Mountains How the Wild West Was Won with Ray Mears

Ever since I was a small boy,

I've been fascinated by stories of the Wild West.

SHOUTING

Stories of cowboys, Indians, wagon trains, and the gold-rush.

But for me those stories are inseparable

from the landscapes in which they took place -

the mountains, the deserts and the Great Plains.

In this series I'll be discovering how the early pioneers conquered

the mighty mountain ranges and the vast expanses of the Great Plains.

How the homesteaders and cowboys overcame extreme temperatures,

blizzards and drought.

And I will be finding out how the plants,

animals and natural resources of this unknown wilderness

offered unimaginable wealth and opportunities for the new nation.

This is Washington, DC.

Now, I can't claim that this is my natural environment,

but it is a very beautiful city.

When you look around here, you see leafy wide boulevards,

neo-classical architecture.

This is a capital city that oozes confidence.

It was the nerve centre - the command control

of the western frontier as it swept across the continent in the 1800s.

The very spirit of the Wild West was forged right here.

In 1786, there were just 13 states in the union

and most of the land out there to the west was still unmapped

and virtually unexplored.

Over the next 100 years, the population would be

encouraged to press westward to colonise the yet-untamed land.

To do so they faced enormous challenges.

In the middle of the continent there was this huge sea of grassland -

the Great Plains.

Then below that and further to the west were great

and very arid deserts.

But even before that, there were mountains to contend with.

Here on the east coast, the maze of the Appalachians.

Then the Rocky Mountains, an almost impenetrable barrier.

And lastly the Sierra Nevada.

And in this episode, it's the mountains I want to focus on.

As I find out how each of these three mountain ranges would

change the course of history as the frontier pushed west.

This is the American Capitol building, and there's a painting

here that really expresses the attitude of the emerging nation.

This is an incredible painting.

The message of this painting is clear - go west!

And it depicts the journey of the American people across the

land from the east coast on the right to the west coast on the left.

These are the poor, the hungry, the religious exiles from Europe,

in search of free and fertile land.

You can see there the pioneers, the men in buckskin,

showing the way through the mountains, helping people,

ordinary people struggling against adversity,

taking their carts pulled by oxen across the rugged mountains.

It's astonishing.

The message is clear - nothing is going to get in our way.

These are people who believe they have a right to the land.

They believe it is their manifest destiny.

It says up here, "The whole of this boundless continent is ours."

Which, of course, it wasn't.

The first nations, the Native Americans,

simply don't feature in this vision of the future.

The early Europeans settlers established

a strip of colonies along the length of the east coast from

Massachusetts in the north to Georgia in the south.

But less than a hundred miles inland,

the wooded slopes of the Appalachians would prove

to be the first big barrier for westward migration.

Well, there are no prizes for guessing why these mist

shrouded mountains get their name, the Great Smokys.

It's a stunning, very peaceful landscape,

and these mountains are part of the Appalachian range that runs

up the eastern side of North America.

1,500 miles of the oldest mountains on the continent.

The great age of these mountains

means they've been worn down by erosion.

They're heavily clad in forestry.

They're convoluted it's a difficult place to find your way

through and it was a serious barrier to westward expansion.

The forest's thick today, but it's hard to imagine that this has

actually all been cut down and re-grown since the early pioneers

were here, but I'd love to have seen the forest that they encountered.

We know that the trees were much bigger.

There were incredible accounts of sycamores that were hollow and

they could shelter 30 men,

and spruce trees that were 20 feet around.

It must have been staggering.

With their big trees and crumpled and forested ridges,

it's no wonder that the Appalachians kept the settlers

pinned against the east coast.

But their fertile slopes promised attractive farming

land for the burgeoning colonies,

and soon the new arrivals started to move into the mountains.

However, there was one fundamental problem - they were trespassing.

This land was already occupied.

It was, of course, home to the native peoples of America -

the North American Indians.

These were tribes with very different beliefs to the settlers

and that would ultimately lead to bitter clashes.

But one of the first tribes the pioneers encountered,

the Cherokee, was remarkably welcoming.

A few of their descendents still live in these mountains.

One of them is tribal elder Davy Arch.

Our people have lived here since before the last Ice Age.

And you willingly shared your knowledge with the settlers.

Yes, and a lot of what's called mountain medicine now was

Cherokee medicine. It's all they had.

And these people wouldn't have survived

if we hadn't took care of them.

This has been here all my life.

When you come to a cane break like this, you'll see a lot of little

stuff outside and the bigger, more mature canes on the inside.

'I've asked Davey to demonstrate one of their most fascinating

'traditional skills.'

There are a few rules of thumb that I try to pass on.

One is that you never take the first plant

when you're looking for a resource.

You always wait till you find the fourth or the seventh.

It takes about three or four years for it to mature,

so we want to look for the darkest colour and the straightest stalks.

