Focus : Paradise Found--and Lost : PBS DOCUMENTARY ON ‘THE WAY WEST’ TRACKS THE MIGRATION AND CLASHES

Though the expansion of the West in the 19th Century may have been the epitome of the American dream for millions, it also brought about the end of the Native American way of life.

“The Way West,” an “American Experience” documentary premiering Monday on PBS, examines how the American West was won--and lost--between 1845 and 1893.

The six-hour documentary was written, directed and produced by Ric Burns, younger brother to another documentarian (Ken Burns of “Baseball” and “The Civil War” fame). Lisa Ades also produced “The Way West” with Ric Burns, who previously co-wrote “The Civil War” and wrote and directed the acclaimed “The Donner Party.”

“The Way West” combines archival photos, period paintings and early motion-picture footage, interviews with historians and writers as well as written records of Americans read by F. Murray Abraham, Sam Elliott, Graham Greene and Matthew Modine, among others. “Masterpiece Theatre” host Russell Baker narrates.

Like the Civil War, the expansion west is “one of the great epic defining moments in American history,” Burns says, “when who we are as a people really was established from the ground up.”

Though Thomas Jefferson once said it would take a thousand years to inhabit the West, the frontier had closed by the 1890s. The once-plentiful buffalo were almost extinct. Five transcontinental railroads crisscrossed the country. Native Americans had been forced onto reservations.

The central spine of the story, Burns relates, is “the clash of cultures between, broadly speaking, European Americans going West hoping to transform their lives entirely and Native Americans already out West, not looking to transform their lives but maintaining a certain culture and the tragic inability, impossibility, as it turned out, for those two groups to find a nonviolent road.

“Movies especially have tended to remember it as the winning of the West,” Burns says. “But any time there’s a winner, you’re going to have a loser. The losers are equally as American as the winners. What we wanted to do is try to find a way in which we could embrace both sides of the story and see what the interconnections were between the winners and the losers.”

Burns acknowledges that the settling of the West was inevitable. “You had a population of 20 million people in the East,” Burns explains. “The numbers were rising rapidly and here was this seemingly empty, seemingly endless Western landscape which beckoned so seductively to so many people. The deep sadness that we all feel about the story is the enormous promise that was incarnate in all that land and everything that it seemed to stand for.”

But the pace with which immigrants came out to grab that promise “ran roughshod over the lives and cultural reality of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans who were already there.”

Had the migration been slower, the clashes between the immigrants and the Native Americans might not have been so violent, he observes.

“Everything our advisers and the men and women who know most about the story have said ... ‘If it had just happened more slowly,’ ” Burns says. “Somehow there is a terrible urgency to it all. All the gold and silver rushes that are involved in this story, all spoke of this sense, that if you didn’t rush quickly you were going to get there too late. As if heaven was being promised, but heaven was going to be lost if you didn’t get there.”

“There was no tolerance, there was no communication,” Ades adds. “They didn’t take the time to understand each other. That’s what our on-camera interviews tell us over and over again. Even back in 1849 after the California Gold Rush, there’s a line in our film which sometimes gets a little laugh--that the Native Americans seeing the immigration moving west, talked about immigrating eastward unable to believe there would be any life left there.”

A high point of the documentary is rare early film footage of the West from the late 1890s, including scenes of the transcontinental railroad.

“I think what the film footage tells you is how recent the history is,” Burns says. “It happened yesterday. Our great-grandparents could have known Sitting Bull. It’s astonishing to think that the Lakota could have owned South Dakota as recently as 125 years ago. To see this caught with still cameras and motion-picture cameras just as the final transformations were taking place, just as the frontier was closing, is a particularly poignant documentary record.”

“The American Experience: The Way West” airs Monday and Tuesday at 8 p.m. on KCET.

WESTERN PARTS

“Westward, The Course of Empire Takes Its Way”: Charts the opening decades of the expansion from the 1840s through the Civil War and how the rapid pace of the expansion led to the series of violent confrontations between Native Americans and white Americans. Monday.

“The Approach of Civilization”: Chronicles the four-year period after the Civil War, marked by the triumph in 1868 of Red Cloud and Crazy Horse over the U.S. Army on the Bozeman Trail. Monday.

“The War for the Black Hills”: Follows the struggle over the last unceded territories of the once vast Indian domain and concludes with the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn. Tuesday.

“Ghost Dance”: Chronicles the crackdown on Native American tribes in the aftermath of the Little Big Horn and examines the rise of the Ghost Dance region and the massacre at Wounded Knee. Tuesday.