Original subtitles

As the United States prepares for its first centennial,

the war in the West between native nations and the U.S.

is not yet over. But its outcome seems clear:

the tribes that once thrived in the Great Plains,

the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho,

are now mostly confined to reservations.

Bison are on the verge of extinction,

and the vast grassland that once sustained them

now offers opportunity

for a new wave of Western immigrants: cattle ranchers.

Their arrival will reshape the northern plains,

igniting a life and death struggle for the control of the open range.

People live on myths.

The myths that really stick in the American experience

are those of the West.

The mountains were taller, the deserts were harsher,

the snows were deeper.

American West conjures wonder, possibility, opportunity.

The figure of the mountain man.

Notorious outlaws. - The cowboy.

The discovery of gold in California.

This train of wagons trailing across the prairie.

Everybody has a reason for wanting this land.

But most of that land was already occupied.

We have been residents for more than 10,000 years.

This is a clash of two different ways of seeing life

and fighting for the future of your homeland on the one side...

...and fighting for the destiny of the New Republic

on the other side.

The history of the West is a creation story.

It's the creation of what we think of as modern America.

The West is a place where anything is possible.

It is the essence of the American dream.

The core of this is, what are we to be as a nation?

The reckoning is coming.

The West is this canvas

on which American dreams become larger than life.

In 1866,

the end of the Civil War brings a new wave of settlers West,

seeking fresh opportunity

and fresh profit on government lands across America's Great Plains.

This is federal property known as the open range.

The grass is free at this point.

Settlers have come to recognise that this enormous grassland,

which provided forage

for tens of millions of head of buffalo,

might be just as good for American cattle.

This realisation dawns as Americans in the North

develop a new taste for beef,

thanks to a booming post-war economy and fast-growing cities.

And it becomes very quickly central to the American diet

and the American identity. When immigrants come to America,

one of the first things they write home is,

"You will not believe it, but I'm having beef

twice, three times a week." The first place

to meet this growing demand is Texas.

While their owners fought in the Civil War,

the cattle proliferated here.

When they returned, they found some five million Longhorns

grazing freely on open lands.

This is chiefly Spanish Criollo cattle

that's being interbred with English Herefords,

known as the Texas Longhorn.

Growing demand means serious money,

and a steer worth $4 in Texas can sell for up to 50 in New York.

But first they must reach the nation's meat-packing centre

in Chicago. That means driving herds hundreds of miles across Texas

to the nearest rail hub in Abilene, Kansas,

gruelling work that falls on the shoulders

of what will become an American icon.

The birth of the cowboy is really the cattle drive:

massive herds of cattle

protected by cowboys to make sure they kept moving.

You would round up in Texas,

and you would go up the famous Chisholm Trail,

but you had to be hardy.

You'd get left behind if you got sick.

And the reality is, being a cowboy was a terrible job.

It was really hard. You were poorly paid.

About 20%, maybe even more of American cowboys

were African-Americans.

It's also work that exposes cowboys

to wild animals, hostile natives.

You're absolutely expendable, which is why you find

such a high proportion of African-Americans in this work.

It is far less glamorous than Hollywood would memorialise it.

Today there are a lot of people who wear cowboy hats

who don't go anywhere near cows or horses, but people live on myths.

Built on the backs of cowboys,

the cattle business booms, and with the completion

of theTranscontinental Railroad in 1869,

transporting beef across the country gets easier

and even more profitable.

One of the most remarkable things was connecting the East to the West

with the Transcontinental Railroad,

and you can't exaggerat e how significant that is.

Before the railroad,

it costs as much to send a ton of goods

30 miles overland as it does to send it 3,000 miles

across the ocean. - That changes everything.

Now, people moving West, they weren't moving laboriously

by the wagon, now they can get on the train.

That obviously opens up an enormous field of opportunity

for ordinary families moving west, but also for big businesses.

Thanks to the railroad, cattle ranching soon expands

north from Texas all the way to Wyoming,

where livestock can graze freely across the open range.

The open range is grazing lands that aren't fenced,

and so they're not staked out by any particular divide,

and that means the cattle can roam freely.

If you had the resources to acquire a herd

and bring it to a place where it was free range,

you were sittin' pretty.

In 1877, Americans hoping to prosper in the cattle boom

are encouraged by a new Congressional law,

the Desert Lands Act, aimed to boost settlement

in the high, dry plains.

