AllMovie

The ninth volume of Ken Burns and Stephen Ives' The West covers the years from 1887 to 1914. At the dawn of a new century, after having seen earthshaking changes and terrible strife, the American West was more or less settled -- only five generations had passed since the Louisiana Purchase, and already the lands beyond the Mississippi were dotted with industrialized towns, prosperous farms, and vast herds of cattle. The West still had many surprises up its sleeve, but its fate was now inextricably tied to that of the Eastern states -- the United States had finally become one nation. Specific topics include: the Oklahoma land rush; the Dawes Act and the legal divvying up of Indian land; turn-of-the-century life in towns like Guthrie, Oklahoma and Butte, Montana; Sitting Bull's murder and the massacre of the Lakota; the Columbian Exposition of 1893; the courtship and marriage of homesteaders John G. Love and Ethel Waxham; William Mulholland's aqueduct and the Los Angeles water supply; Mariano Vallejo and his fight to preserve the Mexican legacy in California; Charles Goodnight and the problem of how to record the West's history on film; and the labored process of adaptation and forgiveness among native peoples. Told through first-hand accounts as well as moving testimony from the descendents of the West's greatest figures, this tribute to the dreams and the eternal promise of a nation is both a landmark documentary and an invaluable tool for the teaching of balanced and relevant history.