THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 15, 1996 TAG: 9609130105
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LARRY BONKO, TELEVISION COLUMNIST
LENGTH: 142 lines
AS HE ADDRESSED the Norfolk Forum a few months ago, producer Ken Burns dropped only a hint or two about ``The West,'' a 12 1/2-hour miniseries beginning tonight at 8 on PBS.
He said he would strive to do the whole story of the settling of the West in league with director and co-producer Steven Ives. The eight-part program will go far beyond myths, said Burns.
``The larger truth about the West is more complicated, and much more compelling.''
In Norfolk, Burns showed restraint when talking about the ``The West.'' He didn't refer to the miniseries as epic in size and scope.
But that is what it is.
``The West'' is something to behold - a larger-than-life, colorful, immensely interesting television event in the grand style of Burns' ``The Civil War'' and ``Baseball.''
``The West'' did not touch my soul as deeply as ``The Civil War,'' perhaps because my roots are east of the Mississippi. And ``The West'' is not the entertainment piece that is ``Baseball.'' But make no mistake about it, this latest time capsule from Burns is very, very good television.
And a wonderful history lesson.
You'll hate yourself if you don't see at least an hour or two of it. While watching ``The West,'' there will be times when you will say, ``I didn't know that!''
A hundred years ago, there was so much undeveloped territory out west that one man, a Mexican rancher and native Californio, owned a quarter million acres!
Bet you didn't know that. The astounding stampede of 50,000 fortune-seekers known as the Gold Rush started in 1848 when a sawmill worker, James Marshall, reached into a stream and found gold in the palm of his hand.
Bet you didn't know that.
In 10 years' time, between 1877 and 1887, the West drew 4.5 million settlers, outnumbering the Indians 40 to one. The whites put down roots in places the Native Americans regarded as too harsh for human habitation.
Bet you didn't know that.
The story of ``The West'' is at times the story of water - too much of it when the great floods came, and too little of it for the fast-growing city of Los Angeles, which built an aqueduct hundreds of miles long with 53 tunnels to bring in water from the Cascades.
Don't scoff at the Indian rain dance. When a drought scorched the Great Plains at the turn of the century, Buffalo Bird Woman and her husband, Wolf Chief, reached for their medicine bundle and asked the gods for rain.
It came and washed them out of their home. A delicious vignette.
Said Burns when he previewed ``The West'' for TV writers, ``We tell stories of devotion, faith, love and sacrifice of the remarkable people who populated the continent.'' He calls himself an amateur historian.
Ives, who has worked with Burns on other projects for seven years, says he co-produced ``The West'' with one thing in mind - ``to rescue the West from the cowboy and gunslinger myths.''
Burns refers to himself as ``the foster parent'' of this miniseries. Burns contributed to the scripts and worked with Ives in post-production, but ``The West'' is by and large Ives' work.
``It has Steve's look,'' said Burns, who is busy producing documentaries on five famous Americans and a miniseries about jazz.
The Ives ``look'' is somewhat similar to ``The Civil War'' and ``Baseball'' in that he uses old photographs and excerpts from diaries to move the stories along. Like Burns, he calls on actors such as Adam Arkin, Keith Carradine and John Lithgow to give the long-dead pioneers a voice.
Peter Coyote is the narrator.
Ives departs from Burns' style in using more film, particularly in the last two installments. He also re-creates some events. And the best innovations of all: a soundtrack with original music and sweeping, overhead shots of the West's magnificent vistas.
``What this miniseries is all about,'' said Ives, ``is the story of people following different dreams to an extraordinary place, and then struggling to carve out a life there.''
WHRO will air ``The West'' Sunday through Thursday at 8 p.m. After a two-day break, Channel 15 resumes ``The West'' next Sunday at 8 p.m. and continues until the two-hour finale on Sept. 24.
(You can get connected to ``The West'' on the Internet, thanks to underwriter General Motors. The web site is www.gm.com/The West).
Here is a synopsis of the eight episodes of ``The West'':
``Episode One: The People'' - The story begins when the West's millions of square miles of mountains, rivers, deserts and forest were inhabited exclusively by Indians. Then came the Spanish, British, French, Chinese, Russians. The Americans - people who lived east of the Mississippi - were the last to arrive. ``The West'' spans the years from the 1500s to 1914.
``Episode Two: Empire Upon the Trails'' - This covers the years between 1806 and 1848, when Americans began settling the West on a path of what they believed was their ``manifest destiny.'' It took not 100 generations to settle the West, as Thomas Jefferson had predicted, but only five. This episode focuses on Sam Houston and his republic called ``Mexican Texas,'' as well as a Virginia family, the Sagers, who pushed west on the Oregon Trail.
``Episode Three: The Speck of the Future'' - This is perhaps the best of the episodes as Burns and Ives look deeply into the Gold Rush, which in one year attracted 50,000 prospectors to the Sierra Nevada. The Gold Rush's first millionaire was William Swain, who gave up home and family to accumulate a ``pocketful of rocks'' that made him rich beyond anything he could have imagined.
``Episode Four: Death Runs Riot'' - Here's when blood begins to stain the history of the settling of The West. It's also about the slavery issue that came to the frontier from the deep South, and how Samuel Clemens found a new identity as Mark Twain in the Nevada silver camps. It was when the Union generals who had defeated the South in the Civil War began using those tactics against Native Americans in the West.
``Episode Five: The Grandest Enterprise Under God'' - After the Civil War, the rush to settle the West was accelerated by the building of the first transcontinental railroad over what were awesome distances for people living in the 1870s. This episode focuses on the West we know from the movies, showing life at the railhead cities such as Dodge and Abilene, introducing viewers to cowboys such as Teddy Blue Abbott. You'll also get to meet the hunters who drove the buffalo to near extinction.
``Episode Six: Fight No More Forever'' - The push westward was resisted by those who were there first - the Indians, about 4 million strong when the 1870s rolled around. Sitting Bull fought to keep his Lakota people secure in the Black Hills, and made it into the history books. This episode also covers Brigham Young's impact on the history of the West. It wasn't rifles or cannons that finally subdued the great Indian warriors, but rather starvation and the elements.
``Episode Seven: The Geography of Hope'' - With the Indians confined to reservations, they were replaced by 4.5 million settlers who staked out lives on the prairie sod. Theodore Roosevelt left New York politics to become a rancher in North Dakota, an ex-slave known as the Black Moses (Pap Singleton) settled his people in Kansas. By the 1890s, just about all that was left of the Old West was limited to Buffalo Bill Cody's traveling tent show.
``Episode Eight: One Sky Above Us'' - The producers say the settling of the West was completed in 1914 with once-tiny places like Butte, Mont., transformed into large cities. The Oklahoma land rush brought the last sweep of 100,000 settlers into what had once been exclusively Indian territory. N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowan scholar who grew up on three reservations, appears often on camera. ``The turn of the century saw devastation of the Indian culture by disease and persecution,'' he said. ``It's a wonder that we have survived and maintained our identity.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos
University of Washington Library
Buffalo Bill Historical Center
Among the characters populating the eight-part miniseries ``The
West'' are Chief Joseph, left, of the Nez Perce, and Col. W.F. Cody,
better known as Buffalo Bill.
GENERAL MOTORS
Ken Burns, left, is executive producer and creative consultant for
``The West,'' and Stephen Ives is director and co-producer. by CNB