And that's exactly what we're looking for right there.

And just ripe to squirrel hunt with.

-A bit of straightening.

-Yeah.

-OK.

Davey's going to teach me how to make a blowpipe.

First we need a fire to help work the cane.

-I can see you're all set up, Davey.

-Yes.

So, come on, tell me about the river cane,

because that's got a lot of significance to you, hasn't it?

I'll tell you, the river cane in the past for us

is kind of like the Wal-Mart for people today -

it provided us with all kinds of resources.

We built our houses out of it, we ate the sprouts,

we made our baskets and stuff that we used in everyday life,

and it grew along the edge of every village.

Well, I guess we'd better get on with it

because I'm really keen to see this in use.

All right, well, the trick to straightening the cane is to

heat it in the fire. And while it's hot, the inside fibres become

flexible and you can bend it without breaking it.

Right, well, let's see if I can... How I get on.

I'll have to be a bit careful.

-Gentle pressure like that.

-It's definitely a little improved.

-Yeah.

'When it's dried, Davy hollows

'and smoothes out the inside of the cane with a metal file.

'When the pipe is ready, the next stage is to make the dart.

'Thistle down is used for the flights.'

The truer you can get the down applied to the dart...

-The better.

-..the better it'll fly.

What would you use then for the darts?

Yellow locust. It's a strong, flexible wood.

So it takes about 15, 20 minutes to whittle out a good dart shaft.

My grandfather used to like find a lightning-struck tree

and make his blow gun darts out of that.

He was trying to convey the power of that lightning to the dart.

The Cherokee use no poison on their dart tips

and rely on their skills as hunters to catch their prey.

That is amazing.

That is truly impressive. That's fantastic.

'Applying the thistle to the dart shaft is a real art form.'

That is difficult.

-And there it is.

-Push the dart down into a piece of cane.

Let's see if I can hit that target with it over there.

Fantastic.

Can't watch that and not want to have a go.

'It seems extraordinary now that the Cherokee shared their skills

'and land with the first settlers.'

Oh, wow. That's pretty close.

-HE LAUGHS

-Try again.

But in the early 1800s it must have seemed like there

were riches enough for everyone in these mountains.

Well, last night, the heavens absolutely opened.

There was lightning throughout the sky and the result -

the woods today are a humid and very sticky place.

But I love it because it's that moisture that makes this forest

grow, and places like this make me feel as though I'm coming alive.

It's so rich in here. It's astonishing.

But to the early pioneers who came here,

this was a fairly dark and foreboding wilderness.

Without science to explain the mysteries they were encountering,

they turned to the obvious source of reference - the scriptures.

What was home to the Cherokee was an alien

and scary land for the settlers.

Their trepidation is clear from the names they gave places -

Blood Mountain,

Devil's Creek Gap,

Abram's Falls.

And the local wildlife was equally unnerving...

..as wildlife biologist Thomas Floyd is about to show me.

-Thomas, tell me you've had some luck.

-I have.

-Is that what I think it is?

-It's a mud dog.

-A mud dog.

-A devil dog.

-Is that a hellbender?

-It is a hellbender.

They've got some horrible names, haven't they?

-A snot otter. even!

-Gah! Let's have a look! That's incredible! Wow!

This is an animal that I never thought I would see in my lifetime

-because it's really rare, isn't it?

-It is incredibly rare.

It requires clear, clean flowing waters.

Human activity has introduced a lot of soil and in a lot of streams.

-So it's losing its habitat.

-It's losing its habitat.

Tell me how it lives.

It's a salamander, but it is completely aquatic.

It lives its entire life in streams that are cool, fast flowing.

-And it's a predator, is that right?

-That's right.

It will take on about anything it can fit in its mouth.

And when people first saw this, what did they think about it?

Well, they thought it was hideous because it lived under rocks

in the streams, they thought maybe it was clawing its way back to hell.

-Hence the name.

-Hence the name.

I find it difficult to understand the mindset that saw this

harmless little creature as the work of the Devil.

So you're measuring the width of the tail, is that a sign of health?

That's a sign of health.

I think they're quite... quite charming really, aren't they?

They really don't deserve all the nasty names they've been given.

Let's get her back home.

'Europeans would never have seen creatures like this,

'and to the waves of religious exiles landing on these shores,

'the Puritans, the Catholics, the Baptists and the Mormons,

'the scriptures coloured their entire view of this land.'

The atmosphere here is so magical,

it's not hard to see why the settlers overcame

the unfamiliarity and started to make their homes here.

Oh, this is beautiful.

Barbara Woodhall can trace her roots back to the earliest pioneers.

Great old buildings.

She has devoted her life to preserving those times.

Life was simple here. It was hard, but it was simple.

They lived off the land. They were humble people.

I mean, there's a real sense of identity here,

isn't there, to be Appalachian?

