A little more than a year ago, another PBS documentary, called ““The Way West,’’ by Ric Burns, Ken’s brother, covered the same ground, only better and in a more economical six hours. This seems a colossal duplication of air time and money by PBS, but the brothers Burns (who collaborated on ““The Civil War’’) are reputedly rivals, and clearly the fact that one of them wanted to do the West wasn’t going to stop the other guy from doing it, too. Stephen Ives directed ““The West.’’ But Ken Burns produced it, and his enormous grant from General Motors–plugged in a slick GM promo at the beginning of each program–gives his version more luster than Ric’s, if less heart and tragic sweep.
Part 1, entitled ““The People,’’ begins by establishing that Americans, ““the last to arrive,’’ were the people who named this great outback of ours ““the West.’’ To the Mexicans it was el Norte, to the Chinese it was east, etc. To the Indians who were already there, it was neither east nor west but simply a homeland. These P.C. teachings are tempered by the observation of Jo Allyn Archambault, one of many Native Americans interviewed for the series, that while much of her people’s culture was ““elevated and marvelous and admirable,’’ much of it was ““pretty horrible.’’ War over the West, for example, predated the arrival of the white man. As writer Terry Tempest Williams cautions in the final installment of the series, ““One of the dangers of looking at the American West, our past, is to paint everything black and white.''
This ““West’’ is less Indian-centric than the other one. An enormous volume of material gets crammed into its 12 hours, from conquistador Cabeza de Vaca’s landing in Texas in 1528 to the great water swindle of 1913 that gave Los Angeles drinking water by sucking surrounding farmers dry. A young adventurer named Samuel Clemens called the Nevada Territory ““fabulously rich in … thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, coyotes, poets, preachers and jackass rabbits.’’ Most of these Wild West archetypes make appearances in ““The West.’’ There are also lesser-known stories, of black ““Exodusters’’ who fled to Kansas from slavery in the South, and the romance on the range culled from the correspondence of sheep rancher John Love, who wooed a young schoolmarm for years until she finally agreed to be his wife. Many of these peripheral histories resonate more than the timeworn retellings of the Gold Rush, Custer’s Last Stand or Wounded Knee. At least we haven’t heard them before, and, hopefully, we won’t hear them again next year in yet another documentary on the West by yet another Burns brother.