The Act lets anyone buy up to 320 acres of land

for just $1.25 an acre.

It was designed to fill the American West

with honest people who would sink down roots

and have their families, build a school, some churches.

Goes back to Thomas Jefferson.

The smallholder is the heart of the American Republic.

Soon hundreds of homesteaders flock to Wyoming,

hoping to make it as cattle ranchers.

The idea is that if you can get your cows out there

and fatten them up to feed on this open grassland,

that's gonna increase your profits. - Didn't have to pay for anything.

The animals take care of themselves.

They're wandering around, but you need to know

which cattle are yours, which belong to your friend, or enemy.

The solution is cattle branding.

You burned a symbol in the animal's side, and people

knew it was yours.

But branding is not a perfect solution

on the open range, where herds could interbreed,

making it hard to know who owns which unbranded calves.

These unmarked calves are called mavericks,

and according to common practice, if you find one, and brand it,

it's yours.

It's a long tradition where if you find stray cattle

that are not branded, what was called a maverick,

you can take that calf and give it your own brand.

It is basically a free calf.

By 1880, a calf is one of the most valuable assets in America.

A herd of 10,000 cattle can net a yearly profit

worth $20 million today. As fortunes amass,

the cattle business changes.

The cattle industry in Wyoming begins with small-time operators,

but very quickly, larger ranches are funded

with corporate money, with stocks sold in New York and Boston

and Philadelphia, and sold in Edinburgh and Berlin,

because of this global industrial market.

These ranch owners get a reputation as aristocrats.

They're called the cattle barons. - But surprisingly,

the great cattle barons didn't own any land.

They might've owned a tiny bit, but they were just extractors

using the convenience of the public domain

to line their pockets. They were living the good life

with cigars, and brandy, and amiable women, let's say,

in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Thanks to such easy profits,

Wyoming's capital, Cheyenne, builds its own Millionaires Row

in the 1880s. Its streets are lit up

by some of America's first electric lights.

In 1882, it becomes the wealthiest city per capita

in the world.

Wyoming's elite ranchers

are determined to maintain their wealth and power.

The most powerful Wyoming ranchers

create the Wyoming Stock Growers' Association, and in the whole state,

cattle-ranching is the foundation of power.

The Association functionally becomes the government

of the territory of Wyoming. Then in 1886,

Wyoming's cattle ranchers are dealt a terrible blow

in what comes to be known as the Great Die-Up.

Winter of 1886-1887 was one of the worst winters

ever to hit the Plains. Cattle died by the thousands.

People would find vast herds frozen to death.

Investors in London, in Scotland, in Boston, New York,

all say, "This is not a good business.

We don't wanna be involved. Liquidate your herds,

send them to Chicago. We're out." Ranches go under.

Cattle industry's in freefall.

Any cattle barons left standing

are now ready to fight for every last dollar.

The great cattle barons get the legislature of Wyoming

to pass a law saying that every maverick

belongs to the Wyoming Stock Growers' Association,

so that anytime there's an unidentified calf

it can't be claimed by one of the homesteaders

or a small rancher.

The Maverick Act made the possession

of unbranded cattle illegal. - So the small ranchers

are breaking the law every time they pull

one of their own calves back from the herd.

The Wyoming Stock Growers' Association

hire stock detectives who will patrol the range

to make sure mavericking policies are being enforced.

And the penalty for stealing cattle is death.

As tensions rise between Wyoming's cattle barons

and its small ranches over mavericks,

a new technology makes things even more challenging.

Advertised as lighter than air, stronger than whiskey,

and cheaper than dust: barbed wire.

The devil's rope, as the indigenous people call it,

will allow people to secure their homestead.

It's dry in the American West, and there's not a lot of wood,

so it's hard to build a fence, until the invention of barbed wire

makes it pretty easy to do so. - You can just

unspool this barbed wire to ensure your livestock stayed in,

and nobody came and stole from you. It was the hot invention.

At the same time,

it undermines the whole notion of the open range system.

All of a sudden, there is no unfettered movement

of grazing cattle. - Everything was now cut

and parcelled into these chunks of land

guarded by sharp wire.

The fences threaten the cattle barons' livelihoods,

which depend on free access to the grass.

The cattle barons are determined to take action.

Two independent ranchers are the first ones in their sights:

Jim Averell and Ellen Watson.

Jim Averell and Ella Watson were beginning to prosper a little,

running a ranch for cattle.

