[ Country music plays ] [ Thunder rumbles ] -♪ There's a traveling wildfire ♪ ♪ Sprawling like an endless... ♪ -The Wild West.

Few areas have burned as brightly or as briefly... [ Gunshots fire ] ...as America's own mythic age.

-♪ You can see it tearing up the mountainside ♪ -But the true history of the West was a lot more diverse, a lot more complex, and a heck of a lot more interesting than we've been led to believe.

In the wars for the West, revolution and conquest reshaped the country.

But when slavery tore the States apart, Americans fought to unite the country under one flag.

The new West was going to be a time of boom, bust, and opportunity.

The rush for gold changes fortunes and inspires mass immigration.

The railroad unites the country, but forces out those that built it.

The bison are pushed to the brink of extinction to make way for cowboys and cattle, while brave homesteaders work the land and emancipated Americans stake their claims out west.

♪♪ ♪♪ -It's much easier to think of history in terms of black and white, but ultimately the American West is far more different, far more diverse, far more interesting.

I'm Alaina Roberts.

I'm an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, and my work revolves around the West and the intersection of Black and Native American life in North America.

Today we're at Fort Gibson, built in 1824 to protect the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole people who were forced to live here after Indian Removal.

-As wars raged, the United States begins to extend its reach, making land an even more coveted commodity, but at the expense of those who lived here for centuries.

The passing of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 sends approximately 100,000 Natives from the Southeast to west of the Mississippi.

Thousands die, and the forced migration comes to be known as the Trail of Tears.

In an area known as Indian Territory, ultimately, 20 to 30 tribes share a small corner of Oklahoma, but they are moving onto lands ruled by other Native nations for eons.

-Well, Fort Gibson is a reminder that some of the first people to settle in Western spaces were Native Americans.

And so, because white settlers forced people out of their southeastern homelands, they're forced here to really kind of impede on the lands and settlements of other Native people who already lived in the West, like the Comanches and the Osage.

Unlike most military posts and forts throughout the West, Fort Gibson -- it's built to protect Native American settlers rather than white settlers.

So it really is supposed to be for Native people to be kind of alone and unbothered by white Americans.

And then, of course, eventually white Americans bother them there as well.

-Indian territory would not be a refuge for long... [ Clock ticking ] ...as a great wave of settlers starts flooding west in the wake of an earth-shaking discovery... ...gold.

-Gold has mesmerized man for nearly 6,000 years.

Ooh, look at that.

There's something about that shiny metal that's just purely magical.

I'm Dainis with Colorado Gold Camp, and I'm a professional prospector.

Holy moly!

That's got to be a good 30, 35 pounds right there.

Prospecting is my calling in life, and it's the only real thing that I'm passionate about.

This looks like a good spot right here.

The most interesting aspect of the original Gold Rush was just the awesome sense of adventure.

♪♪ Prospecting is not easy.

The three main things you need to be a successful prospector -- patience, persistence, and perseverance.

The oldest gold-recovery method was using a gold pan.

The actual act of gold panning is one of the most challenging aspects of gold prospecting.

This is probably my 20,000th pan or something like that.

So I've developed a couple skills and tricks along the way.

This dredge is our modern technology.

It processes anywhere from 10 to 100 times more gravel than that old rocker box.

Saw a couple glimmers of gold.

It's a giant treasure hunt.

When you find gold, you get this true, deep sense of accomplishment.

-Dainis follows a calling that dominated the 1800's.

-The gold rush was a huge change to the American West.

My name is Jordan Bennett, and I'm the curator at the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum here in Leadville, Colorado.

I think people romanticize the story of the American West and gold panning and the gold rush, because it's a story that people want to try to make it rich and make a life for themselves.

-In 1848, carpenter James Marshall spots something glimmering in a stream, and the California Gold Rush kicks off in a little place called Sutter's Mill.

-Claims of the validity of this find were highly disputed at first.

However, the gold passed all the tests, and news quickly spread to San Francisco.

-Before the Gold Rush, San Francisco was a tiny port town of only 500 people.

