Tony Robinsons Wild West S01E01

when I was a kid my heroes were sheriffs gunmen outlaws train robbers and Indian fighters I was obsessed by cowboy films and TV shows but though they gave me a lifelong love of the West they didn't really tell me anything about it it's a time and place I've always wanted to explore and now with the help of an archive of long-lost images I'm gonna do just that these are genuine 3d photographs of real cowboys and Indians most have never been seen on television before they capture amazing moments - like Jesse James dead in his coffin and General Custer patrolling the wilderness and killing a grizzly bear with these as my guide I'm going to uncover the real West so I'll learn how Butch and Sundance held up their first trains experience the firepower of the US Cavalry and meet the real cowboys and cowgirls I'll also try and discover how much of the Old West is still out there this is a stereo graph of a real cowboy taken sometime in the 1880s stereo graphs were images that could be viewed in 3d and they were a massive craze in the 1800s this is a stereo graphic camera it's got two lenses roughly the same distance apart as your eyes and each lens takes the same picture but from a slightly different perspective and then you put the two pictures on a card you look at the card for a viewer like this and your left eye sees the left picture your right eye sees the right picture your brain fuses them together and you've got 3d stereo graphed prints were popular all over the world and images of the American West like this cowboy were big sellers landscape shots were also highly prized these striking photographs were designed to sell the country as a land of opportunity but behind the sales pitch other photographers were capturing a different story shots like this were taken by men who wanted to record the lands original inhabitants they were a people who were fast disappearing before the Europeans arrived there were around 2 million native people living in America spread out amongst 600 or so different tribes this is obviously a map of America all laid out in a familiar jigsaw but 600 years ago the map would have looked like this this is a tribal map of America each color represents a different tribal group with its own language history and culture to find out more about them I went to the Buffalo Bills Center of the West in Wyoming to meet museum curator Rebecca West was there one overarching indigenous culture or was it a bit more complex than that it was quite complex there were over 60 different tribal cultures on the Great Plains alone and each culture had a different language different set of beliefs traditions and arts as well what sort of things did the people do with their lives well the tribes that lived in the river valleys oftentimes farmed other tribes were more mobile they hunted they followed the Buffalo and other game and of course this was prior to the European arrival things must have changed quite dramatically then yes they did they brought different material goods trade goods things like that an excellent example is the horse they didn't have horses before the Europeans arrived no they did not the horse was really present on the Great Plains really in the 1700s these incredible pictures capture the uniqueness of those people I love this one Havasu sky burial the bodies were placed on platforms and exposed to the elements the idea was that no trace of them would be left behind which is ironic because as a people the Sioux have left behind a huge legacy and it's their story but I want to focus on the Sioux lived on the great claims the vast flat prayer is that carpeted the center of the country these were a nomadic people whose lives and culture were dependent on one thing their ability to hunt and live alongside Buffalo these animals roamed the plains in vast herds the numbered in the millions the bring down one of the great beasts took real courage they're not as gentle as they look these are wild animals that have never been domesticated they can grow up to 11 foot in length the big adults can weigh up to 2,000 pounds and they can charge at 40 miles an hour these are big dangerous creatures that are easily spooked and there's 1,500 of them there and me here which is why I'm keeping my distance the Bison was a supermarket of the plains and provided the tribes with everything bones were made into weapons and tools hide into clothing and tepee covers even the Bison dung was burnt as fuel the Sioux maintained a delicate relationship with the land but this allelic lifestyle was under threat that threat came from immigrants from Europe they'd begun arriving here in the early 1500 s they first colonized the coast and then spread inland through the great river systems by 1850 only this section of the interior remained largely untouched this is what we refer to as the Wild West it would be the fate of the tribes here to make one last stand against the settlers albeit a doomed one by the time the settlers came West they had a foolproof method for taking the land a short bloody conflict would be resolved by the US Army who then forced a peace treaty on the Beaton tribe the terms of the treaty always handed land to the government meanwhile the tribes would have to live on reservations policed by the military they were given money and food but were now subject to American law that law was often violently applied in favor of their new white rulers the violence was an inspiration for a new generation of warriors wasn't it yes it did inspire some a good example is Crazy Horse he was a