Great Plains 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.

What now?!

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.

These are the Great Plains -

a vast, flat grassland

in the heart of North America.

200 years ago, nearly all of it was covered in prairie

and there are still places where you can see the Plains

as they were back then.

No trees, little water just open space.

This is a place that experiences extremes,

extreme heat in the summer

and extreme cold in the winter

and the wind is always blowing here.

An incredible landscape, but a very harsh one.

To describe this as an ocean of grass is pretty accurate.

The wild prairie once stretched

all the way from Canada in the North to Mexico in the south,

half a million square miles of wild grassland.

In the early 1800s,

the Great Plains were virtually unknown to the

European settlers on the East Coast.

They were sparsely populated by tribes of Native Americans,

drawn to the area by the animals that thrived there.

I'm travelling to the northern reaches of the Great Plains

in Montana to find out what attracted the native

Americans here in the first place.

North American bison, known in America as buffalo.

The bison were lured here by the prairie grass, their primary

source of food, and with their huge shaggy coats they're

perfectly evolved to thrive in this forbidding climate.

It's lovely to watch.

The calves are all sat down at the moment.

There are some very big bulls in that herd,

massive humps behind their heads.

Quite a sight.

Vast herds of these animals once roamed across the Plains.

There are descriptions of the herds being so long that a fast horseman

could ride all day and fail to reach from one end of the herd to the other.

They were certainly a key ingredient in this ecosystem.

Their grazing didn't harm the landscape,

their woolly fur carried seeds

and dispersed them across the landscape.

They were an integral part of the health of the prairie.

And they were also absolutely central to the life-way

of the indigenous people that lived here,

the Plains Indians.

This herd is owned and managed

by the Southern Peigan, part of the Blackfeet nation.

At the beginning of the Wild West years,

the Plains Indians had a unique dependency upon

the buffalo for food, clothing, shelter and even medicine.

The portable homes, or tepees, of the Plains Indians are one of

the most evocative icons of the Wild West.

You can't find a cowboy movie

without one and they are still used today for ritual ceremonies.

I've been invited to witness

one of their most significant events,

a buffalo hunt.

Each year the Blackfeet harvest 20 buffalo for meat to be shared

amongst the tribe.

A special ceremony is performed beforehand

to give thanks to the animal.

We've been given special permission to film

the first part of the ceremony, but most of it will go unseen.

THEY CHANT

Can you see them all running there? Just right on the other side there.

Just right behind you - a small one, right there.

Fight looking at it.

OK, take him in slow.

-Keep going. Keep going.

-Yep.

Right there's good.

That's the heart cavity and lungs.

This is how I do a deer.

He's thick there!

RAY LAUGHS

Wow, look at the size of that rib.

So what they are doing is, they cut through the ribs which is

behind the diaphragm there, that's where all the heart and lungs are.

They separated the ribs, that left the diaphragm intact,

holding back the guts, and now they are cutting the guts out.

But they don't want to spill any of that

because it would spoil the meat

and also these pieces all have traditional uses.

So you've to do this quickly, don't you?

Because you don't want the meat to spoil.

Yeah, we're just going to take the kidney,

liver and cut the lungs away and pretty much everything,

and open that up and if somebody wants the stomach,

they can take the stomach, that's a kidney right there.

This is the sweetest part of the liver right there.

When we hunt elk and stuff like that

we cut that part off

and give it back.

So you give something back to the environment.

Yes, always give it back. Put it up high, say like on this log.

Say a little prayer for good luck.

Let your shot always be straight.

Only take what you need. Never more.

-There's the spleen.

-Yeah.

-Not bad, though.

-What will you use that for?

Throw it on the coals.

Cover it up and let it slow cook and eat it like that.

Real good.

In many societies these parts of an animal are discarded.

Tell me about the hooves and the legs, Rick.

We could use the tips of the hoof

for our bells for a dancer

or for some ceremonies we use them.

We could take these bones right here

and use it for our fleshing tools

so when we're skinning this,

when you're skinning that, we could take that bone

and push the meat away, we don't need a knife.

If we decide to make raw hide out of this, we can make drums out of it.

We can make rattles from him.

We can do many things.

Are you going to blow it up?

You should have had Ray do it.

-Ray, do you want to?

-Just show me.

No, go over and blow it.

-Is he scared?

-No, no, I'm not scared.

-He has to clean it with his lips.

They think I'm scared to blow up this thing!

-Hold it.

-Yeah.

-Put your hand like this.

-Like that?

What have we got here? This is part of the stomach, isn't it?

This is how it'll look.

BLOWING

So you can blow it up like that. Yep?

So then once they are like this you, er...just dry them.

