Episode 4 Brave New World

"America has been the New World in all tongues,

"to all peoples,

"not because this continent was a new-found land,

"but because all those who came here

"believed they could create upon this continent a new life -

"a life that should be new in freedom."

With these words,

Franklin D Roosevelt summed up the reason millions of people

have been drawn to this new world

from the 1500s to the present day,

among them, men and women from the north of Ireland.

This is the story of people from Ulster who came here

before the United States was even formed,

and found themselves at the very heart of the American experience.

In every walk of life, at every great juncture

in this nation's history,

they've made an extraordinary contribution,

helping to shape its culture,

its economy, its democracy and its values,

and in doing so, they and their children became Americans.

This is the Gateway Arch in St Louis, Missouri,

a symbol of the city's role

in the westward expansion of the United States,

and a monument to the pioneers of the West.

In many ways,

modern America, with all its power and ambition,

started right here.

In 1804, President Thomas Jefferson

commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

to find the Northwest Passage,

a water route to the Pacific Ocean

that would open up trade and clear the way for settlement

west of the Mississippi.

When Jefferson became President,

two-thirds of the population of the United States

lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean.

St Louis represented the extremity

of the mapped American world.

Anything west of here was as unknown to them

as the far side of the moon.

To undertake this journey into the unknown heart of America,

Lewis and Clark selected 35 volunteers.

Soldiers and frontiersmen,

such as Patrick Gass and John Coulter,

who, like Clark himself, came from an Ulster Scots background.

I've come to the mouth of the Missouri River

to meet Scott Mandrell, who in 2003

recreated the journey taken by Lewis and Clark

200 years earlier.

You obviously have an incredible passion for this story.

How did you first get into it?

I grew up sort of staring up the Missouri River,

paddling, riding horses and that sort of thing,

and when the opportunity came along

to retrace this path, I felt like I...

It was something I couldn't pass up.

-You mean that literally, retrace it?

-Literally.

-How much did you retrace?

We were able to retrace about 90% of every mile.

And that was every mile on the right day at the right time

-of the original expedition.

-90% of 8,000 miles.

Every bit of that.

Can you describe the first day? What would it have looked like?

Well, after they would have left the eastern shore

of the Mississippi River, just about seven miles down,

and entered the mouth of the Missouri,

they would have felt an incredible force.

The Missouri was running at a fairly good flow rate.

And they would have been largely poling

the vessel up the river, where they...

On the keelboat and the pirogues, they would have

essentially walked the boat with long poles

and forced themselves upstream.

And with it being 5 to 7 feet tall,

in some cases they were also cordelling.

Cordelling was to actually use a rope to pull the boat.

So, the men would have been in the water, on the boats poling,

and they would have been the largest boats

to have ever went up the Missouri River ever in history.

Do we know much about the people who made up that expedition...

-We do.

-..and their backgrounds?

-A great deal about them, actually.

-Yeah?

It's believed that about 11 members of the expedition

were what we referred to here as Scots Irish,

and had a background that was from the northern British Isles.

-So nearly a third of them?

-That's right.

You know, they weren't necessarily always the nicest guys.

This was a pretty rough and tumble crew.

And they had to be. I mean they were

completely unsupported from the time they,

you know, got maybe 16 miles west of St Louis.

There was no going back, and there was no Walmart.

In addition to finding a route to the Pacific,

expedition members were to keep a written account of the journey,

the Native American tribes they encountered,

and the new plants and animals they discovered.

I can tell you, having taken the trip myself,

there were mornings where I'd read the journey entry every morning,

and then I would read that day's journey entry every night,

and there were so many days that, at the end of the day,

I would have this epiphany,

and an understanding of that journal entry

that I didn't have in the morning.

For example, when they saw the Little Rockies.

The Little Rockies are east of Great Falls, Montana.

It's an outcropping of the Rocky Mountains.

They thought they were at the mountains,

because you're down in the river and you see the outcropping,

this little bit of the Rocky Mountains off in the distance.

And they thought "Oh, surely we're there."

Well, they weren't. There were still another 400 miles, you know?

The journals also reveal how Lewis and Clark

drew on the local knowledge of the Native Americans.

A 16-year-old Shoshone girl, Sacagawea,

later became famous for her role as their guide and interpreter.

Did the expedition depend on the help of the Native Americans?

I think they might have indeed survived.

Whether or not they would have accomplished their roles,

that's a different thing.

I think that that might be a less likely answer.

Was the expedition successful?

I believe it was,

because by Lewis and Clark making this trip with the men,

they made this land crossing, so when they did this, they sort of

gave a concrete fruition to Jefferson's vision

of a continental nation.

There were, you know...

I think it was 122 different species of animal,

178 plants, approximately, that were

recorded for the first time.