young Lakota man known for his skills as a warrior but also his tenacity in defending his people his homeland and a way of life that he felt was quickly slipping away Crazy Horse belongs to the Lakota branch of the Sioux he always refused to be photographed so images like this based on contemporary descriptions of him all we have in the movies I watched as a kid he was portrayed as a dangerous wild man but as Lakota historian and author Joseph Marshall told me that's not the reality Crazy Horse was a quiet person a very humble man when he was a child fifteen year old boy he would hunt and bring back the meat for people who didn't have a hunter in their family and not even wait to be thanked for it he just left it went so it was that kind of compassion and quiet humility that really drew people to him and he was he was what a lot of Lakota men aspired to be throughout their lives a complete man he had a deep hatred for the American army in 1855 when he was still a child he witnessed an atrocity committed by them against a Sioux village he and some of the boys are out hunting they come back and they see religious industry when they get really close the village is burning possessions are scattered all over horses are dead bodies laying all over the place similarly eviscerated have to consider the kind of impact those images have on a thirteen-year-old boy so that shaped his attitude about white people the rest of his life life on the reservations was inherently unfair promises of food money could be reneged on and treaties could be torn up and renegotiated if the government didn't like them or if they wanted more land and they always wanted more land specifically the government wanted land in the West but politics had stopped them seizing it the northern and southern states were split over the wilderness the North wanted to open it up and encourage new farms and settlements here the South disagreed their economy was based on agriculture and they didn't want any new competition on their doorstep so a stalemate developed one which was only broken when the two sides went to war in 1861 the American Civil War started when seven southern states declared independence over their right to own slaves at a stroke the war stopped the South objecting to further western expansion President Lincoln pushed through new policies to encourage settlement in 1862 he passed the Homestead Act which promised 160 acres of free land in the West to anyone willing to farm it slowly little houses like these built with sods of Earth for bricks began to appear he also greenlit a new transcontinental rail line to further open up the country when the war ended in 1865 with the north victorious the western expansion went into overdrive as award-winning historian and author Paul Hutton explains so now that the war is over millions and millions and millions of immigrants are coming from Europe more people are coming into the ports of New York and Boston every month then there are Indians on the northern plains the Indians are in the way they have to be pushed out also in the way of the Buffalo the Buffalo have to be eradicated one to defeat the Indians two to make place for the cattle and so within essentially 20 years with it the buffalo herds 50 million strong were eradicated the extinction of the Buffalo was the first stage in their plan to destroy the Indians the young warriors like Crazy Horse were about to go to war they would be led by Sitting Bull and hunted by General George a Custer and all of them would become legends in 1865 the end of the Civil War saw the start of another mass migration West this time mostly concentrating on the area we call the Great Plains covering present-day Montana Dakota and here in Wyoming some of those people traveling West began to trespass on Indian territory lighting the fuse on a dispute which would define the future of these lands the trespassers were directed through the tribal areas by an illegal route called the Bozeman trail thousands used it as a shortcut to a new gold rush in Montana the Sioux would attack the trespassers which prompted the army to build a line of forts to protect their people this incensed the tribe so much that he United the Northern Cheyenne the Sioux and the Arapaho under the leadership of the charismatic of glawler Sioux chief Red Cloud Red Cloud was supported by the likes of Crazy Horse and other young warriors together they waged a two-year long war it culminated in a devastating fight against an army group led by this man Captain William Fetterman the clash would be a defining moment as historian Tom hatch explains well William Federman was a captain in the army and he had that attitude that most army officers had at that time he claimed that with 80 men he could ride through the entire Sioux Nation Federman one day left the fort and foolishly attacked a group of Sioux Indians and rode into a ambush it was Red Cloud's greatest victory Fetterman and his 80 strong troop were slaughtered and the Sioux were now in control of the territory chief Red Cloud basically shut down the Bozeman trail the soldiers were held hostage in their forts and it was the only time in the history of the United States of America that an Indian tribe was able to negotiate a treaty when they won the battle the war and they they negotiated the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 the United States government acknowledged that half of South Dakota including the sacred Black Hills now belonged to the Sioux it promised its people would never trespass there again then two things happened which