And then you can make bags out of them, like tobacco bags.

-That's how it ends up?

-Yeah.

So it can either be for tobacco or just carrying water.

It's very good. It's really good to see, very good to see this

and it's all being done in a special way which is really neat.

'But the ancestors of the Blackfeet

'didn't have the luxury of 4x4s or rifles.

'Leo and James invite me to see how they would have hunted buffalo

'200 years ago with bows and arrows and on horse-back.'

Horses were introduced to the Plains by the Spanish in the mid 1600s.

It was a momentous encounter for the Indian tribes who were

farming on the edges of the Plains.

They developed phenomenal horsemanship skills.

Now they could hunt buffalo more easily and more often,

and follow them wherever they roamed.

That's pretty good. You enjoyed that, didn't you?

-You broke your bow!

-I know. First time.

You were over excited!

Can you imagine what that was like for your ancestors?

It had to be pretty amazing for them to kill them,

to be able to shoot them and kill them right there, hauling ass beside them.

You make it look easy. But it's quite difficult, isn't it?

Getting right up beside them, staying beside them like that,

getting one shot between us, that was the hardest part.

Well, it was great watching you.

-I bet you want a drink, don't you?

-Yeah, a shot of water.

That was really good.

I'm really impressed and riding bareback as well.

The Plains Indians turned into nomadic peoples,

accompanying the migrating buffalo right across the great grasslands.

In the early 1800s, at the beginning of the Wild West years,

the Plains Indians had the Great Plains all to themselves.

But all that was set to change.

Stories of rich farmland on the west coast of America were brought

back east by early mountain men and fur trappers.

By the 1840s,

a trickle of white emigrants from the eastern seaboard

started to cross the Great Plains heading for Oregon and California.

They became known as the pioneers.

The journey became an annual event with more and more people

crossing the Plains to make the 2000-mile trek west.

The route west across America became known as the Oregon Trail,

but to think of it as one route would be a mistake.

Think of it instead like this frayed rope.

On the eastern seaboard you've got the population

and people are coming literally from every corner.

In fact some are arriving by boat from overseas.

They all converge, though, here

at Independence, Missouri.

This became the staging post for people heading west.

And here families would arrive and wait for others to join them.

When there were sufficient families with the right skills,

perhaps a doctor, a carpenter, a trail guide,

and they felt they could travel west safely, they'd set off.

As they headed west they went across mountains,

the Plains and then across deserts

before reaching the west side of the US,

and there they went their separate ways.

The central part of the journey across the Plains is fascinating.

They'd travel 450 miles taking a route that took them

through some of the driest areas of the Great Plains.

The reason for that's that there was a river.

This is the North Platte river.

And of course rivers mean life

and that was the case for the settlers too.

Because this river didn't just give them

directionally a means of navigating across the prairies,

it also provided water for the families, for their animals,

lush grazing and very often flat ground to travel along as well.

You may wonder why didn't they build boats and go along the river?

Well, there's one obvious answer to that.

This river flows west to east. It goes in the wrong direction.

Whatever, it was a lifeline and they followed it.

The banks of the River Platte

guided the steady stream of wagons across the Plains.

Then in 1849, gold was discovered in California

and the stream became a flood!

The Great Plains became the stage for one of the greatest mass

human migrations in history.

As many as half a million emigrants

made their way along the Oregon trail.

I've caught up with the Oregon Trail on the

western reaches of the Great Plains, at Guernsey in Wyoming.

Here the wagons were forced away from the river bed for a few miles.

It meant that virtually every wagon had to cross a ridge of soft sandstone at exactly the same spot.

These extraordinary marks in the ground are the ruts

left by the wheels of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of wagons

going through, just here.

And you find them all through this area.

There's one here.

When I look at this rut, it looks like a left hand wheel.

So you have to imagine the wagon cantered right over.

It gives you some sense of their urgency to get through.

And, in fact, you can see a cut mark here. It's very faint.

Quite eroded now.

Gosh.

And look at that!

You can really - you can feel the drama as they're coming through here.

There would probably be somebody near here looking,

to make sure that the axle doesn't grind out on that barrier there.

Inching forwards. "Yes, yes, stop!"

Maybe trying to chock up the wheel to get through there.

You really get a sense here of overcrowding, of frustration.

Imagine if you will, the animals, their hooves slipping if the ground is wet,

trying to get through here, of a family desperate, children crying.

Maybe a wheel is shed or an axle is broken and one of the routes

is temporarily blocked with half of humanity pressing from behind.

"Get out of the way, we want to go west!"

You really can feel that here. It's a remarkable place.