Well, I say that my heart is knitted to these mountains with

golden threads that will never rust.

It's a beautiful place, that's for sure.

You get to see the mountains change different colours

and every season, every turn has a new surprise or a new blessing.

But when the settlers came here,

it must have been a bit mysterious for them.

I mean, you know, as you come further south

there are more plants, strange things here.

Yes, there were. Thankfully the Cherokee Indians were here and they

had a grand knowledge of herbs and stuff, and they taught the settlers.

They had a wonderful relationship between the Cherokee

and the white settlers. Like, for instance,

this is sweet birch and it's used for many things.

It has the aspirin compound in it, you know

you could treat pain with it.

Mostly we used it for, like, chewing gum and stuff like that.

-Shall we find some shelter in one of the buildings?

-We might melt!

BOTH LAUGH

By the early 1800s, there were thousands of families

like Barbara's pushing west into the Appalachians.

Scottish, Irish, Germans and English

found plenty of good land to farm alongside the Cherokee.

This is a wonderful place.

I mean, I love these buildings - they're fantastic!

Paint a picture for me of what life would have been like here.

Well, you'd have had somebody up

there ploughing that garden, you know.

You'd have heard the wheel on the grist mill grinding, producing

corn meal for the community, the sights and sounds around the farm.

They played bluegrass music, you know.

I know my dad could play the mandolin.

There wasn't a whole lot of time to play because quite,

quite frankly, if you didn't grow it, you didn't have it,

and corn was life in these mountains.

If your corn crop failed, well, you'd have to either depend on your

neighbour a little bit or you would sup from the cup of sorrow.

Very soon, the emerging nation demanded the rich resources of these

mountains - the timber, the land and soon the gold - for themselves.

In 1838, after many years of co-existence,

the Federal government ordered the forcible removal of the

Cherokee people along a route that became known as the Trail of Tears.

The two communities were split asunder.

This old wagon was the only one that's known left in history

that was actually used in the Trail of Tears in this area,

when the Cherokee Indians were rounded up and taken out of here.

And they were shipped off to Oklahoma.

Yes, they were, and they were driven like dogs.

They were treated as sub-human,

and that appalled the native Appalachian people here

because it was the government that did that, you see.

This was a pattern that was to be repeated over the Wild West years,

with Native Indian tribes constantly being relocated to

less valuable land as the frontier moved ever westward.

You've got the fire going good.

A house without a fire isn't a house, is it?

-No, no, it's not.

-Certainly not a home.

What was life like in a house like this?

Imagine ten young 'uns running around - it would become crowded.

But it was home - that's the main thing.

There's no place like home,

and you can make do with what you've got to make do with.

I like these, right here. These are called leather britches beans.

They're green beans with a thread running through them,

and they would take them down and cook them in the pot like that,

and season them with meat and stuff.

My mother cooked in a Dutch oven.

She could boil a dish rag and make it taste good.

BOTH LAUGH

One of the things that immediately hits you when you

look at this lifestyle is how dependent

they were upon these trees here.

Oh, absolutely. We would depend on it for fuel to heat the house.

You had to build your house out of wood.

You could use the barks, you know, for different stuff,

to make furniture.

They made their own caskets, their own coffins,

they made their own everything.

If you didn't grow it or you didn't make it, you didn't have it.

Wood was abundant in the 19th century.

It is said that each settler family cut down one whole

acre of wood a year just for their own needs.

But of course, this timber, it had a much more significant role to

play in the history of the United States.

Because it was wood that would be used to build the carts,

the wagon wheels and the railway sleepers that would drive

the population across the continent.

Joe Currie is a lumberjack whose job it is to steward these forests.

Ta-da!

What have you cut down? Was that a pine to start with?

-We had a white pine...

-Yeah.

-..and a chestnut oak.

That's interesting. That's not a tree I know.

-Ah, I can smell the tannin in there.

-Yeah.

-Sweet.

What species do you have here?

We have northern red oak and two of poplar,

and some higher end species like hard maple and cherry,

soft maple...

cucumber magnolia, bass wood.

Coming from Europe, I'm astonished at the range

of species that you have here.

Oh, and that's just the beginning of it.

This is the most biodiverse temperate forest in the world.

So in the early days, when people first came here,

it must have seemed like a bonanza,

with all these incredible species and so many of them.

Especially coming from, you know, the majority of the settlers at the time

coming from Europe, where the forest had been largely used or overused,

or had already been placed in some sort of intensive management.

To come into a native forest

environment must have been radically different.

Among the first settlers in these mountains were

the ancestors of Sanford McGee.

Sanford, tell me about your family history.

Well, my folks came over the mountains down through

from Virginia, down through East Tennessee

when this was all complete wilderness.

They moved there in 1806, and were on the same piece of land

and living there all the way through to the 1920s.