Ella Watson was very angry that the cattle barons,

the Stock Growers' Association,

was starting to make it impossible

for her and her husband to make a living.

But their homestead is right on the river,

a prime watering hole

in the middle of a cattle baron's range.

It was fenced, and so he couldn't use that land anymore,

land that had made him rich. He needed to get them off that land.

And so the cattle barons decided to eliminate Averell and Watson,

so they send out a hit squad.

The moral legitimacy is on the side of the homesteaders,

and none of the legitimacy

is on the side of the cattle barons, misusing power for their own greed.

Averell and Watson are accused of stealing cattle,

a practice called rustling.

And the stock detective s take them from their ranch...

...and they lynched them.

Extra-judicial hanging. The cattle barons believed

that this is the first important step

in warning people in Johnson County to desist from rustling.

For the people who knew Watson and Averell, this is murder.

The powerful cattle barons have money,

and they controlled most of the newspapers.

So the headlines in most of the Cheyenne papers

present, "Rustlers are lynched, and they deserved it,

they were thieves". - Ellen Watson is 'Cattle Kate,'

a notorious prostitute being paid with stolen cattle.

And that Averell was her pimp.

She is branded as an outlaw,

when the truth of the matter is, she was a woman trying to get by.

The news terrifies small homesteaders in Wyoming,

but some realise if they want to survive,

they must band together and fight back.

One of them is Nate Champion.

Nate Champion grows up in Texas.

He works in various places as a ranch hand,

and cowboy riding the ranges. He knew how the business worked.

Champion moved to Johnson County in the 1870s

to set up his own ranch, and has grown his herd

to over 200 cattle, but right now, the future looks bleak.

Homesteaders fear being murdered, or falsely prosecuted

for fencing off their own land.

People are dying, and there's a real climate of fear.

Nate Champion's one of the few

that does not get completely scared off by this.

Champion and some of his compatriots

realised they weren't gonna be able to stay in business

unless they could break the cattle barons' power,

and so they establish their own association,

the Northern Wyoming Stock Growers' Association.

It's gonna have its own rules, and its own round-up,

and crucially that round-up is gonna be

one month before the Wyoming Stock Growers' Association round-up.

Champion and the homesteaders know the risk,

and going up against the powerful Stock Growers

is a make or break decision.

The big-time ranchers know this is an existential threat.

If this round-up happens before them,

there's gonna be a lot of unbranded cattle

that they think should be theirs

going to Champion and friends. They must stop it happening.

So the cattle barons hire Frank Canton to lead the effort

to suppress the round-up.

Now Canton, he had a kind of chequered past:

murder, robbery, all sorts of crimes.

But he reinvented himself,

first as a sheriff in Johnson County,

and them as the henchman for the cattle barons.

He is in cahoots with big stock growers,

and ultimately becomes a stock detective.

In the spring of 1882,

Canton and his men find Nate Champion at his cabin.

Nate Champion is in bed.

Champion reaches under his pillow and pulls up a revolver...

...and starts shooting.

There's a gunfight.

Champion hits a couple of them.

They flee...

...and they're not able to get Nate Champion.

Once the coast is clear,

Champion finds a literal smoking gun.

He does the minimal forensics to realise

that it belongs to Frank Canton, a key player for the cattle barons.

So now Nate Champion is in a position

to bring down Frank Canton.

This is a real problem for the Stock Growers' Association.

If one of these stock detectives ends up in court,

they will be forced to testify against their employers.

Nate Champion could blow the lid off the whole thing.

In 1890,

as tensions between homesteaders and stock growers intensify,

Wyoming enters the Union as the 44th state,

with Cheyenne as its capital.

Cattle barons are appointed to important government positions,

hold meetings in the Capitol,

and have a hand in electing the state's Governor

and its two Senators.

All three of them are Republicans.

President Benjamin Harrison is also a Republican,

so these are people who know each other,

so they're optimistic that they'll get co-operation.

As the cattle barons consolidate their power,

the nation itself is in the midst of a fight

between workers and the millionaires who employ them.

Thousands of miles away in Homestead, Pennsylvania,

Andrew Carnegie is in the midst of crushing the Steel Workers' Union.

He sees these unionised workers

as people that are undermining his ability to make his millions,

and so he does everything in his power to crush them,

including hiring a private army of 300 Pinkertons.

