‘The Way West’ Recounts A Painful Period In History
Having finished his six-hour, two-night documentary about westward expansion and the near-annihilation of Native Americans, producerdirector Ric Burns was in a reflective mood.
“This is not an easy chapter of history to look at without flinching,” he said.
Indeed it isn’t. What EuroAmericans did to the original residents of this country was often appalling. But they firmly believed that the push west from Atlantic to Pacific, triggered by the Gold Rush of 1849, was their right.
Whites heading west were fueled by dreams that they were going to find gold, or build the Kingdom of God, if only the people who already lived there wouldn’t stand in the way.
They followed that dream, building railroads and telegraph lines to connect the coasts, and clearing and settling the land with zeal - and sometimes, in the case of the federal government, with lies.
So recounts “The Way West,” airing Monday and Tuesday night on PBS’s “The American Experience.” Unlike CBS’s four-part “500 Nations” - half aired, half still unscheduled - this one tells its story in much the same style as “The Civil War,” the landmark project from brothers Ken and Ric Burns and two other producers.
“The Way West” too has its roots in the Civil War, a time when soldiers stationed in the West were called away to fight the Confederates, leaving a large number of volunteer soldiers to maintain order in an area that was becoming turbulent.
The series is produced by Ric Burns and Lisa Ades, who earlier made “The Donner Party” and “Coney Island” under the Steeplechase Films banner. They are also working on a documentary about the Mormons’ trek west to Utah.
“The Way West” tells a chapter in American history that is almost within living memory. “This really was yesterday,” Burns said. “What we try to do is make the past present, to abolish the distance between the past and the present.”
Burns tends to look at the bloody conflict between whites and Indians as an inevitable clash between what historian Stephen Ambrose terms “being and becoming.” The whites’ concept of “becoming” - a particular quality of the new American character, he says - won out over the Native Americans’ desire to be left alone - “being.”
xxxx TUNING IN PBS’s “The Way West” airs Monday and Tuesday nights at 8 on KSPS-Channel 7 in Spokane and at 7 on KCDT-Channel 26 from Coeur d’Alene and KUID-Channel 12 from Moscow.