Introduction - Scio School District



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

My Dear Girl:... Better... that I had suffered imprisonment than to have you going by another name and running here and there for fear of being known. It touches the manly feelings of any man to such a degree that it is almost unbearable.... God bless you in your wandering.

David King Udall

David Udall did go to jail for a time, as did many Mormon leaders. By 1887, the federal government had denied voting rights to all Mormons, polygamists or not, and federal marshals were preparing to confiscate church property. Then, in 1890, Wilford Woodruff, the church president, issued a Manifesto in which he advised all Mormons to obey the law and refrain from plural marriage.

"The church was being driven toward bankruptcy. It was clear they had to make a change and I think this was a very pragmatic decision to say, Polygamy is dragging the church down, and we're going to have to give it up."

Stewart Udall

Over the next few years, Woodruff and other church leaders disbanded the Mormon's political party, divested many church businesses and drew up a constitution that not only separated church and state but even banned polygamy. In return, on January 6, 1896, Utah was admitted to the Union as the 45th state.

But in Arizona, David and Ida Udall remained committed to their marriage and to each other. When she finally returned from hiding in 1887, they went on to have five more children together -- three of them after their church had renounced polygamy.

The Church could not undo what had been done in practicing plural marriage... Those who lived that order of marriage righteously will have glory added to their posterity.

David King Udall

Friends of the Indian

Let us forget once and forever the word "Indian"and all that it has signified in the past, and remember only that we are dealing with so many children of a common Father.

Charles C. Painter

Containment had been the goal of federal Indian policy throughout much of the nineteenth century, but in 1883 a group of white church leaders, social reformers and government officials met at Mohonk Lake, New York, to chart a new, more humane course of action. Calling themselves “Friends of the Indian,” they proposed to remold Native Americans into mainstream citizens and to begin this process by re-educating the youngest generation at special Indian schools.

They were trying to make white people out of 'em. When they took the children away from the mothers, they just knew they'd never see their children no more.... they didn't think about school. They were thinkin', they didn't know whether or not they really went to school, or were going to be killed.

Mildred Cleghorn

The United States Indian Training and Industrial School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was the model for this re-education movement, a military-style institution which housed students as young as five years old brought from half a continent away. Many Indians -- including even Sitting Bull -- sent their children to such schools willingly, believing they would help prepare the next generation to live successfully in the white man's world. Unfortunately, this was rarely the case.

Still, by century's end, there would be 24 off-reservation boarding schools like Carlisle, plus 81 boarding schools and 147 day schools on the reservations themselves, all striving to eradicate their students' tribal identities and educate them "not as Indians, but as Americans."

When I went to Concho... we all spoke our dialect and we were told not to talk it, speak English.... our Matron [was] a big, husky white lady, her name was Garrett, and [one day] somebody said, Mother Garrett's coming! Well, we all tried to keep quiet, but she heard me. Mother Garrett jerked me by the collar of my dress and dragged me into the bathroom.

That lye soap was about that big and about that high. She broke off a piece and she washed my mouth with lye soap. She said, Don't you ever speak Indian again or I'm going to wash your mouth again. And my tongue got blistered from that lye.

Mary Armstrong

Frank Hamilton Cushing

Frank Hamilton Cushing was 22 years old when he arrived at the Zuni pueblo in New Mexico in 1879, the same pueblo Coronado had attacked at the start of his expedition more than three and a half centuries before.

Cushing was there on an expedition as well, as part of a U. S. Bureau of Ethnology team sent out to survey tribal life before the West's native peoples and their customs disappeared. But Cushing thought the best way to understand Indians was to live as they did, so rather than observe life at the pueblo, he moved in.

Over the next five years, Cushing learned Zuni pottery-making and the Zuni language, grew his hair long and had his ears pierced, wore Zuni clothing and adopted a Zuni name: Tenatsali, which means "Medicine Flower." The Zuni admitted him to their sacred Priesthood of the Bow, after he went through the rigorous initiation rites that included taking an enemy's scalp, and they brought him along on war parties against Navajo raiders, despite the local Indian agent's stern objections.

Mr. Galen Eastman

Navajo Indian Agency

Fort Defiance, Arizona Territory

Sir: It is quite true that I fired, not twice, but three times into two different bands of horses belonging to the Navajo Indians. It is possible that, as I intended, I killed one or two of them, although of this I cannot be certain.... Rest assured, sir, that... when all of our grievances are set right by the Navajos, we shall be then very ready to say amen, and to act all things aright on our side.