Mark Twain described the years between 1875 and 1900

as the Gilded Age, a result of the Industrial Revolution,

where people at the top enjoyed huge wealth and power

at the expense of factory workers in the East

and small farmers in the West.

These enormous natural resources of the country, this vast amount,

the whole lot of it, is coming into the ownership

of a smaller group of people.

At this point, the wealthy have the power

to be able to incite violence at a mass level

against the smaller guys, and at times they do.

As it is in the East, so it goes in the West.

But the cattle barons go even further

and hire private armies to take out their worst enemies.

The cattle barons make a list of 70 individuals

up in Johnson County that must be eliminated,

by which I mean eliminated,

and the number one they want to get is Nate Champion.

The list included manyhomesteaders

in Nate Champion's Northern Wyoming Stock Growers' Association,

and anyone whose homestead is in the way.

This is not just a bunch ofranchers or hired hands

or cowboys. The kill list is of prominent people of Johnson County,

sheriffs and judges and city council members

and newspapermen. So it's a civil war, effectively.

The Stock Growers' Association decide they need to get hired guns.

They recruit 25 desperadoes, gunmen from Texas,

with the promise of $5 a day for expenses

and $50 for every rustler that they kill.

Now, to us, they look like hitmen.

To them, they were bringing justice to Johnson County,

which to them had descended into anarchy.

People in Johnson County are gonna call them invaders,

because they're coming to basically invade Johnson County,

to take over, and to kill people.

The hired guns travel from Texas by a private train

to meet the cattle barons and Frank Canton.

They're then equipped with horses, with rifles.

They have a wagon that's got tons of ammunition and food

and even dynamite, and off they go,

headed for the heart of Johnson County.

On the way, they find out that Nate Champion is staying

on the KC Ranch, which is right on the way to Buffalo,

and they thought if they could ambush Champion,

they would get one of their key suspects off their list,

cutting the head off the snake.

As they near the KC Ranch, the invaders cut the telegraph lines

to prevent news of their arrival from getting to Johnson County.

On April 9th, 1892,

the cattle barons' vigilante army quietly surrounds the KC Ranch.

Champion is staying at the KC Ranch

along with one of his friends and two other men.

Two of the guys go out to get water, and don't come back.

Nate Champion and his friend, Nick Ray,

realise that, "Where are they? Something's going on here."

Ray decides to go look.

Suddenly Champion, he knows what's going on.

Can he get out alive?

He's outgunned here by 50 to one, but he actually hits three of them,

and he does manage to keep them at bay for several hours.

And so a stand-off ensues. He was holed up in his cabin.

There wasn't a lot he could do. He could give up,

but he knows that might mean certain death.

Nate Champion is under siege, and yet he starts to take a diary,

write what's happening. - "I see 12 or 15 men.

One of 'em looks like Frank Canton."

Even though he's very alone, he feels like

he's part of something bigger. - He's gonna provide evidence

that the cattlemen were behind the attack,

so that if he was gonna die, he wasn't gonna die in vain.

At one point, a friend of his rides by

and exchanges gunfire with these hired invader gunmen.

He realises that something really bad is going on here,

and so he galloped back to Buffalo to get help.

Frank Canton and his hitmen

suspect that rescuers from Buffalo will soon be on their way,

and they'd better get Champion fast.

They take this cart, which they light on fire,

and then push very firmly toward the cabin.

Cabin catches on fire. Nate Champion is shooting, writing.

"The house is all fired. Boys, there's bullets coming in like hail.

I don't think they intend to let me get away this time."

He's surrounded by dozens of killers.

There's no way out.

Astonishing that he writes a journal at that time.

"I think I'll make a break for it.

They're still shooting all around the house.

Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again."

Champion knows this isn't gonna end well for him.

He makes a run for the ravine.

There are all these people shooting at him.

Nate Champion... is gunned down in a hail of bullets.

Canton finds Nate's diary. He tears out a page,

and leaves a warning on Nate's body.

That note is a key part of the story,

because killing Nate Champion, in a way it's an act of terrorism.

More than about enforcing the law or finding justice,

it's about scaring people, telling people what'll happen,

even if they think they're gonna get away with it,

about what'll happen if they cross the Association.

Johnson County is not gonna be welcome

to people like Nate Champion anymore.

When Nate Champion's friends discover that he's been murdered,

they sound the alarm and go after the invaders.