There was a lot of really ground-breaking things that just

happened through their exploration and understanding of the continent,

the topography, the geology and all of those things.

So, I think of it as the first chapter

in the book of our history as a nation.

The Lewis and Clark expedition,

or the Corps of Discovery, as it became known, changed America.

It opened up the West for farmers and merchants,

and families hungry for land and a new life.

And the descendants of people from Ulster were central

to this defining moment in American history,

and to the westward expansion it created all the way to California.

Yet 30 years after the Lewis and Clark expedition,

only a handful of the hardiest pioneers

had travelled to the west coast.

All that changed in 1848,

with the discovery of gold in California.

Prospectors came from all over the world

in the hope of striking it rich.

Among them was 21-year-old James Irvine

from Annahilt in County Down.

He and his brother emigrated to New York in 1846

at the height of the famine in Ireland.

But when news of the gold rush reached the east coast,

James headed west.

James Irvine didn't make his money from gold.

But by selling goods to other miners,

he amassed a big enough fortune

to buy a stake in a 100,000-acre ranch

here in Southern California,

and just below me is the city that today bears his name.

How does a town get to be named after a man from Northern Ireland?

That's a really interesting story!

I think... Well, it comes from the name James Irvine,

the man who came here in 1864.

And he came here from San Francisco

with three other investors,

and they purchased this land.

It was about 110,000 acres.

And he was able to buy out the other partners, eventually?

He did. In 1876, he got full control of the land here.

He bought out his partners and became sole owner of what was about

one-fifth of what would later become Orange County.

James Irvine had a lot of land and a lot of influence,

but he wasn't afraid to make enemies,

as the Southern Pacific Railway Company found out.

People were so anxious to have the railroad line come in so they could

sell their crops, get them to market,

and travel themselves.

So at the time,

railroads like the Southern Pacific were very used to being able to just

lay tracks and build and go wherever they wanted.

And in order to get from Los Angeles to San Diego,

you had to come across the Irvine Ranch.

And so they just kind of started

what they did in a lot of places, which is laying down tracks.

But when they came across the Irvine Ranch, they had a bit of an issue.

James Irvine REALLY didn't like the owner of the Southern Pacific,

and he refused him permission to lay a railroad through his land.

A final confrontation happened in 1887, when the Southern Pacific...

Irvine had died, the land was in trust

waiting for his son to inherit it,

and so, they thought this is the perfect time.

There's nobody here mining the ranch.

And they started laying tracks.

But what happened was, George Irvine,

James Irvine's brother, who was the ranch manager at the time,

met them at the tracks, the workers,

with rifles and shotguns and got them off the land,

and stopped them from laying the tracks,

and stopped the Southern Pacific from coming across the Irvine Ranch.

Shortly after that, the Santa Fe was given the right,

their rival was given the right to go across the Irvine Ranch.

So, James Irvine posthumously got his right of way.

THEY LAUGH

When James died, the ranch was passed his son,

James Harvey Irvine.

He's the one who really kind of turned this into a large-scale

agricultural operation.

They had some wonderful success with growing lima beans here.

At one point, the Irvine Ranch was the number one

private producer of lima beans in the world.

After the Second World War,

the Irvines came under increasing pressure

to sell their land for development.

And in the 1960s, they came up with a remarkable plan...

to build their own city.

-A master plan.

-A master plan, exactly.

They wanted to create a community,

they wanted to create a lifestyle here.

So it was an interesting time in the...

1960, that point of time in America was a very optimistic time.

And the main focus and the impetus of getting it all started

was the University of California was looking for a new campus.

So, this was the perfect timing.

They needed a new campus,

the Irvine company was kind of looking for something

to focus their development here.

And it was a good marriage.

Do you ever wonder what

James Irvine would have made of all that?

Well, you know, I've thought about that a lot,

about what James Irvine would have thought of

what has happened in this town that has his name.

I think he would really enjoy the fact that there was a city

so founded on education.

It was definitely a very important thing in the Irvine family,

for education, so I think they would like the fact that

a city named after them was based on a university

and the whole foundation of learning that's here.

Despite having made his money in business,

ultimately it was land that mattered to James Irvine.

That commodity, so treasured by Ulster migrants.

He arrived in America,

one of hundreds of thousands fleeing the famine in Ireland,

but such was his contribution to Southern California

that his name will be remembered here for generations to come.

Those Ulster Scots settlers of the 19th century

could not have imagined a place like Hollywood.

Yet it, too, is part of the story of Ulster migration,

a magnet for our brightest stars of stage and screen,

and home to one of the most revered magicians of his generation -

a former medical graduate from Belfast

called Billy McComb.

This is for golfers.

You will love this. This is, would you believe, a hole in one.

There's the one.

There is the hole.

