Deserts 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?!

GUNSHOT

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.

The pioneers who headed west across America in the 1840s

really were remarkable people,

but I don't think anything could possibly have prepared them

for this - the desert.

It's hard to get a sense of scale of this vast landscape.

One way to appreciate just how intimidating it must have been

to new arrivals is to see it from the air.

This was the last great frontier.

It wasn't somewhere the immigrants wanted to settle.

The desert was so hostile it was to be avoided wherever possible,

and only ventured across in extreme circumstances.

8% of the United States is arid land, some of it classified

as the harshest desert to be found anywhere on the planet.

This is the great Monument Valley. Stunning, isn't it?

Looks really green at the moment because this is the monsoon season.

But it is a desert. They only get eight inches of rain a year here.

You can be burned in the daytime,

but at night the elevation, coupled with clear skies,

means that the temperatures plummet.

This high desert can be a very cold place, too.

The deserts of North America lie in the southwest of the continent.

The Great Basin Desert is a cold desert sandwiched on a high plateau

between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada.

Further south are America's three hot deserts -

the Mojave, the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts.

But I'm beginning my journey in Monument Valley.

This stunning landscape's not only scorching hot and bone dry,

it's convoluted and rocky,

the result of millions of years of battering

by the Earth's geological forces.

160 million years ago,

Monument Valley lay under a vast inland sea

which deposited a thick bed of sandstone.

100 million years later,

volcanic activity tilted and folded the Earth's surface,

leaving these great sheets of sandstone pointing skyward.

The wind has been carving out these amazing rock pillars ever since.

This is a really distinctive landscape.

You've got the flat-topped mesas,

the small hills and buttes, the big ones,

very distinctive and very familiar

because this has been the backdrop of so many movies.

In fact, this is called John Ford Point.

One of my favourite movies was made here, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon,

and today of course, tourists flock here to photograph this landscape

and be inspired by it. But they also have a chance to meet

the native people for whom this is their traditional homeland -

the Navajo.

There were many Native American tribes living in the deserts

in the early 1800s, with names like the Hopi, the Apache, the Navajo.

Each adapted differently.

Some, like the Apache, were warriors

but most - like the Navajo - were farmers, who in addition to hunting

and gathering learnt to exploit the precious resources of the desert.

Unlike the nomadic tribes of the Great Plains,

the Navajo were farmers and settled in this harsh landscape.

Their traditional homes, called hogans,

were supported by a wooden frame, coated in thick mud

sun-baked into a rock-hard shell.

These thick walls would be cool in summer,

and in winter very effective at retaining heat.

The packed earth was a simple, local and abundant building material,

but the wooden logs were much scarcer in this desert landscape

and were highly prized.

There are still a few hogans on the property of Navajo elder,

Effie Haliday.

These logs were from my grandpa.

So, when my grandpa passed on, the wood was given to my mum.

So, let me get this right,

-so the wood's been used in more than one hogan?

-Yeah.

Because you save the logs,

-because there are no trees here?

-Yeah, mm-hm.

-Can we look inside?

-Yes.

-It's a lot cooler in here, isn't it?

-Mm-hm.

-It's nice,

there's a nice atmosphere in here.

I mean, these are absolutely perfect for these conditions, aren't they?

-Mm-hm.

-I can see some bark and things.

Yes, they put all the barks that they have, you know,

trim all those logs off and after that they pack it down with the mud.

Every time it rains and it starts washing the mud off,

you repack it and then pound it down with a shovel

and then later on it kind of bakes the clay, hard as a rock.

-It's beautiful in here.

-Mm-hm. Shall we have something to eat?

Yes, why not? That's a good idea.

-It's about that time, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-Looks like we might get rain.

-Yeah.

THUNDER RUMBLES

Something's cooking.

'Effie's daughters and granddaughter have already got a traditional

'Navajo lunch under way - blue corn mush and frybread.'

THUNDER RUMBLES

-That's looking delicious.

-There we go.

-And you got it just done before the rain.

-Yes.

-Smells good.

'It's wonderful to be with Effie's family.

'Navajo society is matriarchal,

'meaning the woman is at the centre of their belief system,

'the source of wisdom.

'Her knowledge and possessions are passed on to her daughters

'and granddaughters, just as Effie has inherited this hogan

'from her mother, and her grandmother before that.'

It has a little bit of corn and you can kind of dip in to it.

That's delicious.

They also pass on their history through storytelling,

and some of those stories are pretty dark.

Like all American Indian tribes,

the Navajo were under threat from the pioneers.

Beginning in 1825, the US Government started rolling out a plan

across the continent to subdue the American Indian tribes

by restricting them to large parcels of land called reservations.

Sometimes the reservations were hundreds of miles away

from their traditional homelands.

For nomadic tribes unable to hunt,

and for farming tribes unfamiliar with the new land,

it was a disaster.

