America's Wild West: Discovery of a Land (Full Episode) | What Really Happened

foreign this is the true story of the frontier of the Wild West and the founding of America Frontier is a very loaded word it was a dividing line between civilization and savagery which was imagined to be indigenous people a violent tale of European colonists pushing ever deeper into an unexplored Wilderness the West has long figured in the American imagination as the Land of Hope and promise of an indigenous people it exploited and conquered by treaty or by force God gave it to the Indians first so it'll always be a hard land it'll always be our country in a chaotic War for freedom annikling The Carving up of a continent birth of Lawless cattle towns the ruthless rise of the railroad [Music] feverish breed of the gold rush witness the brutal reality How the West Was Won the Bonafide history of life on the frontier [Music] the whole story is about opportunity opportunity for land opportunity to make a new life [Music] Americans always looking to the next Horizon from you know Columbus and the Vikings the West Was Always what was considered the frontier the front end of modernity in the 19th century American history a land where anything was possible Frontier made America different perhaps more individualistic more more the people who are stating that a frontier exists do so because they want to distinguish themselves from the people that they see on the other side of the boundary and that can be politicized even weaponized the scene was really set for a showdown between these American settlers who claimed access to that land and the native people who had long since lived there it changed everything native people become known as The Vanishing race you can't survive if you want to or you can just lay down and die it's only once people understand the cost of these territorial acquisitions that will be able to fairly judge the past Amerigo Vespucci was the first European to suggest the landmass stumbled upon by Christopher Columbus might be a continent in its own right a map drawn up in 1507 marked South this bold Discovery borrowing a derivative of the Explorer's name America the British began arriving sort of in trickles in the early 17th century they set up colonies in Virginia and then what's today in Massachusetts but they basically hugged the Eastern Seaboard for decades it was very difficult for them to make inroads because the native people in what would become New England and in Virginia were powerful they were numerous and they weren't inclined to just give their land away did these newly arrived English settlers there were 13 colonies on the mainland of North America [Music] all of which were controlled by the British these were independent political entities that were governed by the crown when you look at how the land encompassed by The Colony is defined most of them don't have Western boundaries written into their Charters so the idea is that the colony could expand Westward indefinitely the 13 colonies wanted to expand actually begin to go into areas that they weren't supposed to and so the British government introduced what is known as the Proclamation line of 1763 and in doing that it really established a line across the crest of the Appalachian Mountains a temporary boundary is established by the British separating the colonists from Native American lands and the colonists were supposed to stay east of that next to the Atlantic seaboard this didn't however prevent a swell of white settlers from breaching the Proclamation line encroaching on native land seeking to harness its natural resources what you had was fur Trappers fur Traders people who could make a living hunting wanted to live out in the wilderness away from society or whatever Mountain Men tough rugged figures undaunted by the countless dangers of this hostile wilderness built peaceful relationships with local tribes setting up vital trade routes which would be used for decades to come majority of mountain men would form alliances with a tribe on Whose land he was he was trapping Furs and they they created interim relationships that way but it was it was an isolated way of life American Hunters fed Europe's insatiable desire for fur in particular hats fashioned from beaver pelts although practically any wild creature with a hide could be killed skinned [Music] and sold for a handsome profit and so the fur trade industry flourished and the market for it was primarily Europe and Asia people would buy fur coats fur hats lined boots and gloves with fur and it was extremely profitable American traders and Trappers were engaged in Cutthroat competition with one another it was sort of a tragedy of Commons effect what they did to the fur trade because of course each individual Trader and Trapper wanted to secure as many beaver pelts as he possibly could knowing that those pelts that he didn't secure his rival would so over time they drastically drove down the population of beavers in North America in this attempt to claim more than their rivals however alongside Traders came homesteaders willing to push further into native lands harboring dreams of permanently settling down and building communities despite the official guidance of the British and this is one of the reasons why the American colonialists rebelled against the British because they wanted to be able to continue to take over the land and the resources of native peoples and that becomes one of the main controversial points with the British crown [Music] you always talk about it as taxes and tea and everything else but my argument would be that it's actually a lot about its access to indigenous land is what triggers the American Revolution the first shots of the war of American independence are fired in April 1775. under the command of George Washington a ragtag militia clashes against the military might of the British Empire indigenous people realize that the new United States would be a great danger for them and so they're very dedicated to trying to stop it Native Americans fight side by side with the British in a Bloody War which rages on for eight long years facing a crushing defeat King George's Representatives finally sign a peace treaty the 13 colonies of Great Britain are now the United States of America Independence has