 million new settlers flood into the West.
New farms cover more than 2 million sq km of open range.
Setting cattle rancher against homesteader.
Cowboys like Teddy Blue
Experienced the collision first hand.
"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
And often deadly.
The farmer who develop this cheap and effective way
To keep livestock off his land...
...is 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 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 autumn of 1873, Glidden has a breakthrough
Using a coffee grinders he crudely fashion some steel barbs.
The problem is how to secure them.
Glidden's solution, bind the barbs between two links of wire.
His design cuts the price of fencing by 70%.
Within 10 years, Glidden sells enough barbed wire.
To go around the world 25 times,
Barbed wire divides the plain into farms and
And blocks 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 of the cowboy on the open range has lasted only 20 years
But settling the Great Plains
Will mark the end of one way of life...
And the birth of another.
By 1876.
Most of America's 300,000 Native Americans
Have been forced on to Government Reservation.
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 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 hectares of 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.
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"
When Gold is discovered in the Black Hills
100,000 prospectors rush in to seek their fortunes
The federal government wants to clear the area.
On a reconnaissance mission with the 7th cavalry.
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 into small bands.
For the next 14 years, the last three Sioux struggle on,
Until a final infamous incident the Great Sioux Nation.
Wounded Knee is a great, great scar on the American landscape.
On December 29, 1890.
The last band of independent Sioux surrender beside Wounded Knee Creek.
As the cavalry disarms them, a gun accidentally goes off.
It triggers a massacre.
Within minutes, over 200 Sioux men, women, and children.
Are dead.
Now 27, Black Elk witnesses the aftermath.
"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, 50,000 km of track across the continent
More than the rest of the world put together
Thousands of new towns spring up around it.
There is a station every 12 km.
5 rail lines link the East and West Coast.
The coming of the railroad even changes time itself
Until now, Americans have set their clocks by the Sun.
There are 8000 different times along 500 rail lines
Scheduling trains is becoming 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.
With 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.
Then he offers them to other station agents, and waits.
He hits the jackpot.
Orders flood in.
Within 6 months,
Sears sells all his watches, 2,500.
Earning 10 times his railroad salary.
Realizing he can sell goods by rail.
Sears hits on an idea that changes America.
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 pocket watch.
Sears's catalog is grown to 700 pages.
Now based in Chicago, he processes over 35,000 orders a day.
Delivering refrigerators, pianos,
And in 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 over 300,000 km of railroad track.
Linking the local markets and creating a national economy.
Over the next 40 years, rail freight sores.
From 55 to 700 million tons.
Raw materials from the West feed 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 population doubles.
The number of cities trebles.
And where buffalo once roamed,
The modern world now rises.