That's where my father was born in the same

house as my grandmother, my great grandfather was born.

I have some photographs, actually, from my grand-parents' collection.

When they would move to a camp, one of the first things that they

would do would be to set up a dwelling.

This is the way, typically,

they were built all around this part of the world.

So they basically put a tent up and then

they put a shingle roof over the top of it to make it more weatherproof.

And canvas walls with generally a wood floor.

You can see the idea of home.

-They even had like a picket fence.

-Yeah, a picket fence.

These logging camps were temporary.

They would move in, cut down the timber and then move on.

Timber had to be hauled by men and oxen or floated down rivers.

It was hard work.

This was the way all the trees were cut, with a cross cut saw like this.

And this was a cant hook.

This would hook into the back of a log,

and I would just roll it once it's hooked in.

What we saw today, with that, was the way it was done.

You can imagine how long it would take

to move that many logs to the mill.

The lumber industry expanded rapidly,

as Americans logged their way across the country.

By 1900, over 40% of the standing American forest first

encountered by the colonists had been chopped down.

It's a shocking figure, but in the days before coal and oil, the forest

provided the nation's only fuel and its chief building material.

Wood was literally driving the nation west.

Around 1810, just as the settlers and religious revivalists

were exploring the Appalachian mountains in the east,

over 2,000 miles away to the west, a very different kind of pioneer was

making inroads into another mountain range.

From up here, the Great Plains seem to stretch on for ever.

It's amazing, it really is, like looking out across the ocean.

But then of course, rising like a wall in front of them,

is the Rocky Mountains.

They're only young mountains at 80 million years old, and you can see

that when you look at them because they've got these really sharp

edges, in complete contrast to the weathered domes of the Appalachians.

You'll find some of the highest peaks in the Continent here -

up to 14,000 feet and covered in snow all year round.

North to south, they stretch for more than 3,000 miles.

It's only when you get up here that you can really get

a sense of what a bruising landscape this was.

How difficult it would have been for people

travelling across this landscape.

It must have seemed impenetrable.

It's a very spiritual place to visit.

You can't help but be moved by the majesty of nature here.

Glaciers and rivers have shaped the range through its history.

You can really see the power of the water at work here in an erosive

sense, as it's carving this river ever deeper into the landscape.

The abundance of water and the variety of climate

and plant-life makes this a perfect habitat for wildlife.

In the early 1800s, the Rocky Mountains would have been

teeming with animals, everything from mountain goats

and bighorn sheep to elk.

Further north in the Canadian Rockies,

the fur trade was booming, and a trickle of enterprising fur

trappers known as the mountain men started making their way south

along the mountain range in pursuit of the animals that lived there.

See the elk cow there with her calf?

A little drama being played out here.

The calf was in the current,

unsure of itself, panicking a little bit.

And mum's gone over,

given it reassurance and encouraged it into safer water.

A lovely thing to see.

But the fur trade that lured the mountain men here

came with serious risks attached.

The abundant animal population included predators,

like wolves, coyotes, grizzlies and black bears.

(In the undergrowth there, there's a bit of movement

and what it is, it's a young black bear.)

The black bear are perfectly adapted to this forest habitat.

They are excellent tree climbers, with short fixed claws that

help them grip and reach their food.

Black bears are really beautiful,

but you must take care with black bears and not get too close to them.

They're very, very quick.

It's one of the threats that the early pioneers

that came here had to live with.

Bears, you could be surprised by them in the woods.

But there was one animal above all that drew the mountain men

into these unmapped mountain ranges.

I can see some fresh sign here going down into the water,

so something has gone down here and come back.

And it's the beaver.

And you can see here this branch has been dragged up here by beavers.

Now beavers have got these incredible teeth that

enable them to fell trees.

What they're collecting, they like willow,

they like aspen because it's their food.

This is the kind of thing they eat, the twigs here and the bark on them.

And they also use the wood to construct their lodges.

When the mountain men first arrived in the Rockies,

beaver were to be found in great abundance.

The beaver was to play a pivotal role in the exploration

of the North American continent.

And here in the USA,

beavers were the driving force for the exploration westward.

That's what brought the mountain men into this land.

They came here to make money and what they were after was this.

This is what it was all about.

That is a beaver pelt.

So what was all the fuss about?

What was special about the beavers' fur?

Actually what they were interested

in was these short hairs underneath - the insulating hairs.

What the hairs were being used for was to make felt.

When they were put together in the felting process,

they made for a very stiff felt,

which powered the fashion trend for tall hats.

The more important you were, the bigger the hat you wore.

It's astonishing to think it was a fashion trend that would

drive the exploration of a whole continent.

By 1840, about 3,000 mountain men had travelled to the Rocky Mountains

to trap the beaver and other wild animals that lived here.

Some joined fur companies and were organised into military

style regiments, trapping animals in return for a salary.