In just over a year, it swells into a bustling city of 25,000, with more on the way.

-The 49'ers are people who had migrated in 1849 for the gold rush.

The initial gold rush was estimated to be roughly 300,000 people.

People who came over during the gold rush were risking it all, basically.

They were leaving their communities, their loved ones sometimes, and they put it all on the line because of there was the possibility of earning money for it.

-San Francisco is the gateway to Gold Country, but reaching the land of treasure and promise presents huge risks.

-People migrated for the gold rush by land and by sea, and each presented their own difficulties.

Those who came by land, disease was very prevalent -- diphtheria and mountain fever and cholera and dysentery.

-But with gold fever in full swing, droves of would-be miners come anyway.

-Those old-timers really had some true grit.

Back then, frequently, these guys were traveling by mule, donkey, horses, carts carrying everything they needed to survive on their backs, heading way up into the hills, into the mountains, exploring caverns, hillsides, gullies, ravines, and looking for that gold.

-As prospectors turn into miners... [ Explosion ] ...gold becomes dangerous business.

One in five 49'ers in California die within six months.

But for some, the rewards are worth the risks.

-Black men, especially, who find themselves free or who run away, these people who maybe wouldn't be accepted because they don't kind of fit into the racial hierarchy, are able to really kind of exploit this to become important, to gain wealth, and to create community.

-Former mountain man Jim Beckwourth sees the opportunity in California.

-Jim Beckwourth is kind of making his industry around prospecting, but there are so many men of African descent who are in California, either because, one, they are already there, they were brought by the Spanish, or were free men who came as soldiers.

Then you have enslaved people who are running away, or are being brought by their owners to prospect or to dig in the mines.

Then you also have people of African descent who are coming as free people to start businesses themselves around this industry that is popping up.

-As gold becomes harder to find by panning, the era of the lone prospector is coming to an end.

Independent miners team up to compete against the big mining corporations, using new tools to extract harder-to-get gold.

♪♪ ♪♪ -We're down in one of my hard-rock mines.

This is our gold vein right here.

So this here vein in particular was originally found on the surface.

Gold tends to get richer and richer the deeper you go.

-During the early days, there was little regulation at that point.

So threats of cave-ins, fires, explosions, Falling pieces of mineral were very prevalent.

-Fortune seekers aren't only traveling from across the States.

-People came from all over the place, and then many came from other countries.

This included South America, Australia, parts of Asia.

-The Chinese become one of the largest groups of mining migrants, and the communities that formed then are an important part of the fabric of America today.

-My name is Julia Lee, and I'm a professor of Asian-American Studies at the University of California at Irvine.

What I tell my students, what I tell everyone is Asian-American history is American history.

-A time of political upheaval at home leads millions of Chinese to take on the Wild West.

They make up almost 30% of immigrants during the gold rush.

-There was a lot of economic and political instability in China at that time, so famine, rebellions, wars, violence, economic distress.

So when gold was discovered, very quickly, the Chinese heard about it and started arriving.

The Chinese gave the US the nickname "Gold Mountain" "Gam Saan" in Cantonese, and that is because California was seen as this possible place for prosperity, to be able to build some wealth.

-The gold rush era burned brightly, but briefly.

Immigrants who missed the boom had to find new ways to survive in the West.

[ Clock ticking ] As the country heals from the deep wounds of the Civil War, a new endeavor dominates the public imagination, a symbol of a country unified from sea to shining sea... the transcontinental railroad.

-The transcontinental railroad was the largest infrastructural project up to that point in US history.

And it was massive.

It garnered a lot of interest from the American public because of its status as a technological feat.

-In 1862, President Lincoln sets in motion an ambitious plan to connect Sacramento, California, to Council Bluffs, Iowa.

If successful, the project will radically transform the speed and safety of transportation across the West.

-It was the technology that everyone was proud of, that everyone was interested in.

It's sort of the 19th-century version of the internet.

It was seen as transformative.

-The US government contracts two companies for the job, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads.

Completing the epic endeavor will take massive manpower.