Born in 1922 into a middle-class Presbyterian family,

educated at Portora Royal School and Queen's University,

Billy gave up a career in medicine

to pursue a dream that would lead him here,

to the Magic Castle in Hollywood.

This seems like a very special place. Where are we?

Well, this is the clubhouse for the Academy of Magical Arts.

It's called the Magic Castle.

This was created as a place for magicians just to be able to

hang out and do card tricks for their friends.

So, it's known worldwide,

and everybody wants to have performed at the Magic Castle.

How important was the Magic Castle to Billy McComb?

Well, it really became I would say the second half of his life.

He first came to the States in the 1960s.

But in 1976, he won

the Visiting Magician of the Year Award here.

He went on to join the board of directors.

He won a Creative Fellowship,

a Performing Fellowship and also the Masters Fellowship,

which is the highest honour the Academy of Magic Arts

can give to a performer.

That's how much esteem he was held in by the Academy.

What was distinctive about his approach to magic?

Billy, although most of his tricks were standard effects,

he would perform them with twists and turns,

first of all, that you'd never seen before, so it would fool you.

But then he would...

He had this running commentary that you were never quite sure -

are you seeing a comedian or are you seeing a magician?

Billy is remembered by the fraternity of magicians

for his contributions and his style.

We've all taken pieces of Billy.

Or that Billy has given us, actually.

Billy worked with some of the biggest names in show business,

appeared in films and on television,

and was still performing until his death in 2006.

Billy McComb did what every aspiring artist

who comes to Hollywood hopes to do.

He realised his dream,

and for him that was a life creating magic,

and sharing his passion for the art of illusion

with audiences here and around the world.

But not every migrant finds the new life they are looking for.

100 miles north of Hollywood

is a reminder of the dark side of the American Dream.

A time when California tried to turn migrants away,

and a story that was brought to the attention of the world

by a Nobel Prize-winning writer with roots in Ulster.

This is Arvin Camp,

built by the federal government to house migrants

arriving in California during the Great Depression,

and immortalised in John Steinbeck's novel,

The Grapes Of Wrath.

# That old dust storm

# Killed my baby

# But it can't kill me, Lord

# And it can't kill me

# That old dust storm... #

Steinbeck tells the story of the biggest internal migration

in US history.

Between 1931 and 1940,

more than 2.5 million people

were driven by drought and dust storms

to abandon their farms in Oklahoma,

Kansas, Colorado and Texas,

and many headed west to California in search of work.

He describes that great movement west as a biblical exodus,

a people suffering squalor, exploitation,

hunger and violence

as they travel to the promised land.

Then, when he turns to Route 66, the main migration road,

he says, "66 is the path of a people in flight.

"Refugees from dust and shrinking land,

"from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership,

"from the desert's slowly northward invasion,

"from the twisting winds."

# ..Lord, and it can't kill me... #

Like Steinbeck himself,

many of the migrants he wrote about

were the descendants of farmers from Ulster.

His own grandfather came from a farm outside Ballykelly

in County Londonderry,

and settled in the Salinas Valley in California,

known as the salad bowl of the world.

To find out more about Steinbeck

and his maternal grandfather, Sam Hamilton,

I've come to the Steinbeck home in Salinas

to meet historian Carol Robles.

Well, Sam was born, as we know, in Northern Ireland.

And the story goes that he lied about his age

to get on a ship to go to New York.

And he arrived in New York, 1846.

So, you know, that's an important time in American history.

Gold was discovered, it was green, it was wonderful.

Many of the things that Steinbeck put into Grapes Of Wrath

about why the Okies came to California,

the green, the pastures, everything growing, prosperity,

so I'm sure Sam was hearing that in New York

in the mid-1800s.

So, he came to California.

So, a migrant farmer who settles in the west coast of America

and within two generations

produces a grandson who wins a Nobel Prize for Literature.

-It's one incredible story, isn't it?

-Well, it certainly is.

And I think a lot of that credit goes to the family.

Even though they were farming,

they were storytellers.

And John makes reference in East Of Eden to Sam

appreciating good literature.

We know that the family really cared about education.

To go to high school in the late 1800s

was unusual,

but he sent his kids to school.

So, we have here a person

of a strong character.

"I'm not going to put him to work on the farm,

"they're going to get an education first."

This is Sam Hamilton's ranch.

It's a place John Steinbeck knew very well.

He spent a great deal of his childhood here.

And in 1952, he set both the ranch and his grandfather

at the heart of one of his best-known novels, East Of Eden.

It is his most ambitious novel,

a story of good and evil,

of legacy and destiny,

in which the character of Sam Hamilton

stands for the integrity and strength

of those early settlers in the Salinas Valley.

Steinbeck writes that young Samuel Hamilton

came from the north of Ireland, and so did his wife.