Further west along the Oregon Trail,

I meet up with wagon master Kim Merchant and his two daughters

to get a sense of what it must have been like to experience the journey.

Now we've got this wagon. This is quite large as wagons go.

I've seen some even narrower than this.

You've got to take in here all of your possessions.

Let me think. Your tool kit, maybe some luxuries, not many,

things you want to take to start your new life.

But you've got to have in here your food and your medicine

to take you across the continent.

There were six to eight people in a family,

so they would have to bring so many pounds of flour

and so many pounds of bacon, and so many pounds of salted pork

or salted beef.

And they didn't carry canned goods because they were heavy.

But they did have a process where they dehydrated vegetables

and made bricks and that's how most people took theirs.

They dried them and prepared a whole year ahead of time.

They dried out the vegetables.

This would be full.

And that's why along the way, when the animals got weak

they threw things out, because they were too heavy.

It was always something like Grandma's organ or Mom's favourite dresser. They just threw it out.

It was more important to get there than take that stuff.

Sure. That's the thing that astonishes me.

These weren't explorers. They're families.

Just ordinary people, and every age group travelled on these journeys.

Well, I see your daughters have got the best seats,

-they have the best seats in the house.

-They do.

-I think we want to get going.

-OK.

Come on. Molly! Molly! Get up!

You can see why the pioneers called their wagons

prairie schooners in the hope they would sail safely

to the other side of this great sea of grass.

With the wagons packed full, incredibly,

most of the emigrants made the entire 2,000 mile journey on foot!

The flat landscape meant that when they set up camp

after a hard day's walk, they were often still within sight of their previous night's campsite.

So how far would travel in a day, at this pace?

Probably with the right weather and everything is right,

animals are well fed, you could travel 12 or 15 miles a day.

People would have been quite footsore.

And what about the weather?

Because they were pretty exposed out here.

The weather in all the seasons was pretty extreme

even in the dead of summer, when they'd be approaching this place.

Thunder storms crop up in the afternoon.

The wind comes up. And you got canvas there.

You can have pretty severe hailstorms as the prairie warms up.

The geology's fascinating, look at that smooth rock there.

Big piece of granite. That's Independence Rock.

-That's Independence Rock?

-That's Independence Rock.

-That's a good sign.

-That's a good sign. We're right on schedule.

If they made it here by the 4th July at the speed they travelled,

they could make it over the mountain passes before the snow flew.

So you had to be here by the 4th July to be certain to get across the mountains.

Yes, within a day or two.

You know, that was the kind of rule of thumb, so to speak.

Well, we're in pretty good shape because it's the 3rd July.

We're a day ahead of time.

It really was a time for celebration.

Some of the ladies would save their last eggs

and their last pound of sugar to make a pound cake

and they'd tear the hoards off the sides of the wagons

to make a long table for all the food to put on.

And what about music?

Oh, yeah, music was a part of the wagon camps in the evening.

Somebody would pull out a fiddle,

and someone would pull out a guitar,

maybe a banjo, a mandolin and away they'd go.

Whoa, let's stop here a second.

That's what they were waiting for. That's what we've been waiting for.

If you were on the trail, that would be like coming home.

And especially after you've travelled, you've been wet,

you've been cold, you've been sunburnt, you've been thirsty,

you've been hungry and you've been sick

and then you finally get to a place where there's some cause for some celebration.

Well, I think we should make our way down to the shindig.

I think so too. It's time to celebrate.

THEY PLAY FOLK MUSIC

Pioneers on this long and risky journey

shared the basic human desire to be remembered.

5,000 of them inscribed their names here using lamp-black,

oil, axle grease, buffalo grease - anything that could be daubed on the rock

which became known as "the Great Register of the Desert".

Very good.

The elation of reaching the rock on Independence Day

was quickly forgotten.

After two months on the trail,

the pioneers were still only halfway to Oregon or California.

Now Hollywood would have you think that the biggest threat

to the people who came down this very trail in their wagons

was Indian attack - and certainly, that did occasionally happen,

but it was by far the least of your worries.

There were a lot of other things that could get you.

In the baking hot summers, you could die from heatstroke.

You could be drowned crossing the rivers,

you could be seriously injured if your wagon turned over

or an animal bolted or if someone had an accident with firearms,

that accounted for a lot of deaths.

Then there were the diseases.

Every disease of humanity came down this very trail -

chickenpox, mumps, measles, you name them.

And the one that was on everybody's lips was cholera -

that's the one they feared the most.

It's estimated that 6% of the people who headed west

died on this very trail.

That's 20,000 people, buried mostly in simple scrapes along the trail.

It's staggering to think how many perished on the way.