From the East, Irish workers fleeing the potato famine, along with other European immigrants, begin laying track toward California.

From the West, a predominantly Chinese labor force lays rail toward the East.

It's a race to the middle.

Across the Sierra Nevadas, the Great Salt Lake Basin, and the Rocky Mountains... ...workers will lay nearly 5 million ties and more than 600,000 rails.

[ Train whistles blow ] -The Chinese got involved in the railroad because there were labor shortages, basically, in the West, particularly in California.

-When white laborers threatened to strike, company executives like Charles Crocker recruit Chinese immigrants to fill the gap.

Executives soon exploit Chinese laborers.

-Central Pacific actually saved a great deal of money by hiring Chinese workers, because they could pay them about a third to a half of what the average white worker was earning as a skilled laborer.

So they sent recruiters and agents to China specifically to recruit them in as railroad workers.

Within a few years, they comprised the majority, like over 12,000 of the 15,000 total workers working on the Central Pacific line.

The reason why Chinese railroad workers undertook this labor is because they couldn't own land, so this would have been the best paying kind of work, as dangerous as it was.

Working on the railroad was extremely difficult.

It was also really dangerous work -- landslides, explosions, all kinds of different things.

At certain points, they couldn't get more than six inches into the rock for a full day's work, even with the use of gunpowder.

So that's why the railroad eventually brought in nitroglycerin to try to blast its way through.

The explosives were obviously unstable, and any mistake would potentially kill a lot of people.

Two Chinese workers died for every three miles of track laid, basically, so there was a very high mortality and injury rate as well.

-But the risk is calculated.

Their wages support families across the Pacific.

After six years and 1,900 excruciating miles, East meets West... and the Jupiter meets number 119 at Promontory Point, north of Salt Lake City, Utah.

May 10th, 1869 -- Central Pacific Railroad mogul Leland Stanford drives a ceremonial golden spike into the final tie.

One photo captures the Captures the iconic moment that thrilled the nation.

-I'd argue it's the most famous photograph of the 19th century.

The champagne photo shows all the men, engineers, laborers who worked on the railroads standing around the two locomotives, the 119 and the Jupiter as they meet.

-It's just missing one important detail.

-Not one Chinese person is in the photo.

Even though they had done all the track laying and actually drove in the final spike of the railroad.

So it's an important spot in Asian-American history because of what it doesn't show you, which is that Chinese labor built the railroad, essentially.

And so as the people who did, like, 90% of the work, they weren't entitled to participate in that kind of celebratory moment.

-The California and Oregon Trails that hundreds of thousands had followed West would eventually become obsolete.

A dangerous trek that killed thousands now takes just seven days with a rail ticket.

It is the dawn of a new era of expansion.

And yet, as politicians and railroad tycoons celebrate, Chinese laborers face new setbacks.

-Once the railroad was completed, they were fired en masse.

And so they traveled back to California.

Many of them continued to do railroad work because, of course, railroad building was happening all over the country.

-Anti-Chinese policies further upended the lives and livelihoods of the Chinese workers.

-The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, and it was the first law, the first US law that restricted immigration from a certain nation in US history.

Up to that point, it had been the US had an open immigration policy.

Basically, if you arrived in US shores, you could come in and become a naturalized US citizen.

So it excluded the Chinese from immigration and naturalization into the US.

It was extended in 1892, ten years later, indefinitely, and it wasn't actually overturned until the mid 1940's, when China became an ally of the United States during World War II.

-For decades, the incredible contributions of Chinese migrants to one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 19th century was completely overlooked.

-It's important to retell these histories and tell it with the perspective of everyone who was involved, I think.

Especially in relation to Asian-American history, we have a tendency to think the perception of the stereotype around Asians is forever foreigners, that they don't belong in the United States, when in reality, Asians have been a part of the US since the founding of the Republic, essentially.

And so something like the railroad really shows the importance of Chinese-American experience to American experience broadly.

[ Bell dinging ] -A steam-powered nation charges forward as the Old World collides with the new.

The railroad will have drastic consequences for the Native people... and wildlife of the West.