Others worked alone in this inhospitable wilderness

with the help of one of the toughest animals they had.

Modern day mountain man Stu Sorenson

has spent his life as a mule packer and guide.

So this is a pack animal. Do you ride these animals at all?

Well, yeah, I... It's nice to have them for everything.

-Why the mule, not the horse?

-They're tough.

They're smart. The tougher the country is, the better they are.

They really are tough animals,

and they're very intelligent and they...

They know where they're putting their feet all the time.

They're looking and they're watching. They won't get themselves in trouble.

They don't panic as much as a horse will.

They build a trust in you by never

putting them in a spot where they're going to get hurt.

You have a unique bond and trust between you.

(You're gorgeous.)

Stu is going to take me on one of the early trails the pioneers

used to get into the mountains.

It's been a long while.

How are those stirrups? Are they gonna be all right?

There we go. That's fine.

Come on, girl. Come on.

You're all right.

INDISTINCT CHATTER

Hundreds of miles from any town or homestead,

the mountain men needed to carry absolutely everything with them -

knives, pots and pans, coffee, salt and tobacco

and of course, hopefully dozens of beaver pelts.

On these steep and narrow tracks, you can really see

why these sure-footed pack animals were so essential.

This is...aspen and the bark off that.

Here you are, Stu.

It's going good.

Now, Stu, you've really lived the old mule packing life, haven't you?

For many, many years.

I've been living in the mountains, guiding, packing,

scouting, fishing trips, just because I like being here.

When I go back in the wilderness,

it's just like it's has changed.

You can still live same way, take care of the land,

leave no trace, just move through like a shadow and just soak it up.

It really did take special people to pioneer

the routes into this country.

-A pretty dangerous life.

-Yeah, it was.

What were the risks that they faced when they came here?

Well, drowning was the big one, pneumonia, infection, Indians.

And, of course, when they were coming into this country,

-they were following the Indian trails.

-Yeah.

But what about the predators they had to face here?

Grizzly bears were always a problem. It was dang tough.

They say that most mountain men only lasted a few years.

Either they died, got killed or gave it up.

It was a miracle they survived at all.

I mean, with the conditions they lived under, it was incredible.

I think Hollywood creates quite a lot of myths about the mountain men.

Hollywood portrays these people who were running away from society.

My impression is something different.

I think they were businessmen.

They were looking to make money on the furs of the beaver,

-is that right?

-That's correct.

Yeah, and there was...

If they stayed at home, farming was about it, you know,

and it was just...

Barely get enough to survive.

Especially, if you hired on with a company,

they supplied everything, and you just went out there

and you'd trap and come back with the money.

That was the theory... They would come into the country,

trap and mostly, on the way back, you got robbed by the Indians.

Well, yeah, that happened a lot. HE LAUGHS

-You had to watch your back all the time.

-It was a dangerous business.

Oh, yeah. And you couldn't build a fire in daytime

cos they could see your smoke. You had to build a fire at night.

So you really had to understand the Indians.

You had to think like the Indians.

But the mountain men would soon be forced

to find a different way to survive.

So you had this period of, say, 40 years

when the beaver were very heavily exploited, and then the trade

-came to an end because the fashion in Europe changed.

-Yeah.

When this period of fur trapping ended,

what did the mountain men do then for a living?

A lot of them looked for jobs in the wilderness.

They became guides for wagon trains and scouts.

And this was really difficult place to find your way through.

Oh, yeah, crossing the mountains was tough.

Then how important would you say their role was in American history?

I think it was very important. It opened up the west for settlers.

The mountain men searched out the simple routes through

the difficult terrain and that's exactly where I'm standing.

It doesn't look mountainous,

but this is a giant pass through the Rocky Mountains called South Pass.

It was important to the mountain men.

What they couldn't predict was it was going to be important to

a lot of other people, too.

And in the years after this pass was established,

half of humanity would pass through here in wagon trains heading

to start new lives in the west.

South Pass was first discovered by the mountain men in 1812 and the

very first wagon trains made their way through the pass in the 1830s.

And by the time the railroad offered an easier route in 1869,

about half a million people had trekked through here.

Most of the wagons followed the Oregon Trail to the fertile

lands on the north-western seaboard.

But if you were headed for the promised land of California,

yet another mountain range stood in your way.

These are the Sierra Nevada.

500 snow-capped peaks with extremely steep eastern flanks,

especially dangerous in winter.

It's the last barrier before the promised land 100 miles

that way, the wonderful farming land of California.

What made these mountains dangerous

was the time of year that the wagons got here -

late in the summer, just before winter.

If you didn't get through these mountains before the winter snows,

there was a good chance you wouldn't be getting through at all.

In October, 1846 a wagon train known as the Donner Party pitched

up here at Truckee Lake on the east flank of the Sierra Nevada.