made them break that promise within five years the first was a financial crisis called the panic which hit the American economy in 1873 when the costs and debts of the Civil War hit home the second was the realization that there might be a way out of that crisis a god-given financial stimulus package right here in the sacred Black Hills General George Custer had led an expedition which confirmed there was gold in South Dakota it wasn't the first time he'd come riding to the nation's rescue he was instrumental of course in saving the Union freeing slaves aa long golden locks he saw himself as a cavalier he loved war war had made him what he was which was a two-star general a Major General at the age of 25 and he was always driven by glory he wanted to succeed as a poor boy he had risen through his his is a ability to fight and he's a warrior after the war he was given command of the seventh cavalry unit and ordered West when Custer arrived on the plains he swapped his uniform for buckskin he won his first major encounter against the Cheyenne in 1868 and began building a reputation as an accomplished Indian fighter that reputation would see him selected for an important mission the geography of South Dakota led people to believe that there might be gold in them there hills but in order to establish whether or not that was the case the government wanted to mount an illegal expedition although if they did so they knew they would antagonize the Sioux who certainly wouldn't take that lying down what the government needed was an aggressive forthright general who could lead the campaign someone who already had a track record with the Indians that someone was stir in July 1874 he left with a thousand strong force one that came with an early American example of shock and awe as firearms expert Gary Harper explains this scary little beauty is an original Gatling gun it was made in 1874 so it was something like this that Custer took West with him yet yes there were two of them in their train he had available to him at any time he wanted to use them how does it work what does it do well it's a 10 barreled weapon if 10 barrels 10 bolts ten firing pins rotary fired each stage of where they're out is loading firing ejecting around you can do this at a rate of fire of up to four or five 600 rounds a minute actual deliverable rate is closer to 400 but it's sort of fixed isn't it why doesn't it just fire its bullets all exactly the same target well it's it's fixed for accuracy you start firing at a mile away you have this oscillating device in the back that you can turn on that when the gunner is turning the crank it'll oscillate the gun just a little bit from side to side but at 500 yards it's covering a width of 60 feet the width of an attacking company would you like to shoot it yourself would I just yeah have a seat there I'll get a magazine what straddle on is yes do I put this on yes put your eye protection on yeah yeah there we go and you're all set to go don't you got them all what you couldn't see wasn't it the casings were held there hot well we're hustling back was whacking into me while it was doing it oh that was a bit of a buzz so I can understand how if an army was coming towards you this would be absolutely devastating but the Indians weren't that kind of enemy were they well no if they saw something on wheels shooting up and they just left maybe they weren't fighting to gain property so they would just leave the battlefield so was this any use at all on the plains uh yes it became a great deterrent that's why you see our forts out west don't have walls or anything they have Gatling guns and artillery sitting there the Indians pretty much left them alone the entire time so there's a bit like something out of the Cold War very much like that as well as big guns Custer took with him the latest in 3d camera technology this is a photograph of the full expedition party it was taken by this man William Illingworth born in Leeds England who was the official expedition photographer his images are incredibly important they capture the landscape just before it was lost to progress and they helped to immortalize Custer Ellen Werth was hired to sell the riches of South Dakota to the American people know that they needed much encouragement once word got out about the gold there within a year of Custer's expedition there were over 1500 miners illegally prospecting on Sewell and the Sioux were outraged but this time Red Cloud refused to fight he believed conflict would spell catastrophe for his people so resistance would center around a new leader I'm at the Custer battlefield Museum in Garryowen Montana which is right by the Little Bighorn River as you can see they've got lots of really beautiful memorabilia including this it's an eagle feather war bonnet meaning the other side of it there it's actually feathers which have been stuck onto a cowboy hat and it's from the the right period have to be careful with that but this is the most fascinating piece here for me it's the death mask of a man who defied the US Army and the American president he was a warrior who inflicted the greatest defeat of the Indian Wars he was also a holy man who became a beacon of resistance this is the face of Sitting Bull he was in his 40s and a respected medicine man when the rebellion began sittin bull' believes that the tribes had to keep the sacred Black Hills at all costs they had to force the miners and settlers out and refuse any new treaty with the government he also warned his people not to move on to reservations someone who would have sympathized