Ken Burns's West

...By hour twelve of The West, the usual guilty suspects and their prey have been rounded up: Land-grabbing white settlers, vain and duplicitous cavalry officers, male supremacists, religious zealots, naive reformers, environmental desecrators, arrogant do-gooders, corporate thieves, barbarous buffalo hunters, polluting miners, petty murderers, and thugs all drown out the occasional noble ethnographer, photographer, and writer, who might have prevented the maltreatment of Indians, Mexicans, Chinese, and blacks...

...Rather The West is one vast and well-meaning apology, whose central—and stereotyped—thesis is the innately murderous, exploiting, and ultimately destructive nature of American culture...

...Some of those interviewed—Joyce Anne Archambault, Stephen Ambrose, Stewart Udall, and especially Jack Chen—are as compelling as Shelby Foote was in The Civil War...

...We are told instead by Sen...

...Moving recitations of Indian testimonials, set to background chants, mostly describe whites as liars, thieves, and murderers...

...But that is too complex an idea for the makers of The West, who seek atonement for our sins and thus abandon a systematic explanation or analysis of what happened during these centuries of transformation...

...Sheridan and Sherman, Custer too, exterminated far more whites in their bloody careers than they did Indians...

...The past instead is a sad chronicle of the more populous, the more warlike, the more technologically advanced and cohesive society dictating to and colonizing the weaker party...

...Conquest is a tragedy that usually results in massacres and frequent killing in the penultimate stage before subjugation...

...Typical of this well-meaning but naive approach are the comments of the novelist Michael Dorris, who could learn something of human nature from Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue...

...But what of the simple savagery of the human spirit that knows no racial bounds...

...Mariano Vallejo welcomed Americans to the Pacific coast and was impressed by the spirit and freedom of these new immigrants, even as they ransacked his lands, ignored his rights, and generally shared none of his cultural tolerance...

...And, as Keegan pointed out, the particular tragedy of many Native Americans was that they occupied a vast expanse and were often a warlike people...

...But The West, despite its title, its years of research, and its hundreds of hours of filming, is, alas, not an intellectually honest or comprehensive account of the West...

...The massacre of Sand Creek, where the scoundrel Col...

...Ben Nighthorse Campbell that the lamentable killing of the Americans was the result of young braves’ “getting out of hand” as part of a male initiation rite where “boys became men...

...The challenge for Burns and Ives was to ascertain to what degree these transgressions were racially motivated, typical, innately American, avoidable, or ever rectified by the Americans involved...

...Western military prowess, then, is but a dividend of a wider cargo of free speech, constitutional government, and free economic activity...

...The very culture that spawned cannons, rifles, exploiters, and missionary zealots would also produce yeoman farmers and a budding middle class...

...Irony, after all, is the essence of Sophoclean drama, whose doomed players realize the hopelessness of their cause and yet choose to meet their fate in accordance with absolute principles, however flawed or outmoded...

...To what degree were murder and mayhem planned and condoned by authorities or instead the result of the chaotic and mostly spontaneous nature of Western expansion, far from, and often unknown by, the settled and urban society of the East...

...The creation of landgrant universities, the saga of impoverished agrarians creating local democratic communities from arid wasteland, the intermarriage of Mexicans, Native Americans, Chinese, and whites—as the heritage of many of the contemporary narrators themselves attests—are overshadowed by the personal disasters of the Cayuse, Gregorio Cortez, Juan Cortina, Lean Bear, Peta Nocona, Vicente Perez Rosales, Chung Sun, Plenty Horses, and a score of other hitherto little-known victims of white racism and exploitation...

...Grant’s formal condemnation of Sand Creek as “a foul and dastardly massacre,” Chivington escapes military justice by leaving the army just in time, only to brag of his bloodletting years later at testimonials...

...This duality produces drama, tension, and irony— and, yes, tragedy—never fully understood or appreciated in The West...

...The argument can be made, as the recent military historian John Keegan has done, that there was an element of unrealism and unintended selfishness among Native American leaders in thinking that the riches of the Plains were to belong perennially to a nomadic warrior culture, while millions in Europe and Asia were without any land at all and starving...

...Chicano, Native American, and other supportive writers, intellectuals, and politicians— David Guti?rrez, N. Scott Momaday, Ronald Takaki, T.H...

...Faced with an Indian missionary in France, a Frenchman would, of course, laugh...

...It began airing on Sunday, Sept...

...Ambiguity and incongruity abounded, as they should in any Greek tragedy—the firepower and brutality of Grant and Sherman in the service of abolition...

...The Indians’ complete use of the buffalo carcass is lauded, but not so the hungry immigrants’ scavenging of even the bison’s skeletal remains for fertilizer...

...And we are further sickened that, despite Gen...

...History is not kind to peoples who reside in extravagant and munificent surroundings they can neither populate nor defend...

...That may be a truth, but it is not the Truth...

...Clearly, the westerner was antiSemitic, yet a peddler named Levi Strauss made a fortune selling denim to miners who needed his product more than they hated his religion The Asian laundry owner Wah Lee was relegated to perpetual second-class status, even as he found ways to master a system not his own in a manner undreamed of in China...

...We are told correctly that Chinese and Mexicans were hated by ignorant and impoverished miners and settlers from Europe...

...We are led to expect in The West the story of the fated migration of a technologically superior nation onto the adjoining underpopulated lands of the West—a brutal, if not inevitable, annexation replete with disastrous and often unforeseen consequences for all involved...