[ Birds chirping ] Bison, or buffalo, have been a keystone species of the continent for 350,000 years.

-When Lewis and Clark came west, they described in their journals buffalo so numerous they were impossible to count.

They were like the stars.

-Buffalo meat has fed immigrants and railroad workers and been hunted for sport as an explosion of settlers move west with the railroad.

It pushes the species to the brink of extinction.

In a little over five decades, the population of the continent's largest mammal plummets from 40 million to only a few thousand.

♪♪ Today, one man has made it his mission to restore the West to a place where the buffalo roam.

[ Buffalo grunting ] ♪♪ -Yeah, my name is Jason Baldes, the executive director for the Wind River Tribal Buffalo initiative.

So I work closely with both the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho tribes in terms of managing buffalo and wildlife on tribal land and protecting them under tribal law.

♪♪ ♪♪ So, these are mostly the cows and calves.

♪♪ All the little babies are here with their mamas.

-Bringing back the buffalo has been a long and difficult journey.

-When you see that first hoof, that first hoof print on the ground, then it really hits home.

I think that was the most emotional moment, because it took so many years to get them back.

This ground where they haven't been for 130 plus years, like, it's here, it's real.

It's happening.

They're home.

-For tribes of the Plains, the buffalo has been an essential part of life.

-The eastern band of Shoshone, we were the Guchundeka', the Buffalo Eaters.

♪♪ They were life's commissary for many tribes.

They were the food, clothing, shelter.

We have many stories that go back for millennia about the relationship between bison and our people.

-The slaughter of the buffalo was more than an environmental tragedy.

It was a sinister strategy.

-What was in the way of the United States growing and becoming a nation often was seen as the Native people.

-By the 1870's, the US is intent on destroying the once majestic herds so crucial to Native American life.

To the Department of the Interior, every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.

[ Gunshot fires ] -The federal government really encouraged the demise of buffalo as a necessary step to control and take land from Native people.

The removal of that animal caused a great deal of suffering, starvation, dependence in some places on the federal government to provide rations.

-Today, two tribes are working together to bring the buffalo back to the plains.

-Oftentimes, the tribal governments have had disagreements.

But one thing we don't have to argue about is that we are Buffalo People.

Right now, these buffalo that are here on the Shoshone enclosure essentially are livestock of the Shoshone tribe.

The buffalo over there are essentially livestock of the Arapaho tribe.

The goal would be, in two to three years, to restore wildlife population in that expansion area.

-There is much work to be done to ensure the buffalo are not simply consigned to the past.

-By restoring buffalo, we're making it better for the future than the way we found it.

A lot of people believe that the West was won, that Buffalo were eliminated to make way for cows, and that tribes were forced onto reservations, and that we should just accept that.

I don't believe that.

I believe that we can ensure that our young people are no longer traumatized from that history.

We are Buffalo People.

We're still here.

-While Americans were eradicating the buffalo... [ Clock ticking ] ...they were making way for a new species to feed off the rich grazing lands of the West -- cattle.

Over the course of the 1800's, 4 million head would be driven over these lands.

[ Cattle mooing ] Leading them is one of the great symbols of the West, the cowboy.

[ Horse neighs, nickers ] But the cowboy of legend did not arrive fully formed.

And Americans weren't even the first cowboys on the continent.

♪♪ -That's better.

There you go, Princess.

My name's Jeff Sanders.

I'm sixth-generation vaquero.

A vaquero is somebody that works cattle on horseback.

It's the Spanish word for "cowboy."

My family started working cows in California almost 170 years ago.

♪♪ -The Spanish first brought longhorn cattle to their colonial outposts in the 1500's.

-As they came into California, they realized what really outstanding cattle country it was.

The vaquero horsemanship, and particularly the California vaquero horsemanship, is kind of unique in terms of how we ride our horses and our outlook on how we work the cows.

The horse is a tool to do the job, and the cows are the job.

The Californios had so much time because of the weather, they could just turn it into an art form.

-Vaquero horsemanship was legendary.

-There are a number of historical reports that say that the Californios were, like, just magicians with a rope.