But when they resisted they were relocated by force.

One of the most brutal of all of these exiles

was inflicted on the Navajo.

In 1846, the US army arrived in the Navajo's territory to claim it

for the United States from neighbouring Mexico.

For 20 years they attempted to subdue the desert tribes,

including the Navajo, with little success.

In a final showdown, the US Government force-marched

8,000 Navajo tribes people for 350 miles across the desert,

from their homes in northern Arizona,

down to Fort Sumner in New Mexico.

The conditions were appalling. During their four-year exile,

thousands of Navajo died from disease or starvation

until finally a treaty was signed

allowing them to return to their homelands.

Of course, by this time, many lives had been lost,

including most of Effie's ancestors.

My great-great-great grandma,

her name was Four Horned Lady.

And she remembered they roll her up in a big gunny bag

and she went and dug a hole and wiggled herself up.

-She took off like a rabbit and ran and ran and ran.

-Good for her.

But then she noticed that she couldn't walk any more,

and her feet were full of stickers and rocks and they were swollen

and red and she climbed a very big tree.

In the morning she would wake up with a lot of frost on her blanket

and she would just kind of take those and make it into her drinking water.

And then during the day, you know,

she took some yucca or some roots

to make herself a sandal so she can walk on it.

That's what she was doing day after day

and she would still crawl around for berries to feed herself.

She got captured again and this time

she was captured with her mum, her grandma.

She looked at her grandma and her mum and they got tired

from walking and they just threw her in the wagon and they died.

This is when they were force marched to Fort Sumner,

-which is, what, 350 miles or so?

-Mm-hm.

And she survived again.

But a lot didn't survive?

Yup, her family didn't survive.

Great-great Grandma used to say,

"None of the family would be here

"if I never had escaped that long walk."

Effie's ancestral grandmother survived

because she knew the desert.

She knew how to find water, collect berries and how to protect her feet.

You can get a real sense of the hardship and danger the Navajo faced

by seeing what happens to immigrants who try to cross the desert today.

Down south, in the Sonoran Desert,

I'm meeting up with coroner Dr Bruce Anderson.

How many deaths are you seeing in the desert?

Just under 200 a year for the last dozen years

-and that comes to about 2,100 people.

-That's staggering.

It takes your breath away to think of that.

Tell me about the individual that you've got here.

We don't know who it is, it's a John Doe,

found in a very remote place in the desert.

And where's the rest of the body?

Probably taken away by animals.

There are some subtle indications, if you will, of gnaw marks.

You can see that there are some scratches here, some bone missing

and there's even a couple of punctures, right there and there.

-Could be...

-Coyote?

-..coyote.

Most of these people are dying from the effects of the environment.

In the summer time, it's due to heat...lack of water,

although some people are well hydrated

and yet go into hypothermic condition

because it gets so dizzyingly hot here in the summer time.

I'm thinking now about the Navajo,

who were forcibly marched 300 miles

and they had horrendous numbers of deaths.

Nobody, even if you are well trained in desert survival,

it's still a life-threatening endeavour

to try to cross the Sonoran Desert.

But tragically many people still do.

Anthropologist Robin Reineke works for the Missing Migrants programme,

collecting thousands of personal belongings.

She tries to reunite bodies with their families.

These are items that have been found on unidentified bodies.

Are people prepared when they go out into the desert?

I think in general, no, they are not prepared.

You can't be prepared for that type of journey.

People are walking five, six, seven, eight days in the desert.

These are in triple-digit temperatures

in very arid landscape, very remote.

I remember speaking to the wife of a missing man.

He actually died and was identified and she said,

"He was a gardener, he was very strong,

"he wouldn't just die from walking."

Sometimes it's really hard to understand,

and I was trying to explain to her that it's like walking in an oven,

it's really so hot that you feel it within an hour.

And there is still a tide of humanity trying to make their way

to a new life in America across the desert.

And there are some strong analogies, I think, to the Navajo

who were made to walk 300 miles through the desert, and even though

they were desert people, it was appalling.

Many, many of them died. You can't imagine the inhumanity of that time.

I mean, your work gives you a strange understanding of the desert.

How has it changed your view of the desert?

Well, the desert's a beautiful place.

The Sonoran Desert, it's the flowering desert,

it's an absolutely beautiful place, I love to hike in the desert.

But I'll never see the desert as something not connected to

a landscape of death, an incredibly brutal landscape.

A landscape that's terrifying and that's not only hard on your soul

but incredibly hard on you, physically.

Those few treasured possessions were very moving

and a powerful reminder of just how dangerous the desert can be.

It's not just the heat and the temperature of desert

that's a threat, there are also a lot of things in here

that can sting and bite

and, of course, they come out mostly at night when it's coolest.

There are snakes, tarantulas, black widow spiders,

and one other nasty creature that is best seen at night using a UV torch.

