La Junta, Colorado, to Pueblo, New Mexico Great American Railroad Journeys

I have crossed the Atlantic to ride the railroads of North America

with my reliable Appleton's Guide.

CAR HORN HONKS

Published in the late 19th century,

'Appleton's General Guide to North America will direct me to all that's

'novel...'

..beautiful...

..memorable...

'..and striking...'

..in the United States...

As I journey across this vast continent,

'I'll discover how pioneers and cowboys conquered the West.

'And how the railroads tied this nation together,

'helping to create the global super-state of today.'

STEAM WHISTLE BLOWS

I'm continuing my journey west on the South-West Chief train and now

approaching the Rockies -

the so-called continental divide,

that represented a formidable barrier to the railroads

and so to the unification of the United States.

President Jefferson had needed only cash

to acquire a vast amount of territory

that doubled the size of his fledgling country.

Out west, an even greater expansion would be achieved by war.

My railroad journey began in St Louis, the gateway to the West,

and took me across the Kansas Plains to Dodge City.

Next, I continued to Colorado Springs in the Rockies,

on to New Mexico's Albuquerque,

before ending on one of

the great natural wonders of the world.

On this leg, I visit Colorado's La Junta and ranching territory,

before crossing the Raton Pass into New Mexico.

Present...

This time, I'm transported back in time to the Mexican-American War.

Soldier, your buttons are a mess,

but you don't need to buttons to fight a war.

-Are you ready?

-Yes, sir.

Explore gun culture in the Old West.

You have to remember that there was not a lot of law and order.

And discover what drove railway expansion.

Out it comes one more time,

much longer and slimmer and giving off an extraordinary amount of heat.

My next stop is La Junta.

Appleton's tells me it's the point of junction with the main line

extending to all points in New Mexico and Arizona.

The first glimpse is caught of the Rocky Mountains

still 60 miles distant.

In 1845,

a New York editor had written that, "The United States had a manifest

"destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free

"development of our yearly multiplying millions."

This ideal, this God-given right, was to sweep all before it.

In 1845, United States President James Polk

was in dispute with Mexico -

a vast, sparsely populated nation with a strong cattle industry,

whose territory stretched to upper California.

My next stop, La Junta, lay close to the western border

between the United States and Mexico on the old Santa Fe Trail -

an important trade route between the two.

I'm heading eight miles east to Bent's Old Fort,

in its heyday the south-west's only all-white settlement and trading

centre on the Santa Fe Trail.

Set up by fur traders in 1833,

it welcomed trappers and Plains Indians dealing in fur

and buffalo hides.

But in 1846, this neutral outpost became the base

for one of three United States armies

on the disputed border with Mexico.

Hasta luego.

Present arms.

-Sergeant.

-Yes, sir.

-What unit is this?

-First Dragoons.

Kearny's Army of the West.

Fine looking body of men.

-Excellent men, sir.

-What use are you making of the fort?

Well, we are on our way into Mexico, to Santa Fe and the thought is

currently being used as a warehouse

and hospital for the sick and injured.

-Mm. Men are well prepared for it?

-They are, they are well armed.

Soldier, your buttons are a mess,

but you don't need good buttons to fight a war.

-Are you ready?

-Yes, sir.

-Good.

-Go get me a Mexican.

That's the spirit. Now, here's a picture of a soldier.

-Are you ready to fight?

-Yes, sir.

Well, you look smart, the Mexicans will be terrified of you.

Thank you.

-Sergeant.

-Yes, sir.

-I'm proud of you.

-Thank you, sir.

-Permission to carry on.

-Yes, sir.

Bent's Old Fort hosted Colonel Kearny's Army of the West,

made up of his first United States Dragoons Regiment

of 1,000 cavalrymen and an army of volunteers from Missouri.

'John Carson is park ranger at today's living history museum.'

John, in 1846 the United States forces are flowing into this remote

place, Bent's Fort. Why?

Well, President Polk has declared war on Mexico and Colonel Kearny's

mission is to be the northern prong of the US invasion.

In 1846, the Arkansas River, a quarter of a mile away,

is the border between the United States and Mexico

and this is the only place on the Santa Fe Trail to stop

and use as a jumping off point.

War had broken out over the annexation by the United States

in 1845 of the then independent Texas,

which had been Mexican territory.

The two nations disputed the new border

and whether Texas ended at the Nueces River or the Rio Grande.

As tension mounted, the Mexicans crossed the Rio Grande,

leaving up to 16 Americans dead.

President Polk saw an opportunity

and rushed a war request through Congress.

The idea then was the bigger you are,

the stronger you are and he didn't use the phrase Manifest Destiny,

but that became a huge movement where the United States had,

if you will, God-given duty to gain control of all the land

from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Manifest Destiny captured the public's imagination and was the

subject of a painting by John Gast in 1872.

