KEN BURNS’ THE WEST—EPISODE 8 SCRIPT

Introduction

By 1887, the West was changing faster than ever before. Americans were moved by the same impulses that had always moved them, to better their own lives and transform the region in the process. Now their numbers soared, and they brought with them the tools of the new industrial age.

Mining still lured people to the West from every corner of the globe, but it was a full-scale industry now. And the cities it created seemed little different from the grimy factory towns of the east.

Homesteaders and fortune-seekers still arrived, even though much of the best land had already been claimed. And the frenzy over what was left touched off human stampedes, while whole towns opened for business overnight.

But for the first inhabitants of the West, it seemed that a way of life that had lasted for generations was ending. As they saw their remaining land stripped away, some Indians sought refuge in a religion that promised it had all been a bad dream.

"If you stop and think about the kind of prejudice a lot of people suffered, a lot of the destruction that took place as a consequence of war and conquering, then it wasn't such a pretty picture. But I have to say that I think we have to recognize that that's a story of all places, of all nations. No matter where in the world, it is a story of conquering, great sacrifice, great loss, and a lot of times a taking away of things that really belong to someone else. But even knowing all of that, and wishing that part of it were not there, cannot take away the spirit, and the idealism, and the excitement that the people felt that actually did it, and that we still feel when we think about them doing it."
Ann Richards

Guthrie

On the morning of April 22nd, 1889, some 100,000 eager would-be settlers surrounded what was called the "Oklahoma District" on the southern Plains, preparing to storm in and stake their claims. Two million acres in the heart of Indian Territory were being opened for homesteading. All along the district's borders, soldiers held back the swarm of excited pioneers who were poised for the signal that the land rush could begin.

At precisely noon, the bugles blew and the huge crowd surged ahead. Many headed for towns about to be born: Oklahoma City, Stillwater, Kingfisher, Norman -- and Guthrie.

The last barrier of savagery in the United States was broken down. Moved by the same impulse each driver lashed his horses furiously... each man on foot caught his breath and started forward.
Harper's Weekly

By the end of the day, all 1,920,000 acres in the Oklahoma District had been claimed. But the choicest lots had already been taken by settlers who had illegally slipped through the army lines the night before. They called themselves "Sooners."

Men who had expected to lay out the town-site were grievously disappointed at their first glimpse of their proposed scene of operations. The slope east of the railway at Guthrie station was already dotted white with tents and sprinkled thick with men running about in all directions.
Harper's Weekly

By noon of the following day, the 15,000 new citizens of the brand-new town of Guthrie began choosing their mayor. It wasn't easy. There were two candidates and no ballots. Two lines were formed and each man's vote was tallied, but so many voters ran to the back of the line to vote again that the whole business had to be done over.

Lawyers went to work, filing land claims for a fee. Three men without a cent between them opened a bank. Deposits were kept in a pot-bellied stove until they could afford to buy a vault. A blacksmith soon saw the need for a dentist, declared himself one and advertised his skills by hanging the teeth he extracted on a string outside his tent.

Within five days, wood-frame buildings were being banged together along Main Street. And by the time Guthrie was only one month old, it had a hotel, general stores, three newspapers -- and fifty saloons.

In the years that followed, there would be more land rushes throughout the West, bringing in settlers and creating new towns in numbers never before imagined.

"I am a being of the West, I am an heir to the richest possible heritage that anybody could have. I think of those people who were ready to take on anything, and to do so with the commitment and the dedication that no matter, come hell or high water, they were going to succeed. I think I'm a part of that. And I love the notion of being somewhere in that lineage, and know that my children are too."
Ann Richards

The Outcome of Our Ernest Endeavors

The Indian may now become a free man; free from the thraldom of the tribe; free from the domination of the reservation system; free to enter into the body of our citizens. This bill may therefore be considered as the Magna Carta of the Indians of our country.
Alice Fletcher

Back in 1887, well-meaning reformers had persuaded Congress to pass the Dawes Act. It provided for each head of an Indian family to be given 160 acres of farmland or 320 of grazing land. Then, all the remaining tribal lands were to be declared "surplus" and opened up for whites. Tribal ownership -- and the tribes themselves -- were meant simply to disappear.