They'd already made a terrible mistake taking what had

seemed like a short cut through the Rocky Mountains.

That led to an unchartered and arduous trip across the high

plateau desert to get to the Sierra Nevada.

It delayed them by a whole month and by the time they arrived here,

exhausted, one of the worst winters in history was just beginning.

They had no choice but to make camp.

This would be the beginning of one of the most terrible

and famous survival stories in American history.

There were about 90 members of the Donner Party stranded here.

Today local historian Gayle Green

is going to show me the site of one of the shelters.

Two families actually built a cabin here

and used this boulder as the west wall and chimney.

They built a fire up against it

and it would come to about the point over here, behind you,

where that log is, and in this small area there were 17 people.

-17 people in a shelter using that as one wall.

-Yes.

What did they use for the roof? Do you have any idea?

The roof, we think, was the canvass and also the pine branches.

-Canvas from their wagon?

-Yes, and I think it was a make-shift cabin

because I think their whole mindset was,

after all they went through to get to this point, they were going to

make it over the Sierras, and unfortunately that didn't happen.

-No, winter overtook them.

-It did. It was an early winter.

And they talk about in the diary accounts of snow steps

-and coming down the steps...

-Into here

-..into here.

This was a very dark, dank area,

and when someone passed it was very hard to get them out of the cabin.

And the conditions in here...

When somebody died, it was hard to get the body out.

Just the idea anybody survived this in the conditions,

it just amazes me.

The winter of 1846 was particularly harsh, trapping the families

inside their cramped and filthy cabins for days at a time.

Their supplies were exhausted.

And when they did make it out to search for firewood,

there were ten foot snowdrifts to contend with.

Gayle, this tree tells a story to me.

It's cut at this height, as you know,

because the snow level was really high that year.

So they were standing on the snow and they cut this tree down.

Now they would have known by then that burning pine is good

because it burns slowly, gives a lot of heat

and it doesn't give a lot of acrid smoke -

-really good for fire lighting.

-And they needed that,

especially in the conditions they were getting in being so weak.

It's a bit spooky, really, to be stood here next to this,

-knowing that this was a desperate survival situation.

-Yes.

Life at the camp was utterly miserable.

By November, they were starving and, apart from mice,

all they had to eat were rugs made out of the skins of their dead oxen.

They must have been in a very bad physiological state.

That's the one feature of all the Indian

cultures across the mountains in America is how resourceful

they were at finding edible roots and saving these things.

They did not have a mountain man and I think that made a big difference,

and one of things I really want to stress is they weren't just stupid.

To get to this point they had to have knowledge.

If you watched your children die in front of you

and cry for hunger... I mean, it was a really sad situation.

The families built their shelters a little distance

away from each other, but they were talking to each other

and we know that from this particular diary extract.

This was written by Patrick Breen, who was staying in a shelter

a few hundred metres over in that direction,

but it relates directly to events taking place here.

"Mrs Murphy says the wolves are about to dig up the dead

"bodies at her shanty. The nights are too cold to watch them.

"We hear them howl. Thanks be to Almighty God. Amen.

"Mrs Murphy said here yesterday that she thought

"she would commence on Milt and eat him.

"I don't think she has done so yet. It is distressing."

So there we are. February, and they are so desperate

they are considering cannibalism.

It's astonishing to think that they would be here until mid-April.

Although never freely admitted,

survivors' accounts of cannibalism at Truckee Lake were

telegraphed across the continent to a horrified population.

It's tremendously important to remember that the Donner

party wasn't an expedition.

This was a family affair.

Less than half of the party was made up by adult males.

Quite frankly, it's a miracle that anybody survived at all.

But of the 91 souls that were trapped in this mountain pass,

49 survived and they made it west.

It was 1847 when the survivors of the disastrous Donner Party

finally limped into California.

You'd have thought that news of that tragedy would put

the brakes on western migration.

But less than a year later,

a discovery was made in the Sierra Nevada that was to trigger

the biggest migration in the history of the continent...gold.

Out of all the magnets to migration, gold was to prove the most powerful.

In 1849, 90,000 men flooded into California to make their fortune -

they became known as the 49ers.

I've come to meet a modern day gold prospector,

John Gurney, to find out more.

Word got out and it was all of a sudden

hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of gold,

and then rush was on from all over the world -

China, South America, North America.

Just everyone flooded here.

-What sort of people were these miners?

-Everybody and anybody.

I mean, you had basically slave labour from China.

If they didn't do their job, they got sent back in shame.

You had bakers, farmers, businessmen, sailors.

A lot of them came up and they made their own shovels or used just hands,

and they didn't have a truck to drive up.

A lot of them either walked up or used donkeys or horses.

And was the work of a miner dangerous?

Well, people died of dysentery, they died of scurvy,

there was no citrus here.

There wasn't much of health care.

