Ken Burns: The West

To the Europeans, the West was a wilderness to be conquered, a wilderness filled with boundless treasure, souls to be saved and new horizons to explore. Beginning with America's purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1804, a young country prepared for its own epic march across the terrain of the West.

A look at the pivotal years from 1806-1848, when hopeful Americans began moving west in significant numbers. The disparate American trails soon merged into a single path and, regardless of their individual reasons for going there, Americans soon determined to make the West their own.

From 1848 to 1856, the rush Westward accelerated into a frenzy with the famed Gold Rush. It began with a sawmill worker, James Marshall, who reached down into a streambed of the American River in California and came up with the future of the West in the palm of his hand. He had discovered gold and in the next year alone 50,000 fortune seekers swarmed into the Sierra Nevada.

For those who ventured there from somewhere else, the West had come to symbolise hope and new beginnings. But during the years 1856 to 1868, western pioneers brought with them the nation's oldest and most divisive issue - slavery - and the rough frontier supplied the sparks that ignited the Civil War, and a brave Mexican-American rancher declared his own republic in southern Texas.

After the Civil War, the transcontinental railroad links East and West.

The Lakota Sioux fight to protect their sacred Black Hills; their victory over Custer at Little Big Horn signals the end of their traditional way of life.