100 miles west of Independence Rock, I find a stark reminder

of the toll this landscape took on those pioneers.

I find this grave site particularly moving.

Perhaps it's the isolation in this desolate landscape

or the fact that it belongs to a young English woman who'd come all the way from Suffolk -

Charlotte Dansie.

She died here in her early 30s with her infant whilst in childbirth.

When she died, her husband dug a grave for her

and for the infant Joseph.

It wasn't a coffin, just a chest lid with brass hinges -

it was the best they could afford, it's all they had with them.

And her husband laid her to rest with her favourite possession -

a string of blue glass beads.

But beyond Charlotte's grave, you can see the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains.

For the pioneers who had made it this far,

they still had a third of their journey to go,

but at least they had made it across the Great Plains!

It's a sad fact that just a few years later,

Charlotte could have made the journey safely.

In 1869, after six years of frantic construction,

America's first transcontinental railway was completed.

The train annihilated concepts of distance and time.

Once, the continent had taken months to cross,

but with America's east and west coasts connected by rail,

those 3,000 miles of mountain, prairie and desert

could be crossed in under a week.

This is what would change the West for ever - the railroads.

With the railroads established, and a lot of propaganda encouraging people to come west,

there was a flood of humanity into the prairies.

1.6 million people headed west,

fired with this thought of the Homestead Act.

In 1861, the US Government passed the Homestead Act,

offering 160 acres of free land

to pretty much anyone willing to farm it.

The pioneers had seen the plains as a barrier to get across.

Now, thousands of homesteaders flooded onto them to settle,

and make a new life here.

Do you hear that sound? That is the sound of money.

And of course, this was the homesteaders' vision -

crops as far as the eye could see.

When they saw all this grassland, they thought,

"We can turn that into farmland."

There was just one problem.

How do you build a house in a land with no trees?

Homesteaders weren't wealthy people.

They couldn't afford to import lumber,

let alone bricks to build with.

But of course, necessity is the mother of invention

and some bright spark said, "Why don't we use the grassland itself?

"If we cut turf, we can use that as bricks to build buildings."

And that's exactly what they did.

It's estimated that there were over one million sod houses

built all across the prairie.

This remarkable building is one of the rarest in North America.

This is a sod house, it was built right at the beginning of the 1880s.

You can see very clearly, the bricks made of turf.

There are some roots.

They found the roots of the prairie grass made for very strong turf bricks.

They laid them so the roots were facing upwards,

and they would grow into one another a bit.

These bricks got the nickname of "Nebraska Marble".

That's how strong they were.

The interior of the building is really in a remarkable state of preservation.

This building was inhabited until 1952.

Since then, it's been derelict.

But you can see how well it was taken care of

in the fact that it's preserved.

One of the secrets was that a tin roof was put on in later years.

We have a graphic picture of what life was like in this house.

A house comprised of two rooms.

Eight children and three grandchildren were born in this building.

Can you imagine a family of eight living together in this tiny space?

The walls were obviously a great home for rodents and birds

and the children would sometimes find that their socks had been stolen

by rodents and taken off into the walls, into their nests.

Before this roof was put on, there was a roof of wood

covered with heavy black paper and sods on top of that.

When it rained, sometimes it would leak

and the father would have to rush out and put soil

over where the leaks were.

But there were certain advantages.

The sod was a wonderful insulator.

So in the extreme heat of summer,

the interior of the house was always cool

and in winter it was remarkably warm.

It's really atmospheric.

There is still life in here now, look at that.

Small communities like this deserted hamlet of Montrose in Nebraska

began to emerge in the rural interior of the Great Plains.

I've come here to meet up with Homestead historian Tammi Littrel,

to find out more about the people who took up the challenge

of farming this landscape.

I've got some pictures here that I've put in this scrap book,

that were taken by Solomon Butcher, an amazing photographer

who photographed many of these homesteads.

-It's great that he did.

-Amazing, yes.

They're quite remarkable. You get a sense of pride in these families.

What sort of people came out here?

Well, anyone that was 21 years old could sign up

as long as they were the head of the household.

So it could be a single woman or a widowed woman.

It could be a newly freed slave.

Usually, they were people that had moved to earlier frontiers.

They were people that were fairly adventurous, but not always.

Sometimes they were like a young farmer in a family of eight boys

and he knew that he was not going to get the family farm back east,

it was too small,

and so he had the opportunity to have land for himself.

You know, to start his own place.

It would be immigrants in eastern cities that are just jam-packed

and they're wanting to own their own land.

Or it would be European immigrants, who were always tenant farmers

or could not afford to buy the land to start their own farms.