I was always taught that it's not enough to just do the job.

You need to be able to do the job with refinement, with style, with class.

-That style preceded the American cowboy by hundreds of years.

-We've got the hats... the vests.

When we look at the chaps -- Spanish.

We look at even the Hyer boots, that kind of thing -- Spanish.

The type of saddle, there's a Spanish influence.

The Spanish vaquero is the father of the American cowboy.

[ Horse neighs ] -American cowboy culture won't blossom into the national identity until the 1800's... when the cattle business begins to boom.

-I'm Jessica Kim.

I'm an associate professor of history at California State University, Northridge, and study the history of the American West, California, and Los Angeles.

-When the Civil War ends, men return home to find their untended herds had multiplied.

-You know, if you have a lot of cattle in Texas following the Civil War, what are you going to do with thousands or hundreds of thousands of head of cattle and no market in Texas?

-A lot of cows and a big appetite for beef means there is a golden opportunity for those daring enough to herd thousands of cattle to market.

-You have to be able to move those cattle long distances, and that would include long-distance cattle drives and then as well as shipment via rail.

So, two key individuals in these long cattle drives were Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving.

-Goodnight and Loving drive 2,000 longhorns from Texas to New Mexico.

They make themselves 12,000 bucks, over $200,000 in today's money.

Their success inspires many more to cash in on cattle.

-[ Shouts indistinctly ] -12-man teams can drive several thousand cows at once.

And thanks to the newly completed railroads... [ Train whistle blows ] ...new markets are now open across the country.

-Historians make the joke that, in the 19th century, all rail lines led to Chicago, and it was because there were massive stockyards.

And so cattle would be driven from across the American West to railroad lines, railroads would ship the cattle to Chicago, and then immigrant workers were hired to slaughter and process that meat.

-It's a well-paid job that provides new economic opportunities out West.

And cowboy culture becomes ingrained in American identity.

[ Cattle mooing ] The cattle drive and the cowboy way of life live on... on trails like Wyoming's Green River Drift.

[ Horse neighing ] -As far as I can remember, I always wanted to be a cowgirl.

[ Cattle mooing ] I'm Brittany Hesseltine, and I am the foreman of the Range Riders.

-Six months out of the year, Brittany lives on this historic range, driving cattle just as the cowboys of the Old West would have.

♪♪ [ Horse nickers ] [ Dog whines ] -It's a lot of physical effort.

-My body has to stay with my horse.

She's trying to jump over sagebrush, and I also have to guide her where I need to be to help push those cattle be in the correct position of the flight zone.

[ Horse nickers ] I get to wake up in beautiful scenery.

I get to saddle my horse, I get to go move cattle, I get to rope and doctor.

It honestly takes just perseverance.

So this cattle drive has been happening for over a hundred years.

It is one of the longest continuous cattle drives left in the United States.

It is on the National Registry of Historic Events and Places.

To be a part of this legacy and a part of the history, it's really important to me because not many people get to do it.

There is a certain romance that it is still as part of today.

-The cowboy way of life has been romanticized since it began, and this unique culture comes from a diverse set of influences.

[ Guitar playing old-timey music ] ♪♪ -Well, my name is Dom Flemons, The American Songster.

I present a lot of different types of old-timey music, music from the United States that has a very elaborate, multi-faceted history.

I try to tell stories that are lesser-known stories, like what cowboys really looked like.

1 in 4 cowboys who settled the West were African American.

Black cowboys are part of this story.

One of the things that is really interesting about the development of the West post-slavery, post-emancipation, is that you're having the first moments where people are getting their own independent wages.

And so this was a moment where, especially when you had people that were coming from generations of slavery, they are working on the farm a lot with animals, or they're very skilled and they're very good at what they do, and now this is the first time they're getting paid to do this work that they were doing for free.

So in some ways, you can see how Black cowboys then excel exponentially from the moment that they were able to break out of the plantation system and then find new work, especially out West.