with that stance was General Custer Custer once wrote that if he were an Indian he would join those who adhered to the free life on the plains rather than go on the reservation of course and take the government dole Custer's not an Indian hater but he's an Indian fighter and he's an Indian fighter because they're the only people to fight Sitting Bull continued to attack the illegal mining camps his actions made him a beacon for anti-american feeling and opposition from January 1876 right through to the late spring people joined his resistance Sitting Bull had marched his men here to the Little Bighorn or the greasy grass rivers they called it they got around about 8,000 horses to feed and the pastures here provided lovely thick healthy grazing the camp was one of the biggest ever seen on the plains traditionally tribes scattered when friend but people began to believe they had safety in numbers surely no one would dare attack them these hills overlook the Little Bighorn River in Montana in 1876 this was the scene of one of the most shocking military defeats on American soil they're ghosts they're they're spirits there I just I've been there I've been there late at night the wind blows through the trees the cottonwoods down a Little Bighorn I just feel it I mean you get a shiver and shiver up your spine it's a it's one of the most beautiful and horrific spots in all the American West and you feel the sense of you know Custer the Cavalier you know in his buckskins making making his last stand and the Indians making their last stand - because Custer's defeat is their greatest victory but also of course is their death now this is Last Stand Hill the epicenter of The Killing Fields that day the stones in this graveyard have been placed to show where the men fell in the last bloody moments of the battle General Custer died somewhere around here 210 men were killed on these hills another 53 died elsewhere on the battlefield what happened here sent shockwaves through America the Battle of Little Bighorn was the culmination of a rebellion led by Sitting Bull he'd been fighting illegal miners looking for gold on Sioux land the american government wanted the sioux to stop the attacks and sell their land when they refused the army was sent in and the tribes scattered most of them gathered around Sitting Bull who had established a village near the Little Bighorn River the army knew that the Sioux would be somewhere in this area grazing their ponies so from their bases hundreds of miles away they hatched a plan to capture them three separate forces would approach the grazing lands from different directions one left from Montana one from Wyoming and a third force left North Dakota accompanied by Custer and his 7th cavalry the aim was to find the tribes somewhere between them it more or less works they were chasing a large group of Indians but were confident of success because the cavalry saw themselves as an elite group but were they really there were 12 languages spoken in that regimen of 650 men so there's a little bit of confusion sometimes the army didn't have enough money so that her soldiers could practice with the weapons to become proficient at it in many instances the first time that some of those soldiers ever got on a horse was one they joined the army because they were small in stature they were assigned to the cavalry so in comparison our guys our men are warriors one on one far surpassed in here there's the military weren't helped by the decision to leave behind their Gatling guns they thought they'd slow down the pursuit of an enemy they believed would always run and anyway they weren't expecting the tribes to be packing much in the way of firepower but they were wrong about that too in the 1980s an Archaeological Survey of the battleground revealed the different types of bullets used that day after discarding these littler shells which were used in the troopers colt pistols and the bigger ones which were used in their Springfield carbines there were still 43 different kinds of ordnance found which were being fired by the Indians from fifty-year-old muzzleloaders through to the latest winchester repeating rifles which could fire 17 times without being reloaded so much faster than the cavalry and also because they had to contend with all the arrows if just half of the 2,000 Braves had fired 10 arrows each that would be 40 arrows for each of Custer's men they didn't stand a chance Sitting Bull had also given his warriors self-belief courtesy of a vision Sitting Bull had done the Sun Dance and he'd had a vision a vision he said of soldiers coming into camp upside down dead now I don't believe in anything and maybe I believe in everything but there's some serious mojo going on that day and everything that can go wrong for Custer goes wrong he was sent ahead to scout for the enemy Custer was to meet up with general Terry's column coming down from the north but it didn't matter cuz Custer pushed ahead he got there early he was on the scent he was determined to bag the Indians get all the glory for the seventh Cavalry and so he pushed on his guides told him he was on the trail of a big party of Indians but he felt if he scouted the village and country ahead the tribes would be alerted and flee so he made a fateful decision he'd split his forces into three and attack major Reno would approach the village from one direction Custer from the other another group would then slowly bring up the rear with the extra ammunition Custer went to the hills to get ready meanwhile major Reno has attacked the Indian village and as