been won but none for all [Music] the 13 United States of America are enshrined in law as an independent Sovereign Nation the leaders of this new nation set their sights on the American West it was 13 colonies that became 13 states some of those States laid claim to this vast domain far beyond the Appalachian Mountains and the states gradually had to give up claim to this land in order to carve out new States from that by and the United States was looking for ways to sort of distance itself from the colonial precedent that Britain had set the United States wanted to expand Westward but it didn't want to do so with colonies it wanted to do so by creating additional co-equal States so what Congress decided to let happen is any time a federally designated territory reached the population threshold of residents it could apply for Statehood and once it earned statehood it would come into the Union as a co-equal member with all the rights that the other 13 original states had these rights allowed each new state a vote on any law passed through Congress [Music] all states were entitled to two senators as well as voting members of the U.S House of Representatives the way that United States history is typically told is from the point of view of the 13 colonies and then eventually they form this independence movement that results in the nascent United States it's actually a nation that's dedicated in many ways to the project of western expansion and George Washington besides being the general for the Continental Army is also a very significant land Speculator in Western lands so the leadership down to lower level people are all very interested in western expansion the revolution itself resulted in a major unresolved controversy over the American West overlands West of the Appalachian Mountains but in the peace treaty when Britain surrendered in 1783 to the newly created United States they seeded native land whether they had any right to do so was an open question [Music] I think we always want to be careful though whether we're talking about Frontiers or Borderlands or borders for that matter not to draw them prematurely if you look at almost any U.S history textbook for example you'll see oftentimes maps to trace out the expansion of the United States Frontier or place borders sometimes where European treaty makers place them as opposed to really paying attention to the reality on the ground so in one sense we can have two maps a map of India North America in 1776 at the time of the Declaration of Independence would show North America divided among Spanish America British America French America and then after the American Revolution British America becomes the United States part of French America is now British America up in Canada and we still have Spanish America in the southwestern part of the United States and that's one map that that sort of we often use it's as I said a map that erases the reality on the ground which is that most of that territory are Indian countries and that a realistic map would show most of the continent being occupied by Indian peoples with maybe little dots of colonial settlement amongst oceans of different Indian nations different Indian peoples Maps can reveal a great deal but they can also distort and erase a whole lot of history too one of the big political questions of that era is you know who would exercise jurisdiction over which parts of North America it wasn't entirely clear at the time partly because population density wasn't that great so you didn't have Imperial Powers really coming into regular contact and conflict with one another by and large these Empires were lines on a map they laid claim to vast amounts of territory but that territory was really dominated and inhabited by native people the scene was really set for a showdown between these American settlers in the newly created United States who claimed access to that land and the native people who had long since lived there when I gather with it a lot of the people that came on the on those boats over here or the bottom of the barrel from those countries you know there were the thieves in the Outlaws and whatever you want to say and we were here waiting for them with good arms and saying come on we're going to share our food and teach you how to plant teach you how to make food whatever and then they were taken advantage of [Music] North America before Europeans arrived was culturally very diverse it was linguistically very complex it involved a degree of environmental manipulation whether it's controlled Burns or whether it's agriculture whether it's irrigation that I think is often forgotten about one of the dangers of the notion of the frontier is the idea that everything was very static on the indigenous side and the U.S side is sort of where all the dynamism is but it's really important to understand is that everything is moving really really quickly and there's a lot of change that's going on on the indigenous side as well you have the horse spread out onto the Great Plains in the late 18th century as well so a lot of indigenous communities there begin to incorporate the course into their way of life and this becomes a really transformative new technology as it were for them [Music] enabling their populations to rise enabling themselves Buffalo and away and scale that they'd never been able to before natives swap animal hides beads food and knowledge for iron tools newly introduced by the colonists outposts are established and with them local economies the United States was growing serious change was afoot Not only was it pushed by these powerful political Beasts of the East Coast but by Napoleon Bonaparte [Music] the Frenchman had once dreamed of creating a new world Empire stretching from the Caribbean Into the Heart of North America but now the military Mastermind was reassessing his Ambitions following his latest humiliating defeat in Haiti the history of the American West really begins with a slave rebellion in the Caribbean on what was then the French sugar colony of San domingue and what became the independent Black Republic of Haiti a group of enslaved people there led a rebellion led by Tucson Overture overthrew their French slave holders and created a black Republic by 1804. so once Napoleon lost Haiti he sort of gave up the the