♪ When you get down to Holbrook ♪ ♪ You won't find me there, Good Lord ♪ ♪ I caught the first thing smokin' ♪ ♪ Down the road somewhere ♪ ♪ 'Cause I called my steel pony, and, boys, I'm goin' to ride ♪ "Steel Pony Blues" is a song I wrote after I read the autobiography of a Black cowboy by the name of Nat Love.

-Nat Love is born into slavery in 1854.

-His family, they are sharecroppers, but he's not interested in living this sort of life.

He's interested in hard liquor and breaking horses.

And so he soon goes West after emancipation to places like Arizona and the Dakota Territory, Kansas, where he's acting as a cowboy, he's driving cattle, but then he's also getting into gunfights and crossing paths, supposedly, with people like Billy the Kid.

He becomes known as Deadwood Dick, who is a popular dime-store novel character known for solving mysteries and great kind of gunfights.

So he's really kind of creating his own mythology.

He's one of the people that we should think of when we think of Black cowboys, and the, really, kind of ability of people to reinvent themselves in the West.

-Another legendary cowboy from the era is Bill Pickett.

He takes his ranching skills and turns it into sport.

This daring cowboy is credited with inventing bulldogging, or wrestling a half-ton steer to the ground.

-♪ Aw, take 'em on down the ridge ♪ -In the sport of rodeo, bulldogging remains a fan favorite.

-With the Black cowboys, it was a much broader statement about movement, about history, about people finding new types of work and the evolution of the American identity.

-But the heyday of the cowboy wouldn't outlast the West.

In 1886, cattle prices suddenly fall to half of what they had been just two years earlier.

The beef bubble had burst.

But the cowboy life is forever a part of the American story.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ The Roy LeBlanc Black Invitational Rodeo is the oldest Black rodeo in the country.

♪♪ -All right.

Yes, indeed.

Put your hands together right there!

Tyson Brown!

[ Cheers and applause ] -We're in Okmulgee, which is in the Creek Nation.

Rodeos are really important because they're an expression of Black culture and really kind of an important symbol of perseverance and of Black Western presence.

The fact that this is the longest running, you know, that tells you that there is a foundation of African-American history in this space.

-And people plan to go on cruises.

We plan to come to the rodeo when we're in Oklahoma.

-Hugh and Viola are a centenarian brother and sister.

-Viola Ford Fletcher, 108 years old, The mother of three children, six grandchildren, and eight grandchildren.

I live, born and raised, in Oklahoma.

-I'm her grandson.

But my father brought me to the rodeo because she brought him to the rodeo.

And we still come to the rodeo.

And she's 108.

He's 101.

Given opportunity, we're going to be at the rodeo because it's a family tradition.

-The LeBlanc rodeo is a living reminder of the of the generations of African Americans who lassoed the West.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Kenneth LeBlanc.

My dad kept the rodeo going because he was a rodeo person.

I mean, he loved rodeo.

In 1955, there used to be a white rodeo here.

And my dad, he was not allowed to participate, doing the rodeo.

And my grandfather, they had a section marked off and it said "colored section."

So if you were colored and you went to the rodeo, that's where you had to sit.

And that next year, they started their own rodeo.

-♪ O'er the land of the free ♪ ♪ And the home ♪ ♪ Of the ♪ ♪ Brave ♪ Oh, yeah!

-Competition is fierce... ♪♪ ...whether it's bronc riding... ...steer wrestling... [ Announcer speaking indistinctly ] ...calf tie downs... ...or the cowboy relay race.

Cowboys and cowgirls are using skills and techniques passed down through the generations.

-We've got contestants that come from Texas, you know, where their parents came down and their grandparents came down and participated years back, you know, and then they just continue.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Let's go, guys!

-We want to keep it going.

I think there's a pride in it, and it's to let people know that there are Black cowboys.

-The West may have been forged by gold rushes, railroads, and cowboys.

[ Clock ticking ] But the West was settled by families.

-You can sum up why people came out to the West in one word, and that would be "opportunity."

My name is Renee Laegreid, I'm a professor of history at the University of Wyoming, and my areas of expertise and research are women in the West and their relationship to the American West.