You'll notice in most of the pictures there are a few things

that they're very proud of. Watermelons was one thing.

You see a lot of watermelons and what that is saying is,

they're taking these photographs to send to their families back in, wherever they came from.

Because often times, when they moved out here, the separation was permanent,

they never saw their families again.

And so, these were photographs to show them, we're in Nebraska,

we made it, we grew watermelons.

Then there's this astonishing photograph.

Now, I'm assuming they must have built a frame house by now

because it's a very high angle.

Well, actually what this picture is about is she was so horrified

to have her family know she lived in a "soddie" - a dirt house -

that she had Solomon and her husband carry that pump organ

out into the barn yard and Butcher climbed the windmill

and got that picture off the top of the windmill.

So there's the elevated position.

So she has her possessions she's very proud of,

the organ, and then in the back ground you see there's pigs,

cattle and horses and everything that he has

and different implements, farm implements to show what he's accumulated.

Really, this country was built on the backs of ordinary people.

People who came out with a dream in their hearts

and when they found no trees to build with,

they literally lifted the turf and made their homes from it.

Lots of ordinary people. Lots of different cultures.

So it was a fabric of different people that came here.

It's the fabric of America.

And hard work.

And luck. SHE CHUCKLES

The new frontier was there for the taking.

But having made it here,

the settlers still faced a huge challenge.

How to farm the virgin prairie?

Some of them had arrived from Europe with farming experience,

but the soil and climate, even the grass on the Great Plains,

were different from anything they'd ever seen before.

This is short grass prairie - you find that in the most arid areas.

But there are places on the plains where there's slightly more rainfall

and there you get the tall grass species.

And they are recorded as having grown all the way up to chest height

if you were on horseback.

It's astonishing.

But when you look at any grass, really you're just seeing the tip of the iceberg.

You need to look underground to see what's really going on -

take a look at this.

This is a species called switchgrass.

That is a life-size photograph showing just how extensive the root system is.

In one square metre on the prairie there can be five miles of roots -

that's what made the ground so productive

but it also caused problems -

the roots were so dense and so tightly packed

that when farmers attacked them with iron ploughs,

the ploughs broke and it was only when steel ploughs came into the prairies

that this land could be turned into farmland.

For many settlers, the challenges proved too great.

Up to an estimated 60% of homesteaders

admitted defeat and returned home.

But for those who remained, the American dream became a reality,

and their descendants are still thriving here today.

I've travelled to Custer County, in Nebraska,

to meet Kevin Cooksley, who still lives on the land

where his great-grandfather's sod house once stood.

So now we're coming up to where the sod house was, aren't we?

The depression is there.

You can go right to where the well was.

The ground actually feels a little harder here,

because that would have been tamped down.

It would have been, yes.

Alex Pirnie, my great-grandfather,

emigrated here in 1876 from Edinburgh, Scotland.

Do you have any photographs of him?

The one that was made famous by Solomon Butcher.

This would have been Alex Pirnie.

With the great, big, whiskery moustache. Very impressive.

Isn't it?

And in it, you can see the sod house.

When they were living in that sod house, what was life like?

There were no trees.

So when you arrived here, firewood would have been in short supply.

So you used the dried buffalo chips,

cow pies, for fuel.

Once you started growing crops,

corn primarily, you could burn the corn cobs.

They must have been incredibly isolated.

Yes, they were.

Things that come to mind, you know, you worry about the hostiles,

you worry about the storms.

You worry about the poisonous snakes.

You worry about injury.

Because where do you go for a doctor?

Where do you go for medicine?

-And of course childbirth as well.

-And childbirth, yeah.

How many...? You go to the old cemeteries

and look how many headstones have children that died

when they were one month old, two months old,

or women that died in childbirth.

What made him stop here?

That's a good question, and I've asked myself that,

and the best answer I've been able to come up with -

they found a place that reminded them of home.

I imagine that when Alex got here and he looked around,

and he got up on this hill, and he's got the creek down below,

he's 360 degrees visibility all the way around.

He's high enough he doesn't have to worry about floods.

He can see the bad weather.

He can see if there's someone coming -

he can see them coming.

And I think he looked round at the hills

and he thought, "This looks like home too".

I've been fortunate that I came into possession

of a couple of his journals,

and he writes in there in pencil...

Could you read a little bit?

Here - 1898, page 86,

he writes about building this frame house.

"The first load of lumber was hauled by Alex Pirnie

"from Berwyn to build the first frame house in this valley.

"James Short, a coloured man from Westerville,

"came and built the foundation,

"but winter came on us very suddenly,

"and came very cold and stormy,

"so the foundations stood all winter

"and the first nail of this house

"driven on March 2nd, 1899.