whole idea of a new world Empire and so he actually sold a massive stretch of land in North America Napoleon looked at Louisiana and didn't think it was worth governing so he was anxious to get rid of it and found a willing purchaser in Thomas Jefferson there are certain presidents especially in this time period that we're talking about that kind of create their political parties and Thomas Jefferson pretty much created his political party he was the first politician elected to that party and around him coalesced all of these ideas that came to be known as the Jeffersonian Republicans foreign so when Thomas Jefferson becomes president he's really a new voice and a new idea for the United States Jefferson had a new vision for America that was very agrarian and it was also very in favor of territorial expansion he lives on a farm a plantation worked by many many slaves and he firmly believes that the only really ethical way of living is to work the land either work the land yourself or enslave people and force them to work it for you so he's he's suspicious of cities suspicious of urban dwellers Jefferson said that cities were sores on the body politic so his idea of what the United States should be made up of is individual farmers and their families this is this idea about how the government will stay virtuous is that every man will own his own land and every man will work his land with his family along his side that's what freedom to Jefferson means what that means in terms of the policies that he's going to support he is in favor of adding more land to the United States so that you can get all of those men their farms for their families in order to expand his territory president Thomas Jefferson is a mint of France to barter for control of New Orleans and West Florida but Napoleon needed money to wage his next military campaign he presented the Americans with an incredible opportunity for 15 million dollars he would grant them the rights to a colossal body of land Louisiana Jefferson himself was probably gobsmacked by that offer it was just too good to pass up it doubled the size of the United States overnight with the stroke of a pen France turns over retro seeds an enormous colony to the United States at the time that was a good chunk of change for the United States that was still in its infancy and didn't have the the resources to sort of deal on a stage with Imperial powers like France but the Louisiana Purchase also unlocked this incredible money-making opportunity for the federal government it was really through the sale of federal lands lands in the Louisiana Purchase that the U.S government was financed for years and years to come [Music] the Louisiana Purchase started where the Mississippi River spills into the Gulf Coast and it went all the way west of the Mississippi River somewhere up there nobody was exactly sure where it ended the United States had just acquired 828 000 square miles of Uncharted Terrain land previously owned by France but barely governed by Napoleon's forces in truth much of the vast area was already inhabited by native people what's left out and what the maps that we use tend to leave out is again the United States made a deal with France to acquire a certain kind of control a certain kind of right but that right has yet meant very little on the ground in 1803 the ground remained almost entirely Indian countries and yet our Maps tend to sort of erase all those Indian boundaries and borders and pretend that the United States had doubled its size now the eventual cost of actually taking control over all that territory is considerably more once you start factoring in the cost of either purchasing or coercing or conquering uh the Indian peoples in those territories to take effective controls of the territory so the one thing that was standing in the way of Jefferson's imagined Empire and the one thing that was standing in the way of the United States really exerting control over this Louisiana Purchase is of course native people themselves native people in the early 19th century held the upper hand they held the balance of power across most of the North American continent so the question of the coming decades in the coming Generations would be you know who would claim that and who would control that land Jefferson hoped that white American farmers and settlers would sort of gradually spread across the American West and turn the United States into this Utopia of small folding farmers the Empire of Liberty never really existed at least in the ways that Thomas Jefferson hoped that it would in fact it very quickly became an Empire of slavery after the purchase of Louisiana in 1804. [Music] the involuntary migration of people's dwarfs the voluntary Colonial migration [Music] the number of free European migrants is dwarfed by the number of African peoples coming as enslaved people in part because their labor is so essential to the process of colonization and also because the mortality rates of enslaved African peoples is so high that you need to bring so many many many millions more over [Music] slaves in the early 19th century before the Louisiana Purchase were used in a number of sort of agricultural Enterprises in the eastern United States in Virginia they were growing tobacco in South Carolina they were primarily growing rice over time they would be pushed into the southern interior where the cotton growing soil was most fertile slave holding and slave selling is not just the southern phenomenon it's not something that we simply can talk about in terms of the Deep South it is in fact legal it is considered to be the engine of development for the North American society there are people who are as deeply implicated in the trade in New England as they are in the Deep South across the 341-year period of trade it's estimated that over 12 million Africans were shipped to the new world against their will 2 million people would not survive the horrific Atlantic Crossing it permeated all of American society so that American society does need to be understood as a slave Society it's not just a matter of one series of States it's not just something that happens with the Advent of cotton production foreign there's been a long sense in European and euro-american thought that basically believes if you're not doing something