That's what I'm after. Look at that! Isn't that amazing?

That's a scorpion.

And that little chappy there is a bark scorpion.

It's distinguished by these long, thin, very narrow pinchers.

It's only about two centimetres long.

You see it glowing there in the UV light, that's what scorpions do.

They look like, almost... They look like toys,

like something you might get in a Christmas cracker.

Nobody is sure why they glow in the dark.

Some have suggested it might be some mechanism that helps protect them

from the sun's rays and others have suggested it might be some sort of

camouflage because they tend to come out on moonlit nights.

Perhaps we'll never know.

The key thing with scorpions is

if they have a big fat tail and small pinchers,

you can bet your bottom dollar they are going to pack a serious punch,

in terms of venom. And that's the case with the bark scorpion -

although he's only tiny, he can really spoil your day.

Fatalities have been known. They are rare but it can happen.

Oh, there he goes. He's moving. Look at that, stunning.

I don't like to take my eye off these fellas cos they move fast.

Take great care.

It's sobering to confront the realities of this landscape.

Not a place to be taken lightly.

Nonetheless there is real beauty here

and despite the harsh conditions,

animals and plants can make a living - providing they have

one key ingredient.

I love to sit quietly in a desert.

When you do, you realise how much life there is.

You see chipmunks running up the sand dunes,

you hear insects buzzing to and fro,

you see the busy ants and the lizards and sometimes you hear

the most beautiful sound that you can ever hear in the desert.

Can you hear it?

WATER TRICKLES FAINTLY

That is the trickling of water,

the very sound of life itself.

Water arrives in the desert in two main ways.

Right now the region looks pretty green.

That's because from mid-July to early August it's the monsoon

or rainy season.

Virtually all of the desert's rainfall will come at once.

Luckily for plants, animals and indeed people, there are also

a few very scarce water sources that will last year round.

This is a little creek and you can see that along here

you get seepages like this, little springs.

These are formed from cracks in the bedrock

where water is under pressure and is forced up

and comes out into the open.

I think this is one of the most impressive desert creeks

that I've ever seen because on this side

we've got the rock and muddy conditions

and on that side there's a sand dune

with its feet literally in the water.

Water like this means life in a desert.

I know it's an obvious thing to say,

but when I'm teaching desert survival it's the hardest message

to get across, is just how important water is.

If you haven't got water, you haven't got one of the fundamental

building blocks of life. And the clock is ticking.

Anyone travelling in desert knows that you travel from water source

to water source and if they are too far apart you can be in big trouble.

And in the 1840s, water sources were critical to the location

of the US army forts

that accompanied the westward moving frontier.

Here in the deserts of the southwest they were needed to enforce

the new nation's border with Mexico, and to protect prospectors,

railroad crews and early settlers

from the fierce Native American tribes.

Historian Rae Whitley,

at the Museum of the Horse Soldier, in Tucson, Arizona, told me more.

The military is needing to, out of necessity, have a water supply.

So, tradition, and because of the thinking of that era,

you are going to build a fort next to a river. Makes sense.

The problem is, in Arizona, a lot of the rivers don't flow continually,

and there is a lot of standing water at certain times of the year.

And then here in southern Arizona we have monsoons.

So, if a person came to survey for a fort in the height of monsoon season,

they will see standing water,

and they may think there is a spring or there is a good water supply.

Well, by mid-summer, they're finding that it's stagnant water

and the soldiers are becoming sick.

So there are a number of posts in Arizona that were only garrisoned

for about one year, one season,

until they figured out this is not an advantageous place to be.

But despite the lack of water,

the desert interior of the southwest was steadily colonised

by a network of forts from the late 1840s to the mid 1870s.

Almost half of cavalry troopers were immigrants.

Some who joined up wanted regular pay, some wanted an education,

and some were lured by the promise of free passage out to the West.

For freed slaves, army service offered social acceptance.

And then there were those who enlisted

in an effort to evade the law.

Wonderful collection.

After a cramped train or wagon journey, or a long march,

their arrival at a remote posting was usually something of a shock.

The cavalry's standard issue equipment

was ill-suited to the desert.

I know they had a lot of problems with their equipment.

I mean, the classic one was their boots.

Isn't it right that their boots fell apart?

Yes, the boots fell apart primarily because of the way the soles

were put onto the boots.

If you can see here, you will notice that the system that is

holding the sole together is a series of wooden pegs.

Now, that's fine if you have enough humidity in the air

but here in Arizona it's actually going to shrink those pegs

because of the lack of humidity and when those pegs fall,

soon thereafter, so will your sole.

-And are these some of the water bottles from the era?

-Yes.

These canteens are telling of the era.

The first series comes from the Civil War, so the Civil War surplus

would have been accompanying these soldiers in the 1870s and then this

comes out in the 1880s but both of them have a feature which is

extremely important for the soldier in Arizona and that's this covering.