"The Dawes Act was a way to break up the whole tribal structure of Native American nations. Instead of saying you are a group of people, all of a sudden you are individual land owners, you are Americans. And so it was designed to break up community, to civilize people, make us farmers, and also break up our tribal structure."
Charlotte Black Elk

In 1889, the same year as the Oklahoma land rush, two Eastern women arrived at the Nez Percé reservation in Idaho determined to implement the Dawes Act. Alice Fletcher was a leader of the group that called itself the "Friends of the Indians," a pioneer in the emerging field of ethnology, and one of the architects of the new law.

Her companion was Jane Gay, a sometime poet who had learned the art of photography to document their time with the Indians. They had come, they believed, to "save" the Nez Percé from themselves -- by dividing up their land and making them homesteaders.

Alice explained... the land allotment... and her wish that the whole people would see the wisdom of the great change... At length one man stood up, a tall, broad-shouldered fellow... He said, "We do not want our land cut up in little pieces..." A groan of assent ran along the dark line of Sphinxes... "We must come together and decide whether we will have this law..." She told them that there is nothing for them to decide... The law must be obeyed.
Jane Gay

Alice Fletcher immediately set to work marking off the new boundaries on the reservation. The Nez Percé came to call her the "Measuring Woman."

Chief Joseph himself came to pay a visit. After his long flight from the army in 1877, he had been exiled to Oklahoma, and then allowed to return to a reservation in eastern Washington -- but not to his beloved homeland, the Wallowa Valley in Oregon. Using a new device -- a wax cylinder -- Fletcher convinced Joseph to record one of his traditional songs. But she could not talk him into taking an allotment of land.

He will have none but the Wallowa Valley, from which he was driven; he will remain landless and homeless if he cannot have his own again. It was good to see an unsubjugated Indian. One could not help respecting the man who still stood firmly for his rights, after having fought and suffered and been defeated in the struggle for their maintenance.
Jane Gay

Alice Fletcher kept at it for four long years, trying to divide Indian lands fairly while fending off whites who sought to persuade her to leave the best land for them. By the time she was finished, she had made more than 2,000 Nez Percé allotments -- over 175,000 acres. Then she and Jane Gay started east to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Fletcher had been awarded a fellowship at Harvard's Peabody Museum.

In the week's journey home across the continent, we shall have time to review the outcome of our earnest endeavors... But if it has been well for us, and well for the Indian... is not for us to know. We can only leave the question among the unsolvable, whose multitude grows ever greater as life goes on.
Jane Gay

The Dawes Act, meant to help Indians, devastated them instead. In 1895, the remaining half million unallotted acres of Nez Percé tribal land were declared "surplus" and opened for homesteading. By 1910, there would be 30,000 whites within the Nez Percé reservation -- and just 1,500 Nez Percé.

Across much of the West, the story would be the same. Before the Dawes Act, some 150 million acres remained in Indian hands. Within twenty years, two-thirds of their land was gone.

Butte

By the 1880s, the great American West was not a matter of cowboys, Indians, mountain men, and explorers, but in fact, a land largely urban, largely industrial, and riven with many of the same problems that assaulted the industrialized east. The mining industry, probably more than any other single industry was designed specifically to get into the West, find what resources it had, dig 'em out, leave a wreck behind, and get out and move on someplace else."
T. H. Watkins

Butte, Montana, was always a mining town. It had been born during a gold rush in the 1860s and was given a second lease on life with a silver strike in the 1870s. Then, in 1881, 300 feet below the ground, miners made an even more important discovery -- the largest deposit of copper the world had ever seen.

It was just what the new electrical age required: copper for conductors, machines, wires. By the mid-1880s, Butte's mines were yielding almost 2,000 tons of silver and copper ore every day, well over a million dollars every month. Its citizens boasted they lived on the "richest hill on earth."

"Butte had a kind of collective energy that I suspect no other western town could have matched. The mines never closed, the bars never closed, certainly the red light district did not close. I've always thought of it as an eastern town, as a misplaced eastern town, a kind of downsized Pittsburgh located in the middle of The Rocky Mountains."
David Emmons

Most of the Butte miners were Irish, but there were also Finns and Japanese and Italians, Croatians, Mexicans and Swedes -- 38 different nationalities in all, so many that the "No Smoking" signs in the mines had to be printed in fourteen languages.