"Then we moved into this new frame house

"after living 14 years in the old sod house."

And the frame house, which is still standing,

how far would he have to bring that lumber?

He writes in his journal of going to Grand Island, Nebraska,

to get the lumber to build the house,

and Grand Island is 90 miles away.

It would have involved a week-long trip by wagon.

That's if there were no problems.

It's amazing. You can really get the sense of his pride

when he talks about driving the first nail.

You know, this is a new departure.

It's a new stage in the family's success.

And this frame house is almost a town house from San Francisco,

albeit on a smaller scale.

It's very grand, isn't it?

Very grand. I mean, complete with a balcony and a walk-out door,

so he can step outside and view his kingdom, if you will.

He had to feel like a man who had arrived.

As the homesteaders began to settle the plains in earnest,

the expansion of the railroads continued to pick up steam.

Farming equipment started to be shipped in by rail,

helping the homesteaders tame the wild landscape.

Of course, there were still problems.

With an average of less than 38cm of rain

falling on the plains each year,

finding enough water to expand agriculture was tough.

But the ever resourceful farmers found a solution to this too.

Extracting water from hand-dug wells was hard work,

so they turned to the natural resource

they had in plenty - the relentless plains wind.

Windmills like this are a common feature in this landscape.

It's wonderful technology.

It's very simple and very effective, and can be long-lasting.

This pump has been functioning since 1893.

That, of course, made life so much easier for the homesteaders.

What they didn't realise, though,

is that they were tapping into an incredible natural resource -

the Ogallala Aquifer.

It's porous rock underground here

that, like a sponge, holds an enormous amount of water.

In fact, it spreads under the prairie for an area of eight states.

The combination of this huge hidden water supply

and the new windmill technology

enabled the homesteaders to alter the frontier beyond recognition.

Incredibly, within one generation,

the vast prairies had turned almost entirely to farmland.

The new farms were supported by America's railroad boom.

By 1890, six huge transcontinental lines straddled the country,

with hundreds of branch lines connecting isolated communities.

It opened up new opportunities for trade

right across the Great Plains.

Towns like Dodge City developed at the rail heads

where the tracks ended.

Saloons, stores, and brothels quickly followed the dollar.

AUCTIONEER SPEAKS RAPIDLY

This auction is a lasting legacy of a beef bonanza

triggered in the mid-1800s.

Dodge City, originally Fort Dodge,

was transformed by the railroad's arrival in 1872.

Now that the local beef could be shipped back

to the new nation's growing cities in the east,

demand was enormous.

39. 85 on 8.

Thank you.

Dodge City has to be one of the most iconic towns in the Wild West.

The original front street burned down in the past.

Fires were a common problem in frontier towns.

Today, there's this tourist approximation

and it gives a really good feel

of what life would have been like back in the 1800s.

But what a lot of people don't realise

is that Dodge City was actually founded

on one of the saddest stories in the Wild West.

As the railroad continued advancing east,

its newly-laid tracks cut right through the migratory path

of the great southern buffalo herd.

It sparked a massive - and lucrative -

trade in buffalo hunting and tanning here in Dodge City.

Historian Noel Ary explains how the arrival of the train

would mark the beginning of the end for the buffalo...

There was a big demand for leather.

And if you stop to think,

we didn't have plastic, so furniture,

harness of all kinds, saddles, coats, rugs,

and then as the industry began to build,

they would have one large power plant,

and long shafts going from that,

and belts that came down to power all the machinery,

and they found buffalo hide made a wonderful belt.

The railroad made it possible to market all of these products

that they got from the buffalo.

Buffalo hunters flocked to Dodge City,

where they could earn up to 3 per hide.

A really good hunter could shoot up to, if everything was right,

100 buffalo in a day.

-100 in a day?

-Uh-huh.

Horizon to horizon, there were buffalo.

And so it wasn't hard in the beginning to find buffalo.

One hunter shot 1,500 buffalo in seven days.

-1,500 bison?

-1,500 bison in a week.

There was a lot more people hunting

than I think a lot of people thought.

I know just in this immediate area, they estimated 5,000 hunters.

And, of course, they had good guns.

This was just after the Civil War,

and the Sharps rifle is heavy.

It's 14-16lb.

And they come in all different calibres,

and different barrel lengths,

but they were accurate, and they were well-made.

And if you had a Sharps, you had the Cadillac of guns at the time.

And this is a genuine... This is a historical piece?

Yes, this is an old Sharps.

I don't know the history behind it.

It's been awfully well taken care of.

Most of them don't look that good.

-It's amazing. A very, very heavy barrel.