Very respectfully, Your Obedient Servant

F. H. Cushing

1st War Chief of Zuni

U. S. Ass’t Ethnologist

In 1884, Cushing exposed a scheme by relatives of a U. S. Senator to build a ranch on Zuni land, and this finally prompted his superiors back in Washington to bring him home. He died in 1900, but even as late as 1938, when an archeologist visited Zuni pueblo, there were some among them who still wondered why their old friend Medicine Flower had never returned.

Hell Without Heat

By 1886, the cattle business was in trouble. Overgrazing had depleted the grasslands, herds of sheep were competing for what remained, and farmers were beginning to stake off parts of the open range. Beef prices were falling, and during the hot, dry months of summer, the herds grew thin and weak.

Then came the worst winter anyone had ever seen.

The first snow came on November 13 and fell continuously for a month. Then, in January 1887, the temperature dropped even farther, and blizzards came howling over the prairie, blasting the unsheltered herds. Some cattle, too weak to stand, were actually blown over. Others died frozen to the ground.

It was all so slow, plunging after them through the deep snow that way..... The horses' feet were cut and bleeding from the heavy crust, and the cattle had the hair and hide wore off their legs to the knees and hocks. It was surely hell to see big four-year-old steers just able to stagger along.

Teddy Blue Abbott

Spring revealed the scope of the disaster. Dead cattle littered the countryside and bobbed in the freshening rivers.

[I saw] countless carcasses of cattle going down with the ice, rolling over and over as they went, sometimes with all four stiffened legs pointed skyward. For days on end . . . went Death's cattle roundup.

Lincoln Lang

Cattlemen called the winter of 1886-87 the "Great Die-Up." It marked the end of open range ranching, that supposedly sure way to riches which Theodore Roosevelt called "the pleasantest, healthiest and most exciting phase of American existence." And it proved again that, in the West, nature could at any moment shatter all sense of human control.

Gunpowder Entertainment

For thirty years, beginning in 1883, Buffalo Bill brought his gaudy version of the Wild West to the world.

As William F. Cody, he had done nearly everything a man could do in the West: he'd been a gold-seeker, buffalo hunter, cattle rancher and an Indian fighter. But it was as Buffalo Bill that he found his true calling -- as a promoter of the West, and of himself.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West promised "a year's visit West in three hours." Every show included Indian attacks on a wagon train (saved by Buffalo Bill), a lonely homestead (saved by Buffalo Bill) and the authentic Deadwood Stagecoach (also saved by Buffalo Bill), plus a buffalo hunt, Pony Express riders, Mexican vaqueros, and for the finale, a re-enactment of "Custer's Last Stand," with Buffalo Bill himself charging onto the battlefield at the end while the tragic words "TOO LATE" were projected onto a screen behind him.

"This is a show about the conquest of the West, but everything that the audience sees is Indians attacking whites. It's a strange story of an inverted conquest... a celebration of conquest in which the conquerors are the victims. And there's something... deeply weird about this.... It's conquest won without the guilt. We didn't plan it; they attacked us, and when we ended up, we had the whole continent."

Richard White

Even Libby Custer, the widow of the Little Bighorn, proclaimed Buffalo Bill's Wild West "the most realistic and faithful representation of a western life that has ceased to be," and for millions around the world it transformed William F. Cody into an embodiment of the American Frontier.

Buffalo Bill I think is the one true genius the 19th century West really produced. Buffalo Bill is an incredible self-creation. What Buffalo Bill knew about the West is that, in fact, it gave you the opportunity to make yourself over, and then once you've made a role for yourself, to inhabit it. The lines between reality, the lived experience in the West, and the mythic West, that Buffalo Bill portrayed for a living, become very, very blurred

Richard White

Final Vision

In 1885, another mythic figure of the American West -- Sitting Bull -- joined Cody's show. Billed as "the slayer of General Custer," he earned $50 a week, plus the profits from the sale of his autograph, for riding once around the arena at every performance. Touring from city to city, Sitting Bull saw another side of American life -- and of his own life as well.

"I think he was probably in turns amused and humiliated by the experience. This was so much unlike the reality that he had lived as a young man, and yet it was a bizarre reflection of that reality too. So he must have seen his experience from a different angle when he was in the Wild West Show."

N. Scott Momaday

Sitting Bull left the Wild West show after only four months, having given much of his pay to newsboys, hoboes and beggars -- destitutes for whom white America seemed inexplicably to feel no compassion. He returned to his home at Standing Rock Reservation, and there had another of his mystical visions, like the ones that had foretold his people’s victories in 1876.

This time he saw himself walking near his home when a meadowlark fluttered down onto a little hillock and spoke to him: “Your own people, Lakota, will kill you,” it said.

Sitting Bull knew that his visions had always proved true before.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download