What you will do when you're filling this canteen is submerge

the whole canteen, get this wet, hang it in a tree and the breeze

will cool this off and it in fact gives you some cool water.

-How many canteens did a man have?

-A man was issued one.

One canteen. Not a lot of water.

-A quart?

-Exactly.

This was a really hostile land. I mean, you've got Spanish bayonet...

cholla cactus, covered in thorns. You've got fish-hook cactus,

-bark scorpions, black widows and rattlesnakes.

-Yes.

You know, something you don't see in the movies is every morning

the soldiers are waking up and they'd have their morning cough,

which is how you knew all the soldiers were rising - you have

about ten minutes of chest rattle, and then you have

everyone complaining about what had bit them in the middle of the night,

shaking out their boots hoping not to get bitten again for breakfast.

So, you'll have a number of soldiers that can't, for example, ride

that day because they have a huge bite from a scorpion or spider

on their backside. And if you took all of those things

out of the equation you'll have a wind storm every couple of days

and if you get caught in that, in a sandstorm that can, in fact,

tear the hide right off of you.

So everything out here is a potential threat to you.

In fact, more soldiers died from illness

than as a result of engagement with the enemy.

But incredibly, despite the conditions,

some of the soldiers brought their families with them.

When I look at items like this and I see the sugar tongs or marbles

in this area, knowing that Fort Wingate would have been crawling with

everything from spiders and scorpions to the enemy, at times people still

try to have moments that seemed civilised, if you will.

If you look at the picture of Fort Grant.

That's actually a rowing pond that has been built there,

so the officers' wives and children can row their boats.

You know, at the time this was happening their husbands

are fighting Apache no more than 20 miles off post.

Back in the late 1800s, it would not have been safe to be here,

not for me, that's for sure.

This is Apache country.

Don't be fooled by Hollywood when they put them way out

in the low desert. This is where they liked to be.

It's arid but it's mountainous and that was part of their secret.

Up here the Apache could disappear,

and to try and winkle them out of these fortresses

was just about impossible.

One of the other secrets, of course, was the rain.

There are lots of little kettles,

little defiles in the landscape of the mountains that will hold

that water and keep it in shade so that even during the dry periods

of the year, the Apache knew where to find water.

When it came to their equipment, they hardly needed anything.

This landscape was very giving despite its aridity.

They just needed a knife and their shoes.

Apache moccasins were the most important

piece of equipment that they had.

Something like this.

Hard soles that can withstand the sharp, abrasive rocks

of the landscape, that can protect them against thorns -

this is a spiky landscape.

There were also snakes and scorpions.

A raised toe to give further protection from the spikes

in the terrain.

Real Apache moccasins were tall, they came high up the leg,

which meant they could run through the cactuses and the thorns

and not end up spending the rest of the night pulling them out.

The desert may have looked empty to the newly arrived US Army,

but it gave the Apache everything they needed.

If ever there was an icon of the West it has to be this,

the magnificent saguaro cactus.

They don't put out branches like this until they are 75 years old

and they live for about a century and a half.

It can stand upright like this

because inside there is a complicated structure of woody ribs,

like this. And when the cactus dies and the flesh falls away,

you are left with this skeletal frame that's inside it.

And sticks like this had a lot of uses for the native people,

including the manufacture of fire sticks.

The nomadic Apache lived a simple lifestyle,

constructing temporary shelters known as wickiups.

A framework of flexible poles was covered with dried grass

or when pursued, with simple pieces of canvas.

All throughout this country there are useful plants,

and this was one of the most important to the Apache.

This is the agave and the choke of this plant was their staple food

and they'd cook it underground for four days to make it

into this sugary pulpy mass.

But it had other uses, too.

You take one of these very spiky leaves

and with a knife you scrape back

just below the spine like that...

all round.

Then you cut through the leaf

like that, just in the middle.

Then bend that over the knife

and pull very slowly but firmly.

What you can feel are the fibres coming out from the leaf.

They stay attached to the spine,

which forms a needle, and this is what was used to sew clothing,

tucked down the side of their moccasins,

ready to repair their footwear as needed.

It's that kind of detailed knowledge and the way they used the plants -

they had every resource they needed for life right here.

When the frontier reached the desert,

the cavalry were soon to find that the forts and battle tactics

employed on the Great Plains were futile

against the strategy of the Apache warriors.

It was the beginning of 40 years of unrelenting warfare

between the two sides.

If you came in here after the Apache

it was like walking into a wasp's nest, and although the cards

were stacked against them,

because the army were determined to put an end to the Apache Wars,

the Apache put up one incredible fight.

They were masters of decoying their enemies into ambushes.

To my mind, they were probably the finest guerrilla fighters

the world has ever known.