If you worked in the water, your feet turned, you know, gangrene

and guess what? There was no-one to take care of that.

Do you have any idea of their day-to-day life?

Back then, there wasn't a lot of food around and food was expensive.

They had, for example, they had an egg scale.

OK, the amount that egg weighed, you had to pay that much in gold.

So if you had an 1oz egg, there was 1oz of gold for that egg.

So they had to continually work to be able to eat,

or to meet their goal of going back home and buying a piece of land,

or having a bakery or having whatever they were going to do.

-How many of them made it big?

-Not many.

I mean, you're struggling to survive every day.

You know, you're fighting off rattlesnakes,

you're fighting off Native Americans,

you're fighting off people trying to steal your gold,

you're fighting off starvation, disease.

I mean, every day was a battle.

You didn't have a house. You had a tent, if you were lucky.

You had to cut trees and make your own place and then,

when that gold ran out, guess what? You have to go somewhere else,

and it may not be a mile down the road.

It may be a week's travel, a month's travel.

Hell, some of them went to Oregon, some went to Alaska.

I mean, just to follow that gold continuously

to keep fulfilling your dream,

or to keep trying to make enough money to go do what you want to do.

In 1849, at the beginning of the gold rush,

it was said the rivers were awash with gold.

It had been pushed to the surface of the Sierra Nevada

mountains by geological forces, and over time the gold seams eroded.

The mountain rivers carried the exposed gold downstream

and deposited it in gravel beds.

All you needed to find it was a shovel and a pail.

So, John, what are we looking for?

Well, in an area like this,

-you see where the bedrock is right here?

-Oh, yeah.

What you kind of look for are the cracks in the bedrock.

-So it settles in there?

-Yeah.

So, as the river flows down carrying sediment with it,

the heavier particles get caught up

-in these nooks and crannies.

-Exactly.

-Right, I'm going to have a go. Lucky shovel. From here?

-Yeah.

-Not from the deep bit there.

-You'll get soaked.

There you go.

-Right then. Put it in the water.

-Right. All the way under.

-Get rid of the big ones.

-Mm-hm.

-Did the original pans have ridges?

-No.

-So it was more skilful?

-Yeah.

They were metal pans and you had to be really careful.

-Right. So what do I do now?

-Shake it under water.

Just shake it real hard, vigorously. Yeah, that's settling the gold down.

And then tip it up at about a 45 degree angle.

-Just a little more of a tip.

-Like that?

-And then...

Well, so you kind of make it a fluid motion.

Bring it up...just like that. Perfect.

Well, you know, I'm learning a few things

-about the gold rush here.

-Right.

The sensible ones went up the creeks, kept shtoom about what

they found, filled their pouch and left, banked it.

Everybody else fell victim to the real wealth makers -

-the people that mined the miners.

-That's right.

I think if I was here, I'd open a store selling shovels and pans.

So would I. THEY LAUGH

-Yeah, I think you would have starved!

-I think I would.

Nice tip.

-I don't want the gold to go.

-Don't worry about the gold.

Trust the pan. That's good.

Now some people swirl, but if you have dust,

the swirl will wipe the dust away.

Nice little wave, just like that. Perfect.

-There you go. Perfect.

-There's something shining there.

-That there?

-That's a piece of gold.

-Whoa!

Wow.

There's some little dust in there, too.

Shall I let you check that? Wow.

-So I'll bring that back down a little bit.

-Don't lose it.

I won't lose it...trust me.

HE LAUGHS

There's your little pieces of gold.

Well, you're very good at that, aren't you?

-They looked bigger a minute ago.

-THEY LAUGH

Well, John, I've really enjoyed this experience. Thank you very much.

It's really helped me to get a sense of the gold rush

and what it was like for the miners.

What do you make of them?

Rough, rugged individuals.

A sense of adventure, drive and determination.

I mean, it's hard to find people like that any more.

I mean, I didn't know them personally,

but to do what they did...

pack up everything to go somewhere they'd never been.

They were a hardy bunch, weren't they?

They must have been to do this.

It's basically what America was built on and that's kind of lost now.

I find it really fascinating that, yet again,

behind the great American narrative of get rich quick

lies another story of poverty and hard slog for the masses.

One of the many miners who left as poor as he arrived was a man

called Horace Snow.

He recorded his experiences in letters home to a friend.

Paper was in such short supply that the miners used to

write their letters one way and then turn them sideways

and cram more words onto the same page.

The letter I have copied down here is actually from the gold years

and it makes for interesting reading.

"Murders are so common here that the people hardly enquire them

"unless they happen to know one of the parties.

"There have been 12 murders within 15 miles of this place.

"It is just so all over California.

"Everybody carries a revolver by his side.

"If a person is irritable or flash and gets insulted,

"the first thing he does is to draw his revolver

"and either shoot the man through or knock him down.