-The passing of the Homestead Act in 1862 is a watershed moment in the history of the United States.

Hundreds of thousands of people will be drawn west by its promise of free land.

-For opening up the West, the Homestead Act was the most important because it gave 160 acres of land to any citizen, male or female, who hadn't fought against the Union and who wanted to settle and start a family, start a homestead.

The homesteader had to go out, had to improve on it, put up a building, and then after five years and you paid your dollar and a quarter an acre, it was yours.

-The Homestead Act is often seen as the ultimate draw.

If you have the money and resources to build a farm, to build fences, to improve it.

And so there is certainly a threshold that you have to reach on your own to be able to really kind of buy into this promise of the American dream.

Land as currency, but also land as identity, I think, is important for thinking about all of United States history, but especially the West, because the West, for so many people, is that picture of how they can become part of the nation by having their own little plot of land.

-Homesteading transforms the landscape as millions of families from across Europe and the United States head west to lay stakes.

A man by the name of John Deere built his company on the commercial success of the steel plow.

This revolutionary invention helps homesteaders till tough grasslands, sow seeds, and grow crops.

But it is not an easy life.

Half of all homesteaders fail and give up.

The other half show great resilience.

That will to overcome lives on in modern homesteaders.

-She'll give us between 5 and 6 gallons a day.

A lot of cheese, a lot of ice cream, a lot of sour -- like, all the dairy, but it's really good.

When I think about the migration West, I think a lot of what pulled people in is what's still pulling people today.

-Is this a potato or a flower?

-I think it's a potato, a late potato.

My name is Jill Winger, and we live in the southeast corner of Wyoming, out on the wide-open prairie.

My husband and I, we have three children, four dogs, an unknown number of barn cats, about 45 chickens, 4 milk cows, a bunch of beef cattle, five horses, a handful of goats.

I think that's everything.

I kind of call it the prairie homestead.

And really, what we do is we call it living in an old-fashioned, on-purpose life.

And so it's this idea of mixing the old with the new.

To me, the modern homesteading movement is just this idea of living with intention and taking more responsibility for your life, whether that be in your food, being more connected to the soil.

So it's those sort of choices that are weaving this idea of that old-time homesteading into our modern life.

-Life in the remote landscapes of the West is challenging.

Forces of nature, like drought, tornadoes, prairie fires... and locusts... test even the most determined homesteaders.

-So it is very breezy today, and that's really normal for the prairie.

An average day, you know, 20 to 30 mile an hour, that's a breeze for us.

When it gets really gusty in the winter, it can get 90 to 100.

So basically, it's like hurricanes, but without the beach.

This isn't an easy place to live.

There's really harsh weather.

There's always wind.

We have blizzards.

We have tornadoes.

We have drought.

But when you are able to thrive within that, it's a really good feeling, and I think that's just a taste of what settlers experienced way back then and what we get to experience even still today.

-It is a harsh and unforgiving time, but the era is associated with freedom and independence, at least for some.

-Up until 1837, women were not allowed to own property.

And by "property," I mean anything.

[ Woman vocalizing indistinctly ] Still couldn't go to higher education, still couldn't get professional jobs, and their real opportunities were within the domestic sphere.

So getting married was your best option.

So a young woman passed from her father's household to her husband.

"Congratulations, sir.

You just now got all her stuff.

And good luck, honey."

[ Laughs ] "Your life is now in his hands."

-Women's rights begin to slowly expand with the passing of the Married Women's Property Act in 1848.

-Homesteading really got started after 1868.

It's three years after the Civil War, where a lot of men died, and so opportunities for women to marry were generally diminished.

If they couldn't get married, then maybe they start their own homestead.

They become independent landowners, and they could kind of create their own destiny.

-Over time, nearly 4 million people succeed in establishing homesteads out West.

-Sometimes my mind wanders back to maybe what the first settlers would have thought coming across this land, whether it was railroad or covered wagon.

I imagine that they were maybe a little overwhelmed by just the ocean of grass and the sheer -- I think it's kind of a desolate beauty.