The Sheriff of Johnson County, Red Angus,

is able to round up 250 men.

It's gonna be the townspeople and the homesteaders

against the big cattle ranchers. Canton and his men

have lost the element of surprise.

Now the whole county is out to get them.

Frank Canton's men decided they would hole up

at the TA Ranch to figure out what they were gonna do

now their plan had fallen apart. Sheriff Angus

and his posse track Canton's invaders to the ranch.

Homesteaders surround the ranch. For the second time in as many days,

we were gonna have a siege.

The invaders, to save themselves, barricade themselves in,

set up sharpshooter positions,

and this begins a several-day stand-off.

Ranches at this time were designed to be defended,

as the earliest ranches were part of taking land violently

from native peoples.

Now, the thing to know about these kind of showdowns

in the American West is, we all have this image from TV, movies,

everybody's an incredible shot, they can shoot a bird outta the sky.

Really, people's guns were unreliable.

A lot of times people were shooting and nobody was getting hit.

The siege at the TA Ranch takes place over several days,

and while that's happening, posse is growing,

and it's gonna get up to around 400 people.

But the invaders have create d a problem for themselves.

The original plan was to surprise everyone in Johnson County,

and part of that plan had been cutting the telegraph lines.

That had seemed like a good idea at the time, but was a mistake:

they had no way to get word back that they were in trouble.

Trapped and surrounded, Canton manages to send a runner

out through the blockade to plead for help.

He reaches the Governor of Wyoming,

who sends a telegram to Washington, DC.

Meanwhile,

the people of Johnson County are moving these siege weapons

towards the cabin. They'll send in dynamite.

It's gonna be the death of the entire invading army.

This is going to be a massacre.

In Johnson County,

Wyoming, a simmering conflict

between cattle barons and small ranchers

has erupted into violence.

Hired assassin Frank Canton and his men

faced a posse of angry citizens bent on revenge,

but he has managed to send out a plea for help to powerful allies

thousands of miles away.

The two Senators from Wyoming,

alerted by the telegraph that this is happening,

literally go from their homes in Washington DC to the White House

in the middle of the night.

President Harrison, who's at home asleep,

they get someone to go in and wake him up

and tell him there's an insurrection underway, a violent insurrection

in Wyoming.

And the word insurrection is a powerful one for Americans

in the 19th century, as all of these people

had lived through the Civil War,

and they feared more than anything

a loss of authority of the United States government,

possible meaningful insurrection. Realising the stakes,

President Harrison wastes no time.

Benjamin Harrison sends a telegram to Fort McKinney,

which is in Johnson County,

and the US military rides to the rescue of the invaders.

President Benjamin Harrison's

from one of the oldest aristocratic Virginia plantation families.

His great-great-grandfather was one of the Founding Fathers.

His grandfather, William Henry Harrison,

was also briefly a President,

and so we see this aristocrat helping out the cattle barons.

This is a pretty tight-knit group,

and the cattle barons have a lot of influence.

At the TA ranch, literally the cavalry arrives,

a visible form of the United States' authority.

Canton surrenders to the US cavalry.

He's lost two of his men,

both killed by tripping over their own guns.

Canton and 45 others are escorted back to Cheyenne,

where they're put in jail to await trial for murder.

Homesteaders believe that the United States government

is gonna bring those men to justice, that they'll get justice

for people like Champion, and believe they can create a world

in which they have a say. - They find the hit list

of the 70 names of people who were to be assassinated.

That's a pretty good piece of evidence.

We might imagine that's a smoking gun,

but we also have to remember the cattle barons' perspective:

it's not a smoking gun if those people

are, in fact, thieves. They believed they were doing the right thing,

for them. The miscarriage of justice was the attempt

to convict these people

for rightfully ridding the county of cattle thieves.

The cattle barons hire expensive attorneys

to defend the invaders, but they don't stop there.

In the weeks that follow, witnesses disappear,

trial dates are pushed back, until eventually

the county runs out of money.

They remain in custody for approximately four months.

At the end of that time period, they are given back their weapons

and released on their own recognisance.

They're all acquitted. Nobody has to pay a price for the violence.

They go to a big party that's thrown for them

at the Cheyenne Club, and they're feted with champagne

and given commemorative rings, treated as heroes.

In the end, all the men who participate in the invasion

are paid for what they did, for their time in jail,

and for their involvement in the killings.

And are even given a bonus for getting Nate Champion.