-Sure.

And when they were hunting,

they tried to get as close as they could to a herd.

And they'd watch them a little while

and determine which was the leader,

which was usually an old cow.

And they could watch by just how the group was reacting to her.

That's the one they tried to shoot first.

If they shot them in the heart, they apparently jumped,

and caused all kinds of a commotion.

And that caused the whole group then to run.

But if they could shoot them in the lungs,

they would bleed to death pretty fast.

And what they'd do, they'd stand there a while and bleed,

and get very sick, and lay down, and that was it.

The other buffalo might come over and smell them,

but she didn't leave, and she was the leader,

so they stayed and continued grazing,

and the idea was to keep them within rifle range

as long as they could to kill as many as they could.

That's fascinating.

So I've got this impression now of the professional buffalo hunter.

But it wasn't all like that, was it?

-There was an element of hunting for sport as well.

-Oh, sure.

And probably the most famous, or infamous, example of that

was on the Kansas Pacific railroad to the north,

the other transcontinental railroad

that went through about 100 miles north of us.

And they...

..touted, advertised, shooting buffalo from the train.

And if they came to a herd,

they would simply slow the train away down, and everybody shot.

And Kansas Pacific did have their own taxidermy department,

which mounted heads.

And there was a...

There's a picture that shows the front of the building

with a number of heads there.

And I'm sure it was a PR-type thing.

It was a lark.

Going to the Old West was the thing to do.

Shooting buffalo was part of the trip.

And the buffalo never had a chance.

Abandoned buffalo carcasses littered the plains.

They slowly decayed into giant piles of sun-bleached bones,

making the prairies so white,

some said it looked as if it were covered in snow.

It's estimated that the bones of 31 million buffalo

were collected up and shipped back east to be ground into fertiliser.

By the end of the 1800s,

the great buffalo herds had effectively vanished

from the Great Plains.

If you know where to look,

there are marks across this landscape that tell its history,

because this depression in the ground is not man-made.

This was made by buffalo,

because this was once a wallow.

It's hard to imagine,

because there are no buffalo here today.

In 1800, it's estimated that there were

between 30 and 60 million buffalo

roaming wild and free across the prairie.

By 1895, there were less than 1,000.

It was inconceivable to the Native Americans

that the buffalo could have been gone.

But they were, and for them,

that had a catastrophic impact on their way of life.

Without the buffalo,

the Plains Indians simply could not survive.

After years of increasing conflict with settlers and the US Army,

they were forced onto reservations.

There was now nothing to stand in the way of the frontier

as it swept west.

With no buffalo,

and with the Plains Indians restricted to reservations,

the prairie grass was now up for grabs.

It wasn't long before industrious ranchers from the south

realised this was excellent grazing ground for their cattle.

CATTLE MOO

I've come to Moore Ranch,

a working ranch south-west of Dodge City.

These are your classic longhorn cattle.

They're beautiful, aren't they?

They were originally brought here by the Spanish,

and farmed by the Mexicans.

But as the United States established its borders,

and the Mexicans retreated,

large herds of these were left in the prairies.

But it wasn't until the buffalo were wiped out

that there was really an opportunity for these cattle.

There was a niche created that they stepped into.

That, coupled with the fact that during the Civil War

a lot of the farms were left untended,

created an opportunity for these animals

to go feral and really breed up.

By the time the farmers returned at the end of the Civil War in 1865,

they found upwards of five million longhorn cattle loose on the plains.

That would usher in a new era,

the era of the cattle drive,

and bring with it that iconic figure of the west -

the cowboy.

The ranch is owned by the Moore family,

third-generation ranchers who come from a long tradition of cowboys.

Hey, hey, hey!

Today, Joe has promised me a taste of life in the saddle.

We'll be driving his cattle to pasture -

a sort of beginners' version of the great cattle drives of the old west.

When the stampede starts, you're on your own.

The 1870s and '80s were the heyday of the cattle drive

as cowboys drove great herds of cattle north

across the unfenced plains to railheads in Kansas or Nebraska,

where they would be transported to market.

These cattle drives would mean spending

over three months in the saddle,

covering distances of up to 2,000 miles.

Heat, dust, quicksand,

stampedes, snakes, drought,

lightning, and dust storms, were everyday problems.

It's no surprise cattle driving was a young man's sport.

The average age of a cowboy was 22.

They worked for a dollar a day.

The cowboy was really just a hired man on a horse,

but he captured the imagination of dime novels, and Hollywood.

Even today. much of that myth lives on.

Joining me at the campfire is Jim Hoy,

an expert on cowboy folk life.

Can you just give me a description of what a cattle drive was?