They knew how to skirmish, to carry out a fighting withdrawal

and to lay a snap ambush -

all of the techniques that are taught to the military today.

To get a sense of their unique fighting style,

I've come to see an old friend, Apache historian Jay Van Orden.

So why have you brought me up here then, Jay?

Actually, this is a very historical spot.

In 1869, a wagon train, the Tully and Ochoa Freighting Company,

was making their monthly trip from Tucson up to Camp Grant,

and at that point, about 80 Apaches sprung up

and thus began a ten-hour battle.

Ten hours, that's a very long battle for the Apache.

Yes, it is.

I wish we could see that, it must have been quite a sight.

Well, surprisingly, this is another unique aspect to this battle -

one of the participants was an artist.

This artist, Edward Zins, did it with incredible detail.

I can see the mountains are just as they are depicted.

I mean, this peak here is over there.

There's the mid range of mountains.

-So that would put these wagons on that rise just below us.

-Yes.

So, what happened?

The main reason why the wagon master was not afraid to give up the wagons

because he had a secret - a cannon -

and they rolled a cannon out and the Indians were surprised

and that helped to keep them at bay for most of the day.

I guess what he is hoping is to hold out long enough for the cavalry

to turn up, just in the nick of time, of course, and save the day?

The cavalry gallop in, firing and shooting and added to the firepower

of the Americans against the Apaches.

What do you think?

I think we should go and have a walk across the battle field.

-Let's do it.

-Let's do it.

Your feeling is that the wagons were down here

somewhere on top of this rise.

The Apache knew how to use the ground, we know that they

could hide in nine inches of grass

and there is plenty of dead ground all around but you've still got

to come up the steep sides of this slope.

It's a long shot for an arrow.

You'd be vulnerable to gunfire to shoot anywhere near here.

But they did use slingshots,

and that also makes me wonder about this location because the slingshot

gives you a chance to not only throw a heavy lethal rock with force

from a longer range than a bow,

but also you can do it from within cover.

You can shoot it out from behind the cover of a bank

and just keep raining them down in the hope that you'll be lucky.

-You got plenty of rocks.

-And there's no shortage of ammunition.

-Let's have a look and see how it does, shall we?

-All right.

I'll put a stone in there, a big stone.

STONE WHOOSHES AND CLATTERS

-Quite a sound, Jay.

-Yes, it certainly is.

STONE WHOOSHES AND CLATTERS

-You can hear it.

-You can hear it go.

I mean, those stones fly.

Very simple, lightweight,

and in this environment an inexhaustible supply of ammunition.

Under the cover of darkness, the cavalry and teamsters were able

to flee back to Tucson, leaving the wagons,

goods and livestock to the Apache.

The deserts in America provide some of the most beautiful landscapes

to be explored.

They are very diverse, though. A lot of people think that deserts are

places of cactus and sand dunes, and it's true that there are deserts

like that, but here, as in most places, deserts are mainly rocky.

All those rocks make it difficult to walk in,

and difficult to ride a horse in and difficult to drive a car in.

They are dangerous places.

It's amazing that the pioneers had to cross this

with the technology of the 1800s.

And this is what 1800s state of the art technology looked like -

the stagecoach.

In 1849, a quarter of a million men had headed west to California

in the Gold Rush, most of them leaving their families behind.

This mass migration created a need for a communication

across the vast continent.

And in the days before the railroads and telegrams,

it was the stagecoach that carried the mail that kept them in touch.

On these vehicles, people, post and wealth

was transported across the West.

In-between the relay stations, these wagons were pretty isolated

so I've been given the job of riding shotgun for protection.

Of course, vehicles like this attracted the unwanted attention

of both hostile Native Americans and bandits.

In the remote open spaces of the desert

you were incredibly vulnerable.

Mind you, these vehicles are notoriously uncomfortable.

I think I better go and check on my guest. I think we'll pull up.

Whoa, boy.

Excellent.

We can see how he's getting on.

My passenger is a stage coach specialist, historian Bob Stewart.

I've read accounts of people getting sea sick in these things.

You probably could. It depends on the type of road you were on.

It probably was quite torturous at times.

Why were these stagecoaches established?

California became a state in 1850

and, of course, between California and the East Coast there was

a huge bunch of land and very few people were living in it.

But California wanted to have mail service.

So, in the 1850s, John Butterfield got the idea to create

a stage line that would carry mail from St Louis to go to Los Angeles

and San Francisco.

The first stagecoaches established a continental trail

across the country. But its route through the Rocky Mountains

was impassable in the winter snows.

In 1857, John Butterfield won the US Mail contract

because his route headed south, and was open all year round.

The downside was that it was 2,800 miles long

and took passengers through some of the most hostile deserts on Earth.

Tell me about the wagons themselves

because the terrain they are having to cross is astonishing.

The wagons, basically, were small and lightweight

so that the horses could pull them quite easily.