He was the son of small farmers,

neither rich nor poor,

who had lived on one land hold

and in one stone house for hundreds of years.

"When Samuel and Liza came to the Salinas Valley," he wrote,

"All the level ground was taken.

"But there was still marginal land to be homesteaded.

"Taking a quarter section for himself, his wife,

"and his subsequent children,

"the ranch eventually grew to almost 2,000 acres."

Sam Hamilton thought of himself as a frontiersman and a pioneer.

He didn't look back to his roots in Ireland.

As Steinbeck puts it, "He was a busy man.

"He had no time from nostalgia.

"The Salinas Valley was the world."

But in 1952, the same year East Of Eden was published,

John Steinbeck travelled to Northern Ireland

in search of his ancestral home.

John looked forward to and dreaded the visit to Ireland.

He didn't know in what he was going to see.

He wrote a story in Collier's magazine in January of 1953

about his visit to Ireland, and he says,

"Every person that has even a drop of Irish blood

"has to come to Ireland and see it."

So, I think inside of him

was this desire to see his roots.

He had been writing about the Hamiltons through East Of Eden,

East Of Eden had been published, 1952,

so, "OK, I've been reading about all this,

"I've been writing about all this, let's go see."

And he tells about writing...

driving through the little area where his family was really from

and he said, "We didn't even know we'd gone through.

"It was four houses!"

But that visit to Ballykelly had a profound effect on him.

He would describe it as, "The seat of my culture,

"the soil of my background,

"the one full-blown evidence of a thousand years of family."

The Salinas Valley became John Steinbeck's creative universe.

It was here that he found his voice as a writer.

Eventually, some would describe him

as the voice of America.

An America of stories,

including the story of a young farm lad

from the north of Ireland

who settled here in California.

150 years ago, it was gold that lured people

from all over the world to California,

and when immigrants left the north of Ireland,

they often said goodbye for ever.

Today, it's Silicon Valley that brings entrepreneurs here,

and the world has never been so connected.

I've come to San Francisco to meet a woman

from Sion Mills in County Tyrone

who works at the very heart of the modern-day gold rush.

Sarah Friar is the chief financial officer

of the global payments company, Square.

Can we start with how you got to America, when you came to America...

-Sure.

-..and why you stayed?

-Yeah.

-So I came in '98.

It was... I didn't really realise at the time,

but the dot-com boom was really starting to take off.

And I came out to go to Stanford, to go to business school.

That was me, '98, straight off a plane into, you know...

I thought it was the Garden of Eden I'd landed in.

It was the most beautiful place.

Tech is a wonderful industry to work in,

because you're working with, you know,

this total melting pot of people who've come from all over the world.

That's the amazing part of Silicon Valley's journey,

is that it does just draw these people

who believe that they can start companies,

they can do crazy things, self-driving cars, you name it.

You know, what we're going to see in our world

over the next 10, 20 years,

someone out there is thinking about it right now and maybe

writing some lines of code that make it actually happen.

Do you really like living in the United States?

-I do. I do.

-How different is it to what you're used to?

You know, what I love about the US is I do feel

that there is this ability to do anything you want.

It's the amazing American Dream.

I miss the sense of humour of the Northern Irish.

So, I now, once in a while,

will fall foul of my brother's deep sarcasm,

where I'm not realising it's sarcasm,

and I'm becoming very sincere

and earnest about everything, and that's very American.

-You had the irony bypass.

-Yeah. Totally.

It horrifies me.

I see my husband wearing white socks a lot,

and it doesn't bother me as much as it used to.

I'm not sure how much you know about the history of Irish people,

Northern Irish people, coming to America.

Do you feel like you're part of that continuing story,

or chain of stories?

I think about, you know, more my mum's family.

A whole bunch of them migrated to Canada.

They're the classic Ulster Protestant farming stock,

and those first couple of winters were so hard

that they ultimately went back to Northern Ireland.

It does make me, you know...

Again, it comes back to how hard it is for that migrant group,

and how strong they must have been to have just left,

cos I can fly home and be home

in 24 hours, door to door.

And to just know that that wasn't available to you

-is just almost heartbreaking, right?

-Yeah.

Because you never lose that part of you, right,

that is still at home in Northern Ireland.

On the face of it, Sarah has little in common with those early pioneers

who forged a trail to the American West.

Yet it's the ability of those Ulster Scots migrants

to assimilate within their adopted country,

along with the diversity of their experience

and contribution to this land

that links her story to theirs.

The men and women from Ulster who made their home

here in the United States did so for many different reasons.

Someone were migrants desperate for a new life.

Some were entrepreneurs pursuing a new opportunity.

Some were dreamers exploring a new world.

But however they got here, their influence is everywhere to be seen.

In the literature, the music, the politics, the culture.

The values of this, their brave new world.