The hired gunman get back on the train,

go back to Texas, and they get away with it.

And it's immediately clear justice is never going to be done,

that this is official military cover-up

extending to the highest reaches of the American government,

to the President himself, protecting capitalists

who are illegally trying to protect their way of life

against legitimate homesteaders. We call it the Johnson County War.

It's a civil war, and it's one of the greatest miscarriages of justice

in American history.

Most of the newspaper coverage of this Johnson County War

is heavily in favour of the cattle barons,

and depicts the homesteaders as, you know, crazy, violent,

you know, bandidos that need to be suppressed

in the interest of law and order.

The wealthy and influential had power in Johnson County,

and could control the narrative to justify their actions.

Johnson County War is just one example of many

where, in various parts of the West, at various times,

the little guys show up and begin to make a life for themselves,

but the rich and powerful,

with their capital and access to government,

gain a tremendous advantage, and the little guys end up losing.

While the cattle barons escape justice

for their invasion of Johnson County,

they can't stem the tide of new settlers

carving up the open range.

This is kind of the death knell of the cattle baron vision.

There are too many people coming in and starting farming,

too many coming in and starting smaller ranches

across the plains. There's not enough free land

to scatter your cattle far and wide, so ranching becomes smaller scale.

It also becomes less profitable. - The Association

has somewhat of a change of heart

and they decide to admit these small cattle operators

into their association.

The era of the open range ends,

and smaller family ranches become more common.

It's this moment where suddenly

there's a sense of, "Wow, maybe the resources have run out,

and now we're fighting over them among ourselves."

For some people who are still making a go of it

in places like Wyoming, this is the time

to seize the last opportunity that is presented by the West.

Near the end of the 19th century,

the US government makes a surprising announcement

that signals the end of an era.

In 1890, the Census Department tells Americans

the frontier is effectively closed. - The frontier at that point

is defined by two people per square mile of land,

and so the U.S. has reached a population that's beyond that.

The frontier as a category has now been removed

from the census forms, because it's no longer useful.

The closing of the frontier has an important impact

on the American psyche,

because the American people have conquered the West

with spectacular success. Who will we be,

now that our Manifest Destiny has been settled,

now that we've achieved this ultimate goal?

There's no longer the sense of continuous abundance,

continuous opportunity,

so it's a defining moment in American history.

As it enters the 20th century,

America has expanded to 44 states,

and its size has quadrupled

since the end of the Revolutionary War,

but native nations have been pushed into ever smaller territories.

The most astonishing fact of the 19th century in America

is the rapidity with which white people

took the entire continent. Jefferson actually believed

it might take 800 or 900 years for us to reach the Mississippi

or the Missouri. In one century,

this juggernaut just overwhelmed everything.

In that process, a complex and enduring myth is born.

We, as a country, grew up very, very fast.

Our distinct American character was a result of this march westward.

When people went west, they could start over again.

The self-reliance, the perseverance,

and the determination it took to succeed in the West

became part of our conception of what it means to be an American.

An important thing to understand

about why Americans are so fascinated

by stories about the West is that fascination starts

in the 1890s. Americans are trying to tell a collective story

about who they are as a country, stories of cattle ranching,

settlement, of railroads, of homesteads.

It gave all Americans something they felt like they had a stake in.

In many ways, the idea of the West

is really the birth of the American Dream...

...pursuing opportunity, seeking a new life.

But part of that is that there are consequences...

...and there are many other people

that pay the price of ambition.

In the end, the legacy of the creation

of the American West, and the story of Western expansion

is a legacy of destruction, of conquest,

of dispossession. But also there's so much to inspire us.

The story of the West is heroic.

There are the peacemaker heroes.

There are the natives of the resistance.

And even though we have a kind of more sombre view

of the heroics today, because we know the cost...

...it was an age of heroes.

Our country is a beautiful, magnificent,

abundant place to live.

And we're still here to tell the story.

Eventually, the open space that so many battled over

is fenced off piece by piece, contained by barbed wire,

and joined to the East by railways and roads.

The frontier, so much a part of the American Dream,

is finally closed. But when we look back,

we can see the story of the West

is much more than just a story of American settlement.

There's a legacy of conquest, of course,

a fact that we should never fail to include,

but we have to also recognise the resourcefulness it took

for our ancestors to cross this country.

It's that legacy of courage and hope that defines America today.

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