KEN BURNS’ THE WEST—EPISODE 7 SCRIPT
“THE GEOGRPAHY OF HOPE”
Introduction
“Americans aren't wrong in seeing the West as a land of the future, a land in which astonishing things are possible. What they often are wrong about is that there's no price to be paid for that, that everybody can succeed, or that even what succeeds is necessarily the best for all concerned. The West is much more complicated than that."
Richard White
By 1877, the American conquest of the West was nearly complete. For every Indian in the West, there were now nearly 40 whites, and as the Indian wars drew to a close, the last obstacles to American domination dropped away, and the country readied itself to assert control over the entire region.
Between 1877 and 1887, four and a half million more people came West. Almost half settled on the western Plains, creating new towns in a region once thought too harsh for human habitation: Bismarck and Champion, Epiphany, Wahoo and Nicodemus.
Some came seeking freedom, land of their own -- and opportunities they couldn't find in the East, while others found in the West a place to change themselves -- become someone else, to start over.
But as more and more Americans arrived, there was less and less room for those who didn't conform.
Indians were expected to change overnight -- to forget their old ways and make themselves over in the image of their conquerors.
The Chinese, who had done more than almost anyone to connect the West to the rest of the nation, would be told that they were no longer welcome in the United States.
Mexican-Americans were overwhelmed by the newcomers, even in towns where they had lived for centuries.
While the Mormons were forced to surrender part of their religion in order to save the rest of it.
But even as Americans tried to “tame” the West, they preferred to remember a gaudier version -- full of violence, adventure, and most of all, romance -- a “Wild West.”
And yet, between 1877 and 1887, Americans would come to learn firsthand just how “wild” the West could really be -- and that no conquest could ever be complete.
The Exodusters
What's going to be a hundred years from now ain't much account to us.... The whites has the lands and the sense, an' the blacks has nothin' but their freedom, an' it's jest like a dream to them.
Benjamin “Pap” Singleton
When the last Federal troops left the South in 1877 and Reconstruction gave way to renewed racial oppression, a former slave named Benjamin “Pap” Singleton began urging blacks to form their own independent communities in the West. Those who followed his advice called themselves “Exodusters,” because they believed the West would prove their promised land.
"Kansas seemed like an ideal place for people who were disillusioned with the black codes that had been passed in the South, the meanness of the Ku Klux Klan, the meanness of the sharecroppers who really weren't sharing the way they had agreed, and these are the people who paid five dollars, five bucks to Pap Singleton to come up the river to a new life in Kansas.”
Bertha Calloway
"The West has always been seen as a place of opportunity. And this was certainly as true for people of African descent as for anybody else. Singleton and other leaders weren't necessarily doing it for purely altruistic reasons. Like a lot of great westerners they were speculators in land and hoped to make their fortunes. But they did have a vision of a place where people of color could breathe free..."
Bill Gwaltney
Soon these early Exodusters’ hopeful letters home were being read aloud in black churches across the South, and in the spring of 1879, word spread that the Federal government had set all of Kansas aside for former slaves. The rumor was false, but it sparked a genuine Exodus that brought more than 15,000 African Americans into Kansas within the next year.
When I landed on the soil [of Kansas] I looked on the ground and I says this is free ground. Then I looked on the heavens and I says them is free and beautiful heavens. Then I looked within my heart and I says to myself, I wonder why I was never free before?
John Solomon Lewis
Rain Follows the Plow
"The West has always been and always will be a place where there's a struggle to survive, and where nature strikes heavy blows at you. . . That's geography. And I think part of that conquering of the West seeped into the American character. In many ways, the West has been a geography of hope for the country as a whole."
Stewart Udall
For forty years, homesteaders had passed over the western prairies on their way to better land, but now even this rough, arid soil was desirable, thanks in part to railroad company advertisements that described it as lush farmland and to a growing belief that settlers had actually changed the onetime "Great American Desert" by plowing the earth.
God speed the plow.... By this wonderful provision, which is only man's mastery over nature, the clouds are dispensing copious rains ... [the plow] is the instrument which separates civilization from savagery; and converts a desert into a farm or garden.... To be more concise, Rain follows the plow.
Charles Dana Wilber
During the 1870s and early 1880s, unusually heavy rainfall made these claims sound plausible, and within ten years nearly 2 million people had sunk their roots into the prairie soil. But when the wet years finally came to an end, the high plains became again a place where only the most determined could hang on.