...The West makes a case that white racism and greed were the ideology that drove the Americans westward and explain the unceasing brutality toward the Indian and the amorphous category of the non-white...

...The Cherokee nation did everything the white man wanted and still was exiled from its ancestral home...

...Peter Coyote is an engaging narrator and wears well...

...But the film’s producers do not explain why these racial groups continued to flock to a country that offered them such hostility—if not from some faith in an economic, social, and political system that eventually might transcend race and so offer them more opportunity than ever found among their own society...

...The final irony left untouched by The West is that the producers’ primary evidence—newspaper editorials, speeches, decrees, and judicial decisions—is, of course, proof that for all the barbarity of the expansion, there was also something in the Americans’ jumbled and abrupt migration different from most other imperial conquests...

...But The West is not tragedy...

...Despite all this, some of the best moments of the series revolve around the poignant stories of indigenous peoples who understood only too well the eventual consequences of the white man’s advance, and yet assumed—with disastrous consequences—that his technological superiority would always guarantee a commensurate degree of humanity and legislative and judicial honesty...

...The very culture that spawned cannons, rifles, exploiters, and missionary zealots would also produce a society of yeoman farmers, autonomous councils, and a budding middle class whose success would draw in others of all races—a society that would feed, clothe, and educate millions in a land that hitherto was largely the haunt of a relatively small number of warriors and hunters...

...it is melodrama...

...In the eyes of the filmmakers, Western technology is the catalyst for human and environmental destruction, but the natives’ own adaptation of imported horses and firearms for similar martial ends is somehow different...

...Questions of race alone did not make them horrific killers...

...the racist plantation owner defended by impoverished day laborers who fought solely for southern honor and the protection of their homes and families...

...But confronted with a foreign zealot with superior technology and material wealth—say, invading aliens from the next solar system—we can imagine that Frenchmen, like Native Americans, would be rather complacent and pliable before alien and ostensibly more dynamic ideas and gods...

...Thus the murder of American women and children is noted only in the context of raiding and foodgathering, sometimes as part of revenge and ritual...

...Rather, a belief in constitutional government and the duties of a civilian-controlled military ensured that they shot, rightly or wrongly, and without hesitation, Virginians, Georgians, and Texans as well as Lakotas and Cherokees when ordered by a command sanctioned by legislative consensus...

...His film was a relentless chronicle of how good men butchered good men over the institution of slavery, with an omnipresent and anguished Lincoln, consumed and eventually destroyed by his role as both executioner and savior...

...The lyrical music, the southern-accented narration, and the personal diaries of the ruined at times drew us to the South—our empathy only to dissipate with the sudden matter-of-fact recitation of the ignominy and horrors of slavery...

...Watkins, Rick Williams, and Richard Wright—are brought in to trace the pathologies of modern American society back to its westward legacy of exploitation...

...The drive to the Pacific was a struggle for the heart of a free society to act in accordance with a Western tradition that involved something more and better than just military dynamism...

...The sheer size, terrain, and climate of the West ensured a hostile landscape that would routinely slaughter invader and invaded alike...

...There are some wonderful moments in this series—documents, pictures, and accounts not previously well known...

...Central to the drama was the suffering of the South, which sent its brave sons to die gallantly for a cause that was unworthy of their sacrifice...

...Episode by episode, ambiguity and subtlety melt before the presentation of victor and victim...

...Frontier life is not sanitized or romanticized, and class distinctions are brought out well, emphasizing that it was largely impoverished immigrants who built the railways, drove the cattle, and served in the army—mostly, in the short term, to enrich others...

...less mellifluous voices read the avowals by nineteenth-century journalists, politicians, and generals of white supremacy and racial extermination...

...The life of the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle was but a litany of broken American promises, both oral and written, that ultimately led to his massacre by Custer, a man who was his moral inferior by far...

...Yet the history of a civilization, any civilization—the Aztecs’ consolidation of central Mexico and their own subsequent conquest by Cortez, the Zulu expansion and ensuing destruction by whites, Caesar’s enslavement of Gaul, the colonization of Australia and New Zealand—is not a morality tale, at least not entirely...

...To emphasize with what unusual magnanimity native Americans reacted when forcibly converted by Spanish and American missionaries, he asks us to imagine what a Frenchman would do if ordered by a Lakota holy man in Paris to abandon his religion—thereby missing entirely the role of materialism and technology in the comparison...

...But is racism really a convincing exegesis of the tragedy of the West...

...But there is not as much emphasis placed, either in the film or in the accompanying book, on the immediate catalyst for such atrocity: the rape, kidnapping, and murder of over 200 non-combatant settlers by young Cheyenne braves in yet another round of the endless cycle of violence on both sides...

...After the lackadaisical reception of his subsequent epic, Baseball, Burns has attempted a return to tragic history with a new 12-hour film called The West of which he is the senior producer and Stephen Ives the director...

...Chivington and his rag-tag band of drunken amateur volunteers butchered and mutilated well over 100 Cheyenne women, children, and infirm is recounted in horrid detail, as it should be...

...That fact ensured that millions of underfed miserable immigrants from an overpopulated Europe—accompanied by starving freed slaves and impoverished Chinese— would employ the technology of European culture to wrest brutally from them land that could feed tens of millions, not thousands...