"He doesn't stop to reason and let his better judgment dictate,

"but gives way to the first impulse."

It gives some idea of what a wild frontier that was.

By 1855, over 300,000 fortune hunters had arrived in California

and the lone gold panners had been overtaken by large mining companies.

BELL TOLLS

Gold and other precious metals were being mined

right across the high desert mountains,

and boom towns appeared overnight in the most unforgiving of landscapes.

I'm standing at about 8,000 feet above sea level.

The hills here experience winds that can gust to 100 miles an hour.

There are no trees,

and in the winter the valleys here simply choke up with snow.

So this would seem to be an unlikely place to build a town,

but there is a town here. This is the town of Bodie.

And for a period of just four years, this town really boomed.

What drew people here was gold fever.

In the boom years in the late 1870s,

up to 10,000 people lived here in Bodie.

There were 30 mines here.

In just one year they mined over three million dollars'

worth of gold ore.

Out of nowhere came 2,000 buildings -

a bank, a jail, a telegraph line, a railroad,

four fire companies and even a brass band.

It's hard to imagine today, but if I'd been walking along here

in Bodie's heyday, this would have been a street of buildings

all the way along on both sides.

In fact, it stretched for a solid mile.

Bodie claimed to have the highest and widest main street in the land.

I'm going to take a look around this remarkable place

with park ranger Chris Spiller.

-Wow, this is some place.

-It's good to get in out of the wind,

because Bodie is famous for the wind, isn't it?

-Yes, it is. I'm afraid so.

-Quite a forsaken place.

Yes, and I can imagine how people felt that way,

especially some of the wives and children.

There's a wonderful story about a little girl from San Jose

who learned she was moving to Bodie,

which was renowned for the bad men and the gunfights,

and supposedly her prayer that night was,

"Goodbye, God, I'm going to Bodie." HE LAUGHS

What was life like?

If you were a miner, you would work six days a week, 12 hours a day.

You would be down in a vertical shaft

and then tunnels went out from the shaft,

and it would be dark and dismal.

Ventilation was not good. You could die from the built up gases.

You could even drown in a mine here.

The ground water table here was very high.

If you had a careless operator in the lift, or the cage that was

taking you down, that could send you and the car crashing down

and kill you, several hundred feet.

The deepest mines were 1,200 feet.

What did the miners do for entertainment?

Well, we had the dance halls.

You could dance with a girl for a dime down there.

There was always a show going on.

You...could go out to Booker Flat.

They had a horse racing track out there.

You could go out and have a flutter on the horses.

You also could watch the baseball team -

they had the Bodie Mutts.

They had the gambling halls - those were very popular -

and you had very grim faced dealers.

They always had a gun ready if anyone got out of hand.

When miners and their families moved on to the next big excitement,

they were charged on the roads by the weight of possessions,

so they simply left most of their things behind.

Wow. Look at that.

Goodness me.

The mattresses are still on the beds.

Even a pair of women's drawers lying on top there.

But there were beds in Bodie that

saw a different sort of action, weren't there?

Yes, there were. There was a big red light district on

Bonanza Street in the north end of town.

Prostitutes would entertain their clients

in one-room cabins called cribs.

They were not very glamorous

if you think about Hollywood portrayal of whore houses.

So this is the general store.

HE LAUGHS

It's amazing.

I mean, there are still nails in the bins.

The stock's still here.

Red skinned salmon, baking powder...

Ground chocolate.

Mechanic's soap.

Ha! This is a real glory hole. It's amazing.

-And there's the cash register.

-Yes, still here.

You can really feel the atmosphere of this, can't you?

How can I help you? What would you like?

Yes, I've got two varieties.

-But this is the important bit.

-Yes.

This is where they mined the miners.

Yes, this is where they mined the miners. Yes, indeed.

A lot of people came out west to get rich, but then they discovered

mining was pretty hard work, and they realised it was much more lucrative

to go into business and provide the things the miners needed.

It's wonderful,

a real time capsule.

I mean, to my mind, this sums up the gold rush.

This is a boom town.

It grew from nothing to this.

You get a real sense of decadence in here at the range

of materials still on the shelves.

It's astonishing. But then, bust, it's all gone.

The people have gone. They have just gone.

Right. They go on to the next big excitement.

Like so many parts of the story of the Wild West,

the story of the mountains is one of great change.

Both people and places come and go with the blinking of an eye.

The three mountain ranges of this continent pushed

and pulled the new nation into being.

The Appalachian forests provided the timber for the buildings,

wagons and railroads to push the nation west.

In the Rocky Mountains,

the pursuit of fur pulled the mountain men into the unexplored

heart of the continent, opening up the way for the wagon trails.

The gold of the Sierra Nevada pulled thousands of migrants west

and gave the young Americans the money

they needed to build their cities and industries.

The geography of these mountains transformed

the fortunes of the emerging nation.