They were suspended between the axels on what were called through braces,

which were leather looped between the axels

with the body riding on top of it.

Now, you couldn't use steel springs because they would have broken.

The coaches out here in the rugged areas had no windows,

had no doors - they were basic.

They would have drop-down canvas coverings over the windows

for when it was a dust storm or rain storm.

It must have been uncomfortable to be inside one of these.

Well, yes. It was state of the art, though,

let's first remember that, for 1860, 1850.

I don't think the passengers would call it wonderful!

The journey itself would have been very, very uncomfortable.

I mean, you would have been sitting elbow to elbow,

shoulder to shoulder with the person next to you,

if the coach was full of nine people, which was the capacity.

The seat width was 15 inches per passenger.

There were three rows,

and the middle row passengers dovetailed their legs

into the passengers who were facing backwards.

Now, 2,800 miles of dovetailed legs

doesn't sound very comfortable.

On top of it, the mail was often on the floor

and your entire possessions were on your lap.

So if you packed a valise or a suitcase or however you were packed,

you were going to sit with that on your lap the entire time.

Plus you had to get out, to help push the coach through mud

or if you were going to walk through an area that was heavily sand duned.

It would be easy to bog down a heavy coach.

There were Indian attacks, certainly they were always something

you had to keep in mind as a possibility.

I mean, you see in the westerns

people in the stagecoaches with arrows coming at them and they are

shooting out the windows, is that what happened?

Well, I've seen a provisions list that was recommended

for travelling on the Wells Fargo coaches,

which asked you to bring a Sharps rifle, 200 rounds of ammunition,

enough powder, a Colt revolver,

three pounds of lead

and additional powder for your Colt revolver,

so I'm going to say there was a reason for that.

When was the last coach to leave?

On the Butterfield, in 1861.

-Short-lived.

-It was. It was two and a half years.

But we started to have railroads that were connected coast to coast

right soon thereafter,

and that pretty much did away with long distance travel by coach.

As quickly as they'd started,

the Butterfield, like other stage coaches, would come to an end.

The Butterfield route took 25 days,

but by 1890 there were six transcontinental railroads

straddling the continent, cutting the journey time to just six days.

Well, Bob, I can hear the horses are chomping at the bit there.

I think they want to get moving,

so I think we should make some dust.

-It's been a pleasure, Ray.

-It's been nice talking to you.

-Did you have your ticket?

-Yes!

THEY LAUGH

It's no wonder that these hot southern deserts

with scorching temperatures, hostile Indians, and no water

were not seen as places to settle by the early pioneers.

They were just to be crossed as quickly and as safely as possible.

But not even the hostile desert could deter the prospectors who,

in the 1860s and '70s,

struck off across the continent in search of silver and gold.

Now, this is southern Arizona.

Back in the 1800s, there would have been no buildings here at all.

In fact, all there was here were venomous snakes, spiny cactus

and very hostile Indians.

But even they would act as no deterrent for mining prospectors,

and just over the hill here, a big silver strike was made

and this town grew up.

This is one of the most famous Western towns of them all -

Tombstone.

One of those prospectors was a man called Ed Schieffelin,

a soldier in the 1870s.

He took it upon himself to come up into this area and prospect.

Well, all his mates said, "You're crazy.

"All you're going to find up there are rattlesnakes

"and hostile Indians. You'll end up dead".

Well, he didn't. In fact, he found silver and struck it lucky.

So he named this town "Tombstone",

the obvious choice!

If there's anyone who can help paint a picture of life

in this desert town in the 1880s,

it's local historian Marshall Trimble.

So here we are, walking up the main street of Tombstone.

Today it's a tourist town, but this was a hive of activity.

There were thousands of people here.

It was one of the largest cities in Arizona around 1880,

1881, when all the action was taking place here.

It was the grand-daddy of the silver strikes in Arizona.

There were several mines, several rich silver mines out here.

Someone told me, like, a million dollars

was mined from one of the mines here?

They figure, in those dollars,

about 80 million dollars came out of this town.

-80 million! Gosh! Staggering.

-Yeah.

And that's just an estimate.

So, this town grew from nothing to a hive of humanity

-in virtually no time at all?

-Almost overnight.

Tombstone, like many mining towns, was a remote and isolated place.

Whilst California had become a state in 1850,

and formed its own local government and militia,

much of the desert in the Southwest was federal territory

and ruled by Washington, DC,

2,000 miles away on the eastern seaboard.

Travel was slow and communications were limited.

This meant that, when trouble erupted,

it took time for law enforcement officers

to get to these distant communities.

Local people settled things for themselves.

In a town like this you had the cowboys out here

who were rustling cows. They came in when they had money

and got kind of Western, as they say.

Along with cattle rustling, other common crimes were claim jumping,

trail and train hold ups and, of course, bank robberies.