"When we look at these people sitting in front of their sod houses ... we think, What squalor, living in a dirt house. We see women in maybe an elegant dress but without shoes on and we think, These people were poor. But what I see is pride. What they’re really saying is, Look how rich we are. We’re stinking rich, our muskmelons are this big.... These are not people who are embarassed by their situation. They are drenched in pride.
Roger Welsch
Ah, Nebraska Land, Sweet Nebraska Land!
Upon thy burning soil I stand.
And I look away, across the plains,
And I wonder why it never rains.
A Hard Time I Have
"The noblest part of the West is the fact that it gave hope to people in ways that we had not been able to have before. It was a force in the shaping of the national character, and an important one.... [But] there is very little that is presumably dear to the American psyche... that was not at one time or another systematically violated during the history of the West. And sometimes in ways that had never been matched before."
T. H. Watkins
On July 19, 1881, Sitting Bull, his people nearly starving, crossed the border from Canada to surrender. He asked for the right to cross back into Canada whenever he wished, for a home near the Black Hills and the right to hunt wherever he pleased.
Instead, the army sent him east to Standing Rock Reservation, where he found his daughter and many who had fought with him at the Little Bighorn reduced to living on rations, forbidden to speak their own language, and denied their religious customs.
"The idea was that if we couldn't pray, if we couldn't behave the way we do, have our social customs, and we couldn't speak, we'd very quickly become white people, and we would no longer be a military problem. So the idea was to corrupt them from the inside, you know, make them give up who they are."
Charlotte Black Elk
The Lakota lived in log cabins at Standing Rock, as well as tipis. They worked as farmers, or as policemen hired to enforce the Indian agent's rules. In 1883, when a delegation of U.S. Senators arrived with a plan to open part of the reservation to white settlement, Sitting Bull confronted them:
Do you know who I am? I want to tell you that if the Great Spirit has chosen any one to be the chief of this country, it is myself.
Sitting Bull
But his objections were brushed aside. From his cabin on the Grand River, Sitting Bull could see the very place where he had been born more than fifty years ago, into an entirely different world. "A warrior I have been," he sang. "Now it is all over. A hard time I have."
Barbarians
We are taught to believe... that your government is founded and conducted upon principles of pure justice and that all of every... race and creed are here surely protected in person, liberty and property.
Chung Sun
When he came to Los Angeles in October of 1871, Chung Sun had $600 and dreams of becoming a wealthy tea planter in Southern California. But soon after his arrival, he became caught up in a violent race riot that brought mobs of European immigrant workers -- French, German, Irish -- storming into the Chinese section of town. When it was over, 23 Chinese had been hanged, stabbed or shot to death, and Chung Sun had been beaten and robbed of his savings.
Throughout the 1870s, similar riots erupted across the West, as an economic depression led American workers to accuse Chinese immigrants of taking away their jobs.
We intend to try and vote the Chinaman out, to frighten him out, and if this won't do, to kill him out, and when the blow comes we won't leave a fragment for the thieves to pick up.... The heathen slaves must leave this coast, if it costs 10,000 lives.
Denis Kearney
The Workingman's Party
In Rock Springs, Wyoming, whites murdered 28 Chinese during an all-day riot. In Tacoma, Washington, the state militia had to be called in to restore order after rioters burned and looted the Chinese part of town. And in Seattle, Washington, Chinese were rounded up, forced onto ships and sent out to sea.
Chung Sun, meanwhile, took a job as a ditch digger, but when the ditch was finished, he could find no work at all. A new California law made it illegal to hire Chinese workers. Then, in 1882, western politicians and labor unions persuaded Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited nearly all immigration from China for a period of ten years.
"For the first time in the history of the United States, the government decided to exclude a group of immigrants on the basis of race. And it set a precedent ... because for the first time you have this new thinking introduced ... We can not only determine who could become citizens in this country, but we could determine who could come to this country."
Ronald Takaki
In California, Chung Sun set sail for home.
I hope you will pardon my expressing a painful disappointment. The ill treatment of... [my] countrymen may perhaps be excused on the grounds of race, color, language and religion, but such prejudice can only prevail among the ignorant. In civility... [Americans] are very properly styled barbarians.
Chung Sun
The Romance of My Life
Theodore Roosevelt entered the West at 2 in the morning on September 8, 1883, stepping down from a train in the heart of Dakota Territory.