America pictured herself leading civilisation,

liberty and progress westward,

sweeping aside the natives and their animals.

How did Colonel Kearny's mission work out?

It went pretty easy compared to the other two prongs.

Again, Kearny left here,

got to Las Vegas and New Mexico and read his proclamation that that area

was now going to be under the United States.

Got to Apache Canyon on this side of the Santa Fe and Governor Armijo

had a force of somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 men,

but as the US Army neared that area, they left.

So, basically Kearny walked into Santa Fe without firing a shot.

'The two year war would fulfil America's Manifest Destiny,'

but it came at a cost.

Over 14,000 Americans and up to 25,000 Mexicans

paid with their lives.

So, how much land did the United States gain in the end?

We would gain what's now the southern part of Colorado,

Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, parts even of Wyoming,

Utah, Nevada and California.

-Immense.

-Huge, huge.

With the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,

which ended the war in 1848,

the United States gained the northern half of Mexico,

representing roughly a third of the United States' landmass today.

It also inherited a cattle ranching tradition developed under Spanish

colonial rule.

The legacy that would help to create the most iconic figure

of the Wild West.

Is the cowboy simply a figure from history?

Well, there are still cattle, there are still ranches.

The old skills must still be alive.

I think I should give them a try.

After all, in my life, I've worn more than one hat.

Off the beaten track, south of La Junta, lies Las Animas County.

I'm hitching a ride through this ranching territory

with Steve Wooten.

Hello, Steve.

Thank you very much.

Welcome.

Good to see you, thank you.

Steve, has your family been in these parts for long?

Michael, we've been in this part of the country for four generations.

My great-grandfather emigrated from Ireland in 1860s and he developed a

cattle business, a sheep wool business

and a goat business, where he traded on the railhead

that they developed there, so that they could transport

livestock and the produce back east.

The arrival of the railroad at La Junta in 1875

transformed its cattle industry.

Large ranches could load cattle here and transport them east.

Unlike the cowboys of the cattle drives, ranch families settled.

Did he acquire much land?

Through the years, he did, Michael.

By the time Papa Joe passed away, he'd made seven ranches,

one for each of his children and the total amount of those ranches was of

greater acreage than all of Ireland that he left.

That is amazing.

President Abraham Lincoln's Homestead Act of 1862

encouraged western migration.

Any adult citizen who headed a family could, for a small fee,

received 168 acres of public land to cultivate for five years.

The Act distributed 80 million acres by 1,900.

And do you still have to do the cowboy things,

like branding and lassoing and riding horses?

Yes, Colorado is a brand state, so we brand our cattle.

We prefer to move our cattle horseback.

It's our tradition, it's our heritage,

it's been done that way since 1800 and we like to carry that part on.

Gosh, Steve, you have a stunning property.

Look at this terrain.

Michael, we're blessed to be here.

'Steve's going to show me the ropes.

'It's a loopy business, but I'm game.'

I think you'd better stand back.

All right, let's get a bit of speed up now.

Point it straight, there you go.

Walk towards it.

'In the 18th century, native cowboys, called vaqueros,

'from the Spanish word for cow,

'developed their roping skills using braided rawhide.'

Later, when Western settlers poured onto former Mexican land,

they learned a traditional ways of the vaqueros.

By the 1870s, the classic Wild West cowboy as we know him had arrived.

This loop, double or nothing, point it right, palm down,

right at the front of the bail.

There you go. OK.

Step towards it.

I'd say, yes.

That's as close as I'm going to get.

I'm going to steer away from this activity.

You're game, all right!

-Good job.

-Thank you.

-Hello, Joy.

-Nice to see you.

-Good to see you.

-Welcome to Beatty Canyon.

-Thank you very much.

-What have you got in the pot, Joy?

-We're cooking brisket.

Whoa! Look at that, that's huge.

-One of your own beasts, of course?

-Of course.

It's great to cook outdoors.

I'm not sure whether today we're going to be able to eat outdoors,

-what do you think?

-I think it's going to rain,

-which would be awesome.

-"Awesome"?

-Awesome.

We always need rain on the dry parade.

THUNDER CLAPS

That is so good. Cooked to perfection.

And wonderful to have a beast straight off the ranch.

I wanted to ask you,

I'm using a late 19th century guidebook to go around

and I believe that even then tourists were coming to visit

ranches, is that right?

I think then they were dudes from the east that weren't

accustomed to the open space, the cowboy lifestyle, the horseback,

cattle riding, wrangling, and so they were craving that experience,

because Western lifestyle had been iconicized in dime store novels.

Do you have dudes today?

We do, but we're more of a traditional ranching experience,

where you can get involved in all aspects of it -

including the horses and the cattle, but the fencing,

the windmilling and everything else

that comes with raising cattle on a ranch.

