The West: Season 1

To the Europeans, the West was a wilderness to be conquered, a wilderness filled with boundless treasure, souls to be saved and new horizons to explore. Beginning with America's purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1804, a young country prepared for its own epic march across the terrain of the West.

In the early 1800's, no one knew who would control the seemingly infinite spaces of the West.

In 1848, a sawmill worker named James Marshall reached down into the stream bed of the American River in California, and came up with the future of the West in the palm of his hand. He had discovered gold.

The West had always symbolized hope and new beginnings, but in the 1850s, as more American pioneers poured west to start over, they brought with them the nation's oldest, most divisive issue -- slavery.

After the Civil War, the transcontinental railroad links East and West, and carries homesteaders, buffalo hunters, and cowboys into the west.

By 1877 only a few groups still resist America's westward push. The Lakota Sioux fight to protect their sacred Black Hills, but their victory over Custer at Little Big Horn does not prevent the end of their traditional way of life.

The conquest of the West is nearly finished: In only 10 years, the native peoples are confined to reservations, allowing four-and-a-half million settlers to claim their land.

As settlers race to claim tribal lands, Native Americans take up the Ghost Dance, to restore a lost way of life; the new century marks a new era in the West, an age of aqueducts and smelters.

Changes mark the turn-of-the-century in the West; tiny mining towns are transformed into industrial cities and white settlers displace the Plains tribes during the Oklahoma Land Rush.