Oh, that's got to hurt!

What now?!

The gun carrying culture and the large number of guns

in circulation after the Civil War ended in 1865,

meant that shootings were a common way of settling quarrels.

Throw up your hands, boys! We're here for your guns!

Look, I don't want to fight you.

One of the most famous, now re-enacted daily in Tombstone,

was, of course, the gunfight at the OK Corral.

Wait! Don't shoot! Don't shoot!

APPLAUSE

"John Martin. Killed."

In 1882 there were a lot of deaths.

Mm-hm. That was the heyday. That was the real heyday.

Law and order was enforced by a small number of marshals

and sheriffs, as well as local vigilante committees

who dealt out rough and ready justice.

Billy Grounds, he was killed out here in a gunfight,

he was an outlaw.

This is the famous Boot Hill cemetery.

-How does it get its name?

-Boot Hill?

-Yeah.

They died with their boots on.

And all of these Western towns had a boot hill.

And that was just the saying for a guy that died with his boots on.

It means he died violently,

never got a chance to take his boots off and die in bed.

Some of these head stones are quite revealing, aren't they?

"Here lies George Johnson, hanged by mistake, 1882.

"He was right, we was wrong, but we strung him up and now he's gone."

It just shows those people had a sense of humour.

They had a sense of humour but it also dispels the myth of

the nobleness of the Wild West.

It was a wild and tough place, wasn't it?

Death was pretty commonplace. People died of diseases,

they died of injuries, of accidents.

Of course, some of them really deserved their reputations,

-didn't they?

-Oh, yeah.

This was an escape for people who didn't fit anywhere else.

Thousands of men lived short, violent and unrecorded lives.

Only a few outlaws achieved the long-lasting notoriety

of Jesse James, Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch.

The so-called "Outlaw Trail" was a network of trails

linking safe havens for bandits, all the way from Mexico to Canada.

This route enabled a safe passage for wanted men and smuggled goods.

The safe havens were hide-outs

tucked away in the inaccessible terrain.

Many were never penetrated by law officers.

I'm travelling north to Utah, to the Great Basin Desert,

to try and find one.

This is the high desert. I really like it.

It's a beautiful terrain. Soft, pastel shades.

But look how broken that terrain is.

The very remoteness and inaccessibility of this country

would shape its history.

Because this would be exactly the right country

for bandits to hide out in.

That area over there is called Robbers Roost,

and that was an almost impregnable fortress that housed one of the most

famous bandit gangs - the Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy.

Here, it was their intimate knowledge of the geography

of the region that was to give these bandits the upper hand.

That is the sound of a life or death chase.

An outlaw pursued by the posse.

And do you know, I think they might get him!

You see that scene in just about every Western movie,

but what I want to know is, did that really happen?

Hightailing was a race for life,

the outlaw making a dash across open country, pursued by a posse

of local vigilantes determined to drive him from town, or worse.

But if the bandit was first to reach the broken badlands

then he'd be home and dry.

A modern day hightailer, West Taylor,

has offered to show me how.

So you've successfully caught this sorry looking individual.

-We've got one. We got him.

-Don't take any nonsense from him.

Tell me, in all truth, did posses ever catch up with people?

Not much out here on the roost. If an outlaw could make it out here to this

part of the world he had it made and he knew it,

cos once he gets off some of these cliffs and the canyons,

no posse would go out there, it's a death trap.

And the outlaws had the advantage because they knew the canyons.

Absolutely, they knew where they were going

and the posse knows not to go over that hill because once they get

over there one gunman can hold off 50 riders on one of those ledges.

So posses knew it, outlaws knew it, it was just a race.

The local posse would generate,

get a group of guys, and they're getting store keepers and farmers

and the banker, you know? They're not getting hard-core cowboys

to go on these posse rides, they're getting the guys from town,

you know, and it's kind of their civic duty so they saddle up and go.

But once they get up to a point it's like,

"We're done, this is it, we gave it a go."

George Armstrong Chapel was my third great grandfather

and he was one of the few sheriffs at the time that dared

to come out here, because it was in his county,

so he had much more of a civic duty to come into it.

And he was the only sheriff to actually make an arrest

on Robbers Roost and bring somebody back out.

There wasn't even a jail built in 1895 when my grandfather

was the sheriff here, so he would take them back to his house in Limon,

and he had a granary out back of the house and he would actually

take the prisoners that he had out to the granary

and lock and barricade them inside the granary,

where his wife and kids would take meals out to them until they waited

for transportation to go up to the county for the court hearing.

I mean, this guy is lucky cos we can't find a tree for miles around

to hang him from so we'll have to take him back to town.

-Maybe drag him on his belly for a while.

-It's up to you.

Right, we'll take him in.

West is taking me into the canyons of Robbers Roost,

to a part of the outlaw trail known as the "Angel Trail",

to help me understand how the landscape protected bandits

from the law.