he put it the ground seemed to just grow Indians and indeed they fall come out because of Sitting Bull's medicine they're not running away Reno kinda becomes unhinged especially when an Indian scout standing next to him is shot in the head and his blood and brains go all over Reno's face Reno retreated in panic Custer didn't know it but he was on his own Park Ranger Steve Adelson a guide at the battlefield site takes up the story customer withdraws up to this position yeah and he orders his brother-in-law James Calhoun to form a skirmish line facing the south that's like the first line of defense exactly in for 45 minutes he tries to flail away and hold where's back and what's Custer doing well he's fighting here in the meantime Custer has advanced to the north with probably another 80 soldiers try to cross the Little Bighorn River to the north and capture all the women and children and old people who have fled to get away from Reno's attack but that doesn't happen it does not because ultimately Custer gets down to that place in the river but Sioux and Cheyenne sentries slam the door on Custer and he has to retreat and fall back up the ridge custodies men fell back until they reached the point now known as Last Stand Hill a desperate order was given shoot your horse in the Calvary manual it was a tactic in desperate times to shoot your horse and use the horse as a barricade 39 dead horses found after the fight on top of Last Stand Hill what exactly happened to custom well nobody knows exactly how Custer died or who killed him but they do know when he was found he had a gunshot wound to the head a gunshot wound to the chest his thigh had been slashed his fingertip was cut off and his ears had been punctured by sewing halls by the shine women who had warned him do not hunt us down in the next life and an arrow shoved into his private parts every soldier in the five companies with Custer was killed the massacre would soon imprint itself on the American consciousness the last moments of Custer were immortalized in print and in paint almost immediately well it's an image Everett's created almost immediately after the battle poems were written paintings were made and then when motion pictures came around they simply copied the paintings and just became a mainstay of American population may Custer into the symbol of the Indian Wars and there's something about it in our psyche that we just we just love because ultimately we all face our last stand and do you face it standing up you know facing the enemy looking them in the eye yeah that we all I guess want to go down like Custer these 3d photographs show the first attempts to mark the mass gravesite they even sold photographs of the bones of the dead horses on Last Stand Hill in a way their victory was too great too provocative the army had been humiliated and from then on they flooded this area with more soldiers more armaments it was the beginning of the end of the Sioux and the Cheyenne as a free independent people for them Little Bighorn was a last stand too in 1876 General Custer along with 262 men were killed here at the Little Bighorn a shocked American government responded by pouring troops into the disputed territory Indian resistance crumbled almost immediately I spring the following year crazy horse have been forced to surrender in order to feed the starving people under his care but within a few months of his return he was killed on a reservation for resisting arrest meanwhile Sitting Bull would see out his days in this cabin after agreeing to live under house arrest on a reservation with their resistance in tatters the tribes fell under the influence of a new religion called The Ghost Dance the whole crux of the Ghost Dance was to dance and to pray to our ancestors and that would help bring the world back to the way it was before white people came all the Buffalo would come back the dead relatives would live again and I mean after you know decades of fighting and now being on reservations living on starvation rations being under the control of whites when that kind of Hope is dangled people that's bound to it when the authorities heard that some of the tribes were praying to bring back the world the way it was they panicked their first knee-jerk response was to a rest Sitting Bull but it was botched and he was killed with the great chief dead many people fled the reservations in terror on December the 28th 1890 a detachment of the seventh Cavalry the same regiment that had fought under Custer at Little Bighorn was sent to bring in a chief called Bigfoot and his followers when they found them Bigfoot had contracted pneumonia his followers were in need of food and shelter so the cavalry said about escorting the 120 men and 230 women and children in the party back to the reservation lands halfway home they stopped and made camp here at Wounded Knee if Custer's last stand is the tale of romance and glory for both sides Wounded Knee is a potentially a tale of murder it was snowing and the tribes camped overnight in this Hollow they were surrounded by riflemen and by Hotchkiss guns deadly repeating cannon in the morning Colonel James Forsythe a contemporary of Custer's ordered a weapon searched several searches were done and the commander apparently was not satisfied with the amount of weapons that were found he thought to do were more so he became nervous in and then the soldiers got more and more aggressive more and more assertive and women were crying out to their men who was standing off to one side because the men had been gathered by the commander no one's