All the men were working steadily toward one goal: take as much ore as possible from the mines 4,000 feet below the surface. It was the most dangerous job in America. In the hot, airless tunnels, temperatures stayed above 90 degrees all year round. Mine shafts collapsed or caught fire. And there was the perpetual threat of silicosis, caused by inhaling dust, which tore at the miners' lungs and led thousands to die young from pneumonia and tuberculosis.

"The elevation to ground level in the middle of a Butte winter was the cause of great elation among the school children of Butte, because men being raised from a hundred degree mine would be covered with sweat, and as they reached the surface, as their sweat-drenched work clothes would strike 40-degree-below air, they would disappear in a plume of evaporation. So the school children used to gather on the hillside and watch the men raised, and it was their afterschool pleasure to watch them literally disappear in this cloud, this puff of smoke."
David Emmons

In approaching Butte I marvelled at the desolation of the country. There was no greenery of any kind; it had all been killed by the fumes and smoke of the piles of burning ore.
Bill Haywood

Just four trees survived within Butte itself, and all the nearby hillsides had long since been stripped of wood to fuel the smelters that roared on, all day and all night. Thick, reeking smoke hung perpetually over the city and the raw-boned mining settlements around it -- Cabbage Patch, Anaconda, and a place called Seldom Seen.

"Butte had an air pollution problem that was such that it would be literally dark at noon. The prevailing winds usually would carry the smoke away. But in dead air conditions Butte was literally obliterated. It disappeared from view."
David Emmons

"Much of mining that goes on in the West today is still operating under a law signed by Ulysses S. Grant called the General Mining Law of 1872, which was designed specifically to encourage mining in the West. It encouraged exploitation. It literally gave away enormous chunks of American land at almost no price. Imposed no restrictions on how the mines would be developed, required no reclamation work afterwards, no monitoring of whatever acids and other garbage might get spilled into the local watertables, and gave away, no one even knows how much, precisely, gold and silver, with no royalties paid to the government at all. The West is a fairly fragile environment. Unlike the well-forested East, the scars last longer, the damage is of a longer duration. And yet, we still continue to use the West the same way, as if what we did was impermanent. But in human terms, it is not impermanent at all; it lasts a very long time. Generations."
T. H. Watkins

Like Grass Before the Sickle

By 1890, no Indian people anywhere in the West lived freely on their own land -- and even the reservations on which they struggled to survive were being broken up under the Dawes Act. Congress had cut appropriations. Rations were drastically reduced. There were deadly epidemics of measles, influenza, whooping cough.

On the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, the Lakota medicine man Sitting Bull was living quietly in his cabin He was still regarded with respect by those Lakotas who remembered the eerie accuracy of his visions during the days when they had fought Custer. But the Lakota were divided now, as they struggled to come to terms with the white man's world.

And Sitting Bull had had another, more disturbing vision. This one told him that the worst fate that could befall a Lakota awaited him -- to die at the hands of his own people.

That fall Sitting Bull had a visitor, a Miniconjou Lakota named Kicking Bear, just back from a train trip to the far West and bearing remarkable news. A ceremony called the Ghost Dance was sweeping through many tribes of the West. It was part of a message of hope for all Indian peoples being preached by a Paiute medicine man and prophet named Wovoka.

My brothers, I bring you word from your fathers, the ghosts, that they are marching now to join you, led by the Messiah who came once to live on earth with the white man but was killed by them... I bring to you the promise of a day in which there will be no white man to lay his hand on the bridle of the Indians' horse; when the red men of the prairie will rule the world.
Wovoka

Wovoka's gospel of salvation was filled with Christian as well as Indian elements. Men and women were first to purify themselves and forswear alcohol and violence. Then they were to dance in a large circle, chanting and appealing to the spirits of their ancestors. When they did, Wovoka promised, the whites would vanish, the buffalo would cover the earth again.

"The Ghost Dance, I think, was a desperate prayer. They thought that, well, it may be possible that all of this has been a bad dream, or all of this is passing and there will be the restoration of the world we knew and loved."
N. Scott Momaday

Like most Indians, Sitting Bull remained skeptical of the ceremony's promised powers. But he agreed to let the Ghost Dance be taught to those people at Standing Rock who wanted to learn it. In the Lakota version of the ceremony, the dancers wore special shirts, said to be stronger than the white man's bullets.