with a piece of land or with a river if you're not planting crops if you're not chopping down trees for Timber if you're not mining something then you're wasting it there were a few concerns I mean one is that if Americans didn't lay clay into this land that another Imperial power would there was also the concern that if they didn't seize this land they wouldn't unlock its Rich potential they wouldn't be able to gain access to the resources that it provided they wouldn't be able to gain access to the trade that this land provided it was to be one of President Jefferson's greatest achievements having acquired the Louisiana territories for a mere three cents per acre this tremendous Wilderness was to be explored and mapped in order to best establish an effective way to retain its control so Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries were hoping that through settlement and incorporation into the American political system they could lay claim to more of this North American continent than their Imperial rivals and so he commissioned an Overland expedition to figure out what this land was and what sort of potential it had [Music] before the dust settles on his deal with the French Jefferson pushes Congress to finance this Grand expedition of surveillance the Louisiana Purchase ended at the Rocky Mountains and the way the exploration business in Europe work was you kind of had respect for other countries and exploring they had done so by exploring the Oregon Country which is between the Louisiana Purchase and the Pacific that might give us a claim to it the president's personal secretary Meriwether Lewis is tasked with traversing these newly purchased lands charting whatever might lay West of the swampy marshes of the Mississippi River Lewis actually went to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and spent a couple of months down there talking to faculty members what am I looking for and so Lewis asked Jefferson to appoint William Clark to be the co-director of this Expedition with him and so they went out and recruited people to go with them [Music] at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition Americans weren't really sure what was out there they had a fuzzy idea of what the Contours of the North American continent looked like but very few of them could draw a map with any degree of accuracy in the 18th century in fact most North American Maps included California as an island one of Jefferson's main missions with this Lewis and Clark Expedition was to discover a Waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean this was essentially the dream of Columbus when he sailed West in 1492 to sail west and hit the markets of Asia and Jefferson thought that there could be a Waterway connecting the two oceans the person was one of the earliest sort of transcontinental Pacific Visionaries in the United States he had one eye on China and the potential of the Chinese trade but it was this dream of trade with China and the luxury goods that would come to the US from China that really propelled a lot of the early American interests in the American West [Music] May 14 1804 Lewis and Clark set off from Camp Dubois outside of St Louis Missouri the Lewis and Clark Expedition was a 28-month journey across the American continent if you read even excellent textbooks by highly regarded historians you'll see different numbers of people being a part of the Lewis and Clark expedition they eventually started out with 51 people including Lewis and Clark some of them were fur Traders some of them were just adventurers outdoorsmen so you need to be a good Hunter you need to be able to live in the wilderness you need to be able to hike at long distances [Music] and one of those 51 people was a slave that William Clark owned named York was born into slavery his parents had belonged to William Clark's Father John [Music] New York became a very important part of the Lewis and Clark expedition because when they got to Montana some of the natives up there when they would go on a hunt they would allow one person bragging rights of being the best person on that hunt and they would take charcoal and smear it all over their bodies until the next hunt [Music] the Indians in North Dakota and some of them later on in Montana thought that York must be the most important person in this Expedition because he was black and so there was this famous painting of them licking their fingers and trying to see if the black would come off of his skin but he became a very important Hunter you had to be very physical to be successful as a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition you had to load and unload boats and you had to carry stuff over land sometimes or pack it on to animals and so it was a slow it was an arduous really difficult Overland Journey they rented a keel boat in St Louis and the Missouri River flows into St Louis from the West so they had to go up the Missouri river which is against the flow and so they had big heavy ropes that they tied to the Keel boat and these men would walk along the bank pulling that Keel boat loaded with all these supplies up the Missouri River it was a tough summer too tough for many of the men plagued by an endless heat and swarms of insects forever battling against powerful River Kerns members of the expedition began to quit [Music] when they got to the winter of 1804 one man had died along the way and he died of a burst appendix and so they were down to 50. with one dying and 16 dropping out they're down to 34. and then they pick up three one of these guys was a French fur trapper named Charbonneau but Charbonneau was married to a native woman named Sacagawea and of course this story has been told a thousand times sacaged away as personal Journey actually began as a slave she was captured as a child and then sold to a French Trader she was still a teenager and she had a little baby boy [Music] Charbonneau was in his early 30s Sacagawea was in her late teens and the little baby was named John Baptiste John the Baptist 18 arduous months into their Trek supplies were running low exhaustion and sickness slowly taking grip but Lewis and Clark's diminished team trekked on when some of their boats tip and they begin losing journals and scientific equipment and materials and the men Panic at