A 24-year-old New York assemblyman with a reputation as a reformer -- near-sighted, Harvard-educated, asthmatic -- he seemed the quintessential dude as he set out to shoot a buffalo before the species disappeared.
Still, despite freezing rains so fierce that even his seasoned guide urged him to abandon the chase, Roosevelt got what he had come for -- and fell in love with the West as well.
Like all Americans, I like big things: big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat-fields, railroads and herds of cattle, too.... I am, myself, at heart as much a Westerner as an Easterner.
Theodore Roosevelt
Like many others, Roosevelt saw the prospect of quick riches on the Dakota plains, where cattle could graze freely, fattening from $5 calves into $45 heads of beef at virtually no expense. European fortune-seekers and American magnates like Marshall Field, William K. Vanderbilt and Joseph Glidden were investing in cattle herds, and before he left, Roosevelt himself bought a Dakota ranch.
But the West would become more than another source of income to Theodore Roosevelt. In 1884, when both his young wife and his mother died within hours of one another, the West became his refuge from despair.
Nowhere else does one feel so far off from mankind; the plains stretch out in deathless and measureless expanse, and . . . will for many miles be lacking in all signs of life.... Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.
Theodore Roosevelt
Over three summers of ranching, Roosevelt transformed himself, driving cattle, chasing rustlers, hunting and camping across the rugged landscape. "Here," he said later, "the romance of my life began."
The Barrio
“It was the custom... in all the families of the early settlers, for the oldest member of the family... to rise every morning at the rising of the morning star, and at once to strike up a hymn.... From house to house, street to street, the singing spread; and the volume of musical sound swelled, until it was as if the whole town sang.”
Century Magazine, 1883
Los Angeles in the 1870s still seemed the Hispanic farming town it had been when the United States took California from Mexico in 1846. But for its Californio natives, life had changed. Bullfighting and bear-baiting had been outlawed; baseball was now the most popular sport. And political power had long since passed into the hands of the Anglos.
Then, in 1885, the Santa Fe Railroad reached Los Angeles and touched off a fare war with the Southern Pacific, which had brought the first line into the city nine years before. Rates were slashed daily until, at one point, travelers could make the trip from St. Louis for as little as one dollar.
Trainloads of newcomers came pouring in -- 120,000 in 1887 alone -- drawn by extravagant claims for the “purity of the air” and the prospect of making a fortune in the real estate boom. By 1888, sixty new towns had sprung up in Los Angeles County, and two years later, the Anglo population was five times what it had been just a decade before. In the heart of the old city, now called the barrio, Mexican-Americans who had live there for generations suddenly found themselves surrounded.
"The change was so drastic, we had to turn inward.... And one way to do that is to fall back into the community, into the family, into the barrio, and try to hang on to what you have of your history.... What's outside is an alien land, where the color of your skin makes a difference, where the way you speak makes a difference. In the barrio... you're accepted, and out there is another world."
Rudolfo Anaya
I Must Lose Myself Again
For nearly half a century, the Mormons had struggled to create their own unique society in Utah. Their church owned the territory’s biggest businesses, controlled the ruling political party, often enforced its own laws in defiance of the federal courts, and resisted federal control at every turn.
But in 1882, the same year Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, a basic tenet of Mormonism -- polygamy, or plural marriage -- was declared a federal crime. Polygamists were barred from voting, holding office and serving on juries, and those found guilty of the practice could be jailed for up to five years.
"The thing to keep in mind is that polygamy was a sacred calling... a commandment of God.... they were fulfilling a very important church principle in doing this, and that was more important than the law."
Stewart Udall
Two months after polygamy was outlawed, David King Udall, the 30-year-old leader of a newly founded Mormon colony in Arizona, married Ida Hunt, his second wife.
Today I have made the most solemn vows and obligations of my life. Marriage, under ordinary circumstances, is a grave and important step, but entering into plural marriage in these perilous times is doubly so.
Ida Hunt Udall
Local newspapers attacked the couple, calling Ida a prostitute, and in 1884, when she learned that federal marshals were in Arizona to crackdown on polygamy, Ida Hunt Udall fled into what the Mormons called the “Underground.” Already two months pregnant, she traveled under assumed names from one hiding place to the next, and after more than half a year in exile, gave birth to a daughter alone.
Dear David:... today I have had a letter... saying that the Apostles will not consent for me to return and say that I must lose myself again if possible.... Oh Dade, I never missed you as I do tonight!... How long will the Lord require His poor weak children to be thus tried?
Ida Hunt Udall