Why do you think people are so attracted by the West?

I believe it's the open space and the quietness.

It's difficult for a European to get a hold on how big this country is.

Look, I've already come 550 miles from Kansas City.

I'll be passing through Flagstaff, still 700 miles to go.

I'm 2,000 miles from New York, more than 1,000 miles from Los Angeles.

With a country like this, let the train take the strain.

From La Junta station, I'm taking an Appleton's recommended itinerary on

the old Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad.

Thank you.

Built along the great trading route of the Santa Fe Trail after the

Mexican-American war,

this important railroad connected Missouri with New Mexico.

It greatly influenced settlement in the south-west.

This is the topographical highlight of the journey. As Appleton says,

"The railroad climbs the mountains through the Raton Pass on a grade of

"185 feet to the mile.

"At an elevation of 7,688 feet,

"the train plunges into a tunnel under the crest of the Raton Range.

"The light of Colorado quickly vanishes

"and that which flashes upon us again in a few minutes

"is the warm brightness of sunny New Mexico."

So long, Colorado.

Howdy, New Mexico.

Raton was a ranching town

and trade centre that flourished thanks to the railroad.

Today, alongside its many tourist attractions,

Raton lists a vast 33,000 acre shooting and recreation centre.

It belongs to the National Rifle Association.

The NRA was founded in 1871 by Union veterans dismayed at the poor

marksmanship shown by Northern Yankee troops

during the American Civil War.

Today, it's a powerful gun lobby.

'I'm meeting firearms museum curator Robbie Roberts

'to find out about guns in the Wild West and their legacy today.'

Robbie, in the exploration and the settling

-and the conquest of the West...

-Yes.

..do the explorers and the settlers and cowboys, do they need the gun?

Absolutely. It was an invaluable tool for the folks coming out west.

Hunting to put food on the table,

they were used for self-defence against the Indians and the outlaws.

You have to member back in the Old West,

there was not a lot of law and order and in a lot of cases,

you couldn't tell the lawmen from the outlaws, OK?

But their primary use was to put food on the table.

Fur traders, pioneer settlers,

soldiers and Native Americans relied on their guns.

By the 1860s, a time of Civil War and great western expansion,

a significant firearms industry has emerged,

dominated by gun makers such as Colt,

Smith & Wesson and Winchester.

Probably the most recognisable is the Colt single action,

the model of 1873.

It's called the Peacemaker

and it was actually developed for the United States Army,

but it was so good that it went and wound up in the civilian market.

And, literally, millions of them were sold over the years and

they're still in production today.

This weapon, then, represents a breakthrough, does it?

Yes, sir, it does. Absolutely, because it is a revolver

and the biggest advancement was

it used a self-contained metallic cartridge,

whereas the firearms that predated it were all cap and ball

muzzle-loaders, basically.

The American Civil War was followed by a series of Indian wars,

as the United States Army pushed west

and Native Americans resisted encroachment on their land.

The Army shipped 37,000 Colt pistols to its cavalry

as the standard issue sidearm.

Now, what about the long barrel weapons?

Probably, again, the most recognisable is the Winchester 1873.

-Oh, yes.

-OK.

And this was used by the Army, by cowboys, by Native Americans?

All except the Army. They didn't really welcome them,

because they thought it was a waste of ammunition.

To give you an example - when Custer went to Little Bighorn,

they were all shooting, their standard issue

was single-shot rifles.

The Indians, on the other hand, had repeating rifles.

In the early 20th century, an advertising campaign marketed

the Winchester as the gun that won the West.

Hollywood reinforced this in the 1950s,

glorifying the cowboy era and placing the iconic rifle

in the hands of gun-toting legends.

Is there an opportunity to fire a weapon today?

You betcha. We'll go out and shoot a Colt and, you know,

if we want to do that, we need to head to the range as we speak.

Good.

-You're going to hit those ducks, are you?

-I'm going to try.

There's no guarantee in the shooting world.

'Robbie exercises his constitutional right to keep and bear firearms.

'Around a third of Americans either own a gun

'or live with someone who does.'

Even when you're ready for it, it's pretty loud, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

-How did you do, Robbie?

-Not very good,

-but you'll notice I was pretty close.

-You were pretty close,

I could see the sand being kicked up just beyond the target.

Yes, I was a little high.

Now, if that was an animal or if it was a bad guy out there,

it wouldn't have mattered, because they would have been deadly.

-You routinely carry a gun?

-Yes, sir, every day.

-Why?

-Well, because I'm going to protect myself and my family.

Now, I've never had to use it and I'm thankful of that.

I don't want to have to use it, but if somebody's there to do me ill,

I would rather be prepared than not be prepared.

So, you've never had to use it in your life?

-No.

-But every day of your life, there's been a risk that it might go

off accidentally, that one of your kids might get hold of it.