Chicago who has her baby with her who is calm cool and collected and is credited with grabbing some of the most important scientific instruments and some of the core's journals and saving them from destruction and she's doing this while tending her baby you know at night while the men are around regaling themselves with stories of the day she is nursing her child she's tending to her child tending to her husband Charbonneau and of course engaging in diplomatic relations on behalf of the corps with indigenous communities they're coming in contact with [Music] when they got to eastern Montana they saw some natives up ahead on horseback every time they ran into natives they were nervous they brought some fur trade items with them coffee tobacco cloth items and they were always afraid they might be slaughtered by an Indian group that didn't appreciate them being there and they always approached them slowly make sure that they're not going to be attacked [Music] when they got closer to these men that they saw riding these horses they saw that one of them was Sacagawea's brother [Music] now that's a very pivotal moment in time because she could have told said Lewis and Clark are you know bad men and everything and that would have been the death of the entire crew right there she had this reunion with her brother she'd also had a reunion with the rest of her family and of course she got the grandbaby but she talked them into selling some horses to Lewis and Clark western Indians didn't like give up their horses but she was able to get them just because they wanted to help her out and so she kind of had a very special role in the Lewis and Clark expedition there's more statues of Sacagawea than any other American woman in history thank you Lewis and Clark discovered over a hundred species of plants over a hundred species of animals Lewis and Clark both kept a diary a kind of a journal three others so there were five journals that were kept and recorded and Thomas Jefferson wanted everything he wanted drawings of animals and plants and rivers and Maps because he wanted to find out what was there through all of the recordings and and they did do that they sat down in studiously did all that during all kinds of weather in November 1805 they finally caught sight of the Pacific coast and the mouth of the Columbia River to commemorate this groundbreaking nation-building achievement and to Mark the United States indisputable occupation of the land an exhausted clerk carves his name into the dry bark of a nearby tree [Music] a group camp nearby until the Winter's eyes began to thaw before making the perilous journey home in the spring they made it all the way to the Pacific coast and then back again along more or less the same route so nobody died nobody drowned in a river nobody fell off a cliff nobody got sick and died except that one guy with the burst appendix and to me that's one of the great stories of it that they spent 28 months in the wilderness and pretty much everything they wanted to accomplish they did Clark became very rich in the fur trade and then became the territorial governor of Missouri for several years Louis however was drowning in debt his life ended in the early hours of October 11 1809. on a Dusty floor of a rural Inn as he bled out from gunshot wounds to his head and gut had he taken his own life or was he murdered the debate continues to this day five years after his death the findings from the Lewis and Clark expedition were finally published I know the story is that because York was such an important person in this Expedition that Clark freed him to pay him back and that never happened Clark was from a Virginia Slave holding family and he kept him for years after he's still a slave for several years after the Lewis and Clark expedition ended the Lewis and Clark expedition sort of locked the American West in the American imagination it convinced a lot of white Americans in the early 19th century that the Pacific coast and this mostly unexplored region of the West was something that would one day really claimed by the United States they believed that the Lewis and Clark expedition sort of blazed the trail there's this misconception I think that the American West is this battle between white European Invaders and Native people but really it's a lot more fine-grained than that when native people first began encountering white Americans they had no reason to believe the United States was going to be this immense power that would eventually lay claim to the continent you know their first contact with the United States was generally a few scruffy Traders so they wanted access to the guns that these Traders provided primarily in their conflicts with other indigenous people because to them other indigenous people presented a greater threat [Music] the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition had expanded America's Horizons the United States was poised to press further into the continent and to assert total control over its growing Terrain [Music] they were not to know it yet but the native population of America a diverse indigenous people who had thrived on this continent for millennia we're about to face a powerful challenge to their freedom and their future this was their land it had always been their land but the battle for the American frontier was entering a deadly new phase they would face disease war and a belligerent Frontiersman as commander-in-chief whose genocidal master plan would forcibly remove native tribes from their land thirst for more control would drive white settlers further west bringing with them slavery and violence and a dream of manifest destiny change was coming [Music]

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 997,854

Keywords: national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, culture, documentary, perpetual planet nat geo, photography, full episode, America's Wild West, Discovery of a Land, Full Episode, What Really Happened, True Story of the Americans, 13 Colonies, West of Appalachia, The British Crown, American Revolution, Slavery, Native Lands, President Jefferson, The Real Estate deals, Native people of North America, Real Estate, Appalachia, Revolution

Id: 4jpXt-Y-Nm4

Length: 42min 52sec (2572 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 14 2023