So this is an unusual trail by American standards,

this is the Angel Trail and it ends here. How does it get its name?

The outlaws had a theory that if you made it across the Angel Trail,

across this section of the trail,

then you had to have angels with you to ensure your safety to make it

-across to the other side.

-Why was that?

Cliffs, slick rock, sandstone, one missed step

and you could be 50 to 100 feet to your death. You've got to remember

some of these posse horses are, you know, a plough horse or a horse

they use to pull a wagon. These weren't off-road type horses,

so once the posse got to some of these off-road situations,

their horses just wouldn't perform, they just couldn't do it.

I imagine back then if we had stood here at this time of day

you wouldn't feel safe.

Even knowing it well, there's dangers out here

that are just unforeseen and there's been a couple of times we've been

riding out here and ended up into some quicksand and that is like

just walking along or just standing like you and I talking right here

and having someone just pull a sheet of earth from right underneath you,

and it's over before you even know you're in it and that's a death trap.

And in this arid land it's the last thing you'd really expect to see.

Both times that I ended up in the quicksand out here

I was riding a mustang, or a wild horse, and these horses seem to

instinctively know what to do in it.

Whereas I was, kind of, was in a bit of a panic mode

but the mustangs started crawling to their side

and just kind of crawled in a circle and got themselves up on their side.

They knew better than to try and stand up and they just kept clawing

-in a circle until they got to some solid ground.

-Amazing.

It was impressive and inspiring to me.

I did the same as I was crawling out on my belly.

I've often wondered how, with a posse of lawmen on their tails,

the bandits were able to disappear.

But their secret was their specially trained horses

and intimate knowledge of the terrain.

West has offered to show me how it's done.

So this is it. My goodness me.

You are telling me you are going to go down here on a horse?

Yeah, this would be one of those spots that the outlaws could get to

-and get their horses off of and posse horses would say no.

-Wow.

I take my hat off to you, because this isn't just steep,

it's loose, it's incredibly loose.

I wouldn't do it if I wasn't on a trusted horse

and one I know can handle this and is familiar with this

-type of terrain and this type of riding.

-OK.

At the end of the day it's only television, no pressure.

I'm going to step back and watch. Good luck.

It's pretty tense now -

imagine doing it after a long run,

knowing the law is hot on your trail!

Boy, you can't buy adrenaline like that on the street!

I'm telling you!

For me, it's a point of trust.

She's got to make that jump, she's got to turn,

she's got a lot to do with her feet to keep me from going 100 feet down.

-That was awesome!

-And what about the horses themselves,

what makes them good for this?

She's a mustang so she has been a wild horse for three years

of her life, so she is more than comfortable

-surviving in terrain like this.

-And this is what the outlaws did?

Absolutely, they make it down off of this, across the river,

-they're home free.

-I can understand, the butcher and the shop keepers

-and the posse, they're not going to follow.

-You're not going to get

your plough horse out here and get him to come off of this.

It's too much to risk. If I'm a farmer and I break

my plough horse's leg I can't provide for my family now.

-It's not a risk I would take.

-I take my hat off to you, that's fantastic,

that's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.

-That's brilliant, thank you.

-All right.

At about the same time that West's sheriff ancestor was chasing outlaws

across these high deserts,

another pursuit was taking place in the hot deserts of the South.

The desert mountains of Arizona were a refuge

for America's last Indian resistance -

the great warrior bands of the Apache nation.

Since the 1840s, when the western frontier had rolled across

these mountains and encountered the Apache, conflict was ever present.

For over 40 years, the US Army and the Apache tribes had clashed

in a series of brutal battles and skirmishes

over their right to this land.

Without a doubt, the most famous of all the Apache was Geronimo,

and he was the last of the Apache war leaders to put up a resistance

and what a resistance he left.

He was a real thorn in the side of the American government,

like a cactus thorn in their foot.

He caused them serious embarrassment.

In 1881, the US Army deployed 5,000 men

and the Mexican Army a further 300,

to hunt down Geronimo and his followers.

By that time, there were only 34 men,

women and children in his group,

yet they managed to avoid capture for over a year.

Well, the pursuit that followed him

eventually wore down the morale of his small band

and he was persuaded to surrender,

and that effectively ended Indian resistance in North America,

one last bright flame of resistance.

The Indian Wars were finally at an end.

Just a few years later, the American government would declare

the wild frontier closed.

When the frontier rolled across the deserts of North America,

it gave birth to some of the most colourful chapters of the Wild West.

Lawlessness flourished in these remote regions.

And outlaws sought refuge in the broken desert landscape.

Native peoples were pushed from their homelands

and relocated to reservations.

And this was where the Indian Wars were declared over.

But here, in the American deserts,

I found that part of America that truly cannot be tamed.

This remains the Wild West.