quite sure what happened next but one thing is clear someone somewhere fired a gun and all hell broke loose this was a slaughter the cannons fired two pounds of shell and shrapnel the rate of 50 rounds per minute and mowed down everything in their path whether it was Lakota or fellow American soldiers at the same time every rifleman had a clear target and emptied round after round into the campsite the killing went on into the afternoon as the soldiers pursued and murdered the fleeing men women and children over several miles these are photographs of the aftermath of the massacre over 200 Lakota Sioux men women and children lay dead the army also killed 25 of their own soldiers and wounded a further 39 this photograph of chief Bigfoot's frozen corpse came to symbolize the tragedy of that day a fierce Blizzard forced the cavalry to evacuate the site with the wounded three days later they came back to bury the dead most of the bodies were piled into a mass grave which now forms the centerpiece of this Cemetery no one was convicted of any charges following Wounded Knee in fact the government issued a record number of congressional medals to the men involved at the time it wasn't the Lakota who got the sympathy it was the soldiers this came from the Aberdeen pioneer which was a local South Dakota newspaper our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians having wronged them for centuries we'd better in order to protect our civilization follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth otherwise we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the Redskins as those have been in the past that was written by Frank elbow who went on to write The Wizard of us the pain of this tragedy runs deep Jon goes in Center is no glasses spokesman I'd say it's still very much a crime scene because of the atrocities you know I guess you did people calm war crimes no there was no war going on so so I definitely was a crime you know I would say John is part of the tribal Preservation Office and he explained how hard has been for Native people here to move forward you've been living ever since it happened with a lot of sorrow and anger so I'm looking for a path from victimhood to being victors but I come from a generation where was not good to be an Indian but I see this generation really sort of like prospering from all these events that have happened are learning to be free thinkers so that's why hopefully that we can tap into his understand who we are again to really regain that power and spirit and I do see it happening with with the youth John's also clear the tribes will never give up their claim on the land or forget what it means to them well the land is our identity this our mother I mean these are things that we inherently have understood for time immemorial you are from the earth we not only just live off the land but we live whistle and we're part of it and so the fight to tell their side of the story goes on this statue is that fight writ large across the landscape of South Dakota this is a memorial to Crazy Horse carved out of a mountain in the Black Hills its roots lay in a monumental snub and a Glen undercoated chief and elder Henry Standing Bear wanted make a statement about his people and the importance of their culture so he asked whether the face of their most famous warrior Crazy Horse could be added to the faces on Mount Rushmore when he was turned down he decided to build his own tribute imagined on horseback by the sculptor corps chalk Joukowsky this is how the finished statue will look when completed it will measure over 600 feet long and stand over 500 feet high this is being built with private donations and with funds raised through the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation the site's also home to the indian museum of north america and the indian university of north america the memorials Director of Media Lauren Ebert explains the philosophy behind it all why what's it all for why is it so important you know education is important in educating a people and making sure that their culture and history lives on is the real value here what does that face say to you Crazy Horse was Oglala Lakota I happen to also be alcohol and Lakota and I'm proud to have that connection to the mountain and to the people when I was growing up the West was all about cowboys not Indians maybe that's because their Wild West story doesn't make us feel that good about ourselves Luther Standing Bear was a Lakota who was the brother of Henry standing there who commissioned that extraordinary Monument and Luther wrote something which I've scribbled down in my journal we didn't think of the great open plains as wild only to the white man was at wilderness and only to him was it infested with wild animals and savage peoples to us it was tame not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustice upon us was it wild for us when the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach then it was for us that the Wild West began next time on the Wild West I look at the gun fighters and outlaws Jesse James Billy the Kid and Wild Bill Hickok we'll be back in the Wild West at 10:00 on discovery as a brand new episode of gunslingers profiles bass Reeves the real Lone Ranger next it's Alaska the last frontier you

Channel: Tony Robinsons Wild West

Views: 622,439

Rating: 4.7065463 out of 5

Keywords: Tony Robinson (TV Writer), War (Quotation Subject), West, Update, wild, season 1, episode 1

Id: JSUQrs4Xr5w

Length: 43min 54sec (2634 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2015