-I don't know, you're running a risk every day?

-No. One, you know,

gun safety is paramount and all the gun accidents that happen,

I guarantee you,

one of the three golden rules of gun safety was violated.

Is that the fault of the gun?

No, it's the fault of the individual behind the gun.

Does it not worry you that a high school student may come in

and buy a gun and massacre his classmates?

Well, is it something that we think about every day?

No. Is it a concern?

Sure, it's a concern.

Is there a gun law that's going to stop that?

Unfortunately, no.

To Europeans, these views are surprising.

Indeed, the United States astonishes us again and again.

But travel is meant to broaden the mind.

It seems that Americans are much influenced by a history that's bound

up with the Colt and the Winchester.

From the New Mexico border heading north,

there are now no passenger services

and the line has been given over to freight.

Appleton's draws me to Pueblo,

one of the chief cities of southern Colorado.

Once situated on the historic Denver and Rio Grande railroad,

my guidebook tells me that it has a large steel works.

I'd always thought of steel as coming from Pittsburgh

and the East, but the guidebook opens my eyes

to something that should have been obvious.

If you're going to build a railroad from ocean to ocean,

you needed a steel plant in the West.

I'm meeting general manager Ben Lutz at the sight of the original plant

that made this steel city.

Ben, this is a tremendous piece of industrial archaeology.

I have a real sense of history here.

And, indeed, this plant is mentioned in my 1891 Appleton's,

so you've been here a good long time.

Yes, we started manufacturing rails back in 1882.

Why was it that the plant was located here?

The Rocky Mountains are rich with iron ore and coal deposits,

which are two primary materials that are needed

and the railroads needed a supply of rail here in the West,

to continue their westward expansion.

William Jackson Palmer was the railroad tycoon

behind the Denver and Rio Grande western railroad.

Instead of importing steel from the East,

he decided that it was cheaper to make steel rails in the West.

His affiliate business,

the Colorado Coal and Iron Company, created the first integrated steel mill

west of the Mississippi.

And it was the railroads then that drove the existence of this plant,

the demand for the steel from the railroads?

Absolutely. This plant is here for rail

and that's still what we make today.

So, these great tubes of hot metal.

-Yes.

-What are they?

-So, these are blooms.

They come from our steel-making process.

Here, we are a 100% recycling operation.

Our primary source is shredded automobiles.

And you can make a reliable rail for the railroad out of shredded

-automobiles?

-Yes, we can.

The old steel mill used the British Bessemer method.

Four blast furnaces belted out plumes of smoke,

as steel was made from the chemical reaction between coal and iron ore.

So, this is the initial rolling process, called our breakdown mill.

This is where we'll start to change the shape from the round we saw

earlier into something that looks a lot more like a rail.

Much more of it appearing now and...whoa!

A lot of heat coming off that metal.

Yes! The rolling temperature here is about 1,900 degrees.

That's the optimal temperature for rolling steel.

How many rails do you make here?

So, every day, we'll produce about 1,000 rails.

-A day?

-A thousand rails per day.

Out it comes one more time.

Much longer and slimmer and giving off an extraordinary amount of heat,

as it disappears past us.

Pueblo's steel plant was acquired by the Rockefeller family in 1903 and

became central to a steel business that in 1906 employed as much as 10%

of Colorado's population.

One of the things that I noticed was just how long the rails were,

much longer than in the old days.

Correct. Lengths have progressed throughout the years.

Originally, starting very short just to what the men could carry by hand.

Today, the standard is approximately 80 feet.

So, you take these 80-foot lengths and then what do you do to them?

They travel in special trains that can take 48 pieces

of quarter-mile-long rail out to the field.

-That I have to see.

-We certainly will.

Then, a remarkable sight.

Very long rails coming out of what?

So, this is a welding plant,

where the 80-foot pieces that we produce are flash-butt welded

together into quarter-mile-long pieces.

And then loaded onto these enormous trains?

Yes, specialised trains made to handle the quarter-mile pieces,

taking them to the field where they'll be installed.

And are your markets in North America?

Yes, we supply all the major railroads in North America,

even the Amtrak Route from Kansas to Trinidad,

Colorado was made with rail from this facility.

I've been travelling on that very route

and I knew that it felt smooth.

I'm glad you're enjoying it.

The war against Mexico gained the United States the far West,

enabling railroads to be built from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The United States Army and cowboys subdued the Native American.

The nation's Manifest Destiny was fulfilled.

Providence no doubt was at work,

but the bullet played at least an important supporting role.

Next time, I ride the historic railroad that sparked a war.

They aimed their guns at each other, shots were fired back and forth.

# America, America... #

Explore the origins of an iconic national hymn.

And ascend to 14,000 feet.

Oh, my word, we are going to the very edge.

That's unbelievable.