One of our main goals in building our homestead is to create a legacy for our kids in skills and knowledge, and just that connection to the Earth.

I think homesteading helps us remember that and get back to those roots and keep that at the forefront.

-The homestead movement allowed families, women, and immigrants land to call their own.

It also allowed formerly enslaved people to leave the South and to build free communities of their own for the very first time.

-In the 1870's and 1880's, there are lots of African-American leaders like Frederick Douglass, who are kind of advocating for the United States to help African-Americans settle in the West after the Civil War and saying, you know, "This is the way to give Black people land, this is the way to help them be economically successful, because you say that's what you want for them to be able to take care of themselves."

So this is part of a movement to make different spaces in the West kind of Black enclaves.

That does not happen, the federal government doesn't support Black people in that way, and so African Americans do it themselves.

They move out themselves.

They have their own resources.

They pull together to make communities.

-144 years ago, some of the first free Black pioneers founded just such a community on the plains of western Kansas.

-...the settlement of Nicodemus.

[ Crowd cheering ] -My name is Luecreasea Horne, and I am the education technician here at Nicodemus National Historic Site.

Along with that, I am a sixth-generation descendant.

Post-Reconstruction, several African-American settlements popped up all over Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, California, the Dakotas.

But Nicodemus, here in Kansas is the only one that is still surviving west of the Mississippi.

-The settlement begins in 1877 when H.R.

Hill, a white land developer, teams up with a Black reverend by the name of W.H.

Smith.

Their goal is to attract settlers from Black churches in Kentucky and send them toward Kansas.

-The lure of the West was to be landowners.

That was the number-one thing, to be a landowner, because that was the American dream.

They sold Nicodemus as this Black utopia.

You could educate your children, you could be free of racism and not have to worry about the KKK, you can govern your own community, so those were the things that really lured these folks to come out here.

-Town historian and descendant Angela Bates has fought to preserve the legacy her ancestors established here over 100 years ago.

-Can you imagine coming from Kentucky, where the land is very lush?

The further west they get, the less trees they see.

And then they really end up on the prairie.

And I know they must have thought, "Okay, now, we done left our slave past, but what are we doing?"

So I think they were apprehensive, but I think they were also probably excited.

They must have shouted with joy to the top of their voice, you know, "Freedom.

Oh, my God, this is it."

And the sky must have said, "Okay, we receive you."

I think they knew that, whatever they did, it was going to help them move forward into experiencing freedom in a way they had never experienced it before.

So we are part of that story.

We are part of that story.

-In just two years, Black homesteaders built something incredible.

-So Nicodemus, at his heyday, I would have loved to have been here and to have seen it because there were two newspapers, several schools, general stores.

So there were people who were entrepreneurs out here.

There were banks out here.

There was a hotel that was a 2-story, 18-bedroom hotel in Nicodemus.

Yes.

How awesome is that?

And so Nicodemus was the place to be.

And that just makes me happy because that's my peoples that was doing that.

-While the town's population has dwindled over the years, its power to inspire remains.

Generations of descendants make the pilgrimage back to celebrate what their ancestors built and accomplished here in Nicodemus.

-Our family calls it "homecoming," and it's just a great big family reunion.

And so when they got here in September of 1878, they decided that they were going to have a great big jubilee.

And so everybody got together.

They had their food, they had a little dance, and they had a party to celebrate the town and the emancipation of them being free in their own little community.

And so we've been doing it for 144 years.

-Nicodemus is one of those places where, when you come, you experience it, you can't help but pull your shoulders back and walk a little taller.

So, here in Nicodemus, this is not just a story of formerly enslaved people.

This is a story about the American spirit.

This is a story about resilience and perseverance.

♪♪ We highlight the self-determination, Black joy, Black resilience, Black love in those stories and tell the fullness of the African-American story, which is, in fact, the American story.

♪♪ -The West was defined by its booms and busts, and through them, individuals, families, and communities not only survived, they thrived.

But as the end of the century approached, the myth of the West was evolving.

It would come to be known as a time of law, disorder, and legend.

[ Gunshot fires, spurs clank ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