Well, it was gathering together a herd of cattle.

Typical size was between 2,000 and 3,000 cows.

You'd have ten cowboys.

Ten drovers could handle

that number of cattle easily.

And then you'd have a chuckwagon

to carry the food - flour, bacon, beans, things like that -

also any medical supplies.

You'd gather these together in Texas,

and they'd start them off.

Most of them would start in the spring

as the grass began to get green down there.

They'd follow the grass north, in a sense.

First day, they'd drive maybe 20 miles.

Second day maybe 15, 20 or 25 miles.

Two reasons - one, get those longhorns far away from home.

They got a strong homing instinct.

You don't want them going back where they were.

Also get them kind of used to the rhythm of the trail.

If you got them at the very first so they'd handle well,

and get the rhythm of the trail,

you could walk 1,000 miles with those cattle.

They'd weigh more when they got to Kansas than when they left Texas.

But if they started stampeding the first day or two,

they might run all the way, and they'd lose weight

as they did it.

After you go those first couple of days, you'd slow down.

15 miles was a big day after that.

You'd let the cattle graze grass,

and then you'd put them in camp.

And they were usually in camp ten hours a night.

You'd get into the camp, you'd bed the cattle down.

Leave two cowboys out there to kind of watch them

and ride around them.

Then when it got dark, you'd sing or hum

so the cattle knew you were there.

And the belief was that it kept them quietened down.

It was like a lullaby.

That's fascinating.

I read somewhere that sometimes

the cowboys would fall asleep in the saddle.

They did, they did.

I mean, if you go,

and the cattle were stampeding, running, causing trouble,

you might go two, three, four days without ever getting off your horse -

or maybe changing horses,

but not getting a chance to sleep.

And they would sometimes, when they were out riding night herd

and they were just dead tired,

they'd take some of their smoking tobacco and rub it in their eyes,

and burn their eyes to make them stay awake.

Wow. Drastic measures.

And if they had steers that wanted to run and stampede all the time,

they'd sometimes rope 'em, tie 'em down

and sew their eyelids closed

so they couldn't see where they were going

and kept them from leading the other cattle astray and running.

Amazing. I've never come across stories of them carrying compasses.

No.

At night, when they'd pull into a camp,

when they're on the trail,

if there was a moon and stars out,

the chuckwagon always pointed the tongue towards the North Star,

so the next day, they'd know which way to go.

And if there was a foggy day -

and, you know, you can get lost going in circles pretty easily -

they'd tie about a 60-80ft lariat rope

on the axle of that chuckwagon,

and he could look back every once in a while,

and if that rope was curving, he knew he was...

and so he would go back and pull that rope straight,

and knew he was going north.

One of the things that fascinates me about the West

is the way things come and go.

It really seems like little bursts of gunpowder going off

left, right, and centre.

There's a flash of something, and then it dies out.

So the horse arrives,

and the Indians go after the buffalo with the horse.

Then the buffalo is gone.

And that's the same, true, of a cowboy, isn't it?

Yeah, in a sense.

Two major things contributed to that -

technology and barbed wire.

The railroad, of course -

the cowboy was created by the technology of the railroads.

But that didn't end the open range, barbed wire did.

1878, it's invented, patented.

1883, they began to fence up the XIT Ranch in Texas.

But barbed wire - they could fence off the water holes.

They could fence off a pasture,

and if that pasture didn't have water,

the windmill could provide that water

as long as there was ground water underneath.

But that open range era is over by more or less 1890 -

wide open life with the wide open spaces.

And when they fenced it,

it really changed the nature of ranching.

It changed the nature of the cowboy very quickly.

If you think of the cowboy,

it defines America as its folk hero.

But that open range cowboy - a bare generation of 25 years.

Yep.

# Come along, boys,

# And listen to my tale

# I'll tell you the troubles of the old Chisholm Trail

# Come a-ti-yi yippy yippy yay Yippy yay

# Come a-ti-yi yippy yippy yay

# Started up the trail October 23rd

# Started up the trail with the 2U herd

# Come a-ti, yippy yippy yay Yippy yay. #

When the Wild West hit the prairies,

it was like a stampede beyond any human control.

It burned across this landscape, changing everything.

By the end of the 1800s,

you could no longer find dark ribbons of buffalo herds

flowing across this landscape, followed by Indians.

They themselves were now confined to reservations.

Even cowboys were no longer making cattle drives,

because the landscape had been fenced.

The wild grasses were replaced now by crops.

But in a strange way, the landscape shaped the nation.

And I think that here, in the very heart of America,

in the adversity and tenacity that was shown,

the very nature of the American personality was defined.