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00:00It was once written off as the Great American Desert.
00:06Today, it's the breadbasket of the nation.
00:11From a desolate corner of Texas, over parts of at least ten U.S. states, right up to the Canadian border,
00:20the Great Plains cuts across some of the most amazing landscapes in America.
00:26Prairies, where wild bison still roam.
00:30Fertile fields, first planted by America's pioneers.
00:34And rugged badlands, with fascinating fossils of the prehistoric creatures that once called North America home.
00:42It's a land with rich stories that tell of the birth of the West.
00:48From Native American legends of how a towering column of rock was scratched into existence by a bear.
00:56To a town called Deadwood, whose streets are rich with stories of gold fever.
01:02To dazzling cities that transformed the frontier and helped give birth to the American cowboy.
01:09It has staggering wealth, deep underground, and seemingly endless riches above.
01:16But those who live here know well that life on the Great Plains can be unforgiving.
01:22Here in Tornado Alley, terrifying twisters ravage entire towns,
01:27and devastating droughts can turn miles of green into bowls of dust.
01:34It all happens under the wide open skies of the Great Plains,
01:39where an aviation pioneer launched his now famous biplane.
01:44Where the legendary Aviatrix was born.
01:47And where thousands of nature's winged creatures flock every year.
01:53A famous author once called its vast open spaces,
01:56not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
02:01This is the fascinating story of the Great Plains.
02:15TORNADO ALLEY
02:21TORNADO ALLEY
02:42When you peer down through the clouds over northern Oklahoma,
02:46you might be fooled into thinking that there's a vast wintry landscape down below.
02:51But in fact, this is a dried lake bed, covered with salt.
02:56It's known as Oklahoma's Great Salt Plains.
03:03In 1811, it was one of the fabled wonders of the West,
03:07which is why U.S. Major George C. Sibley asked a group of Osage Indians to take him here.
03:13The Osage had long come here to hunt, since animals often used the lake as a giant salt lake.
03:21Sibley was one of the first European Americans to see the Great Plains,
03:26and later wrote that the white expanse before him looked like a brilliant field of snow.
03:34But knowing it was salt, he called it the Grand Saline.
03:40What Sibley couldn't have known at the time was that this strange, otherworldly landscape
03:45is actually fascinating evidence of how the Great Plains was born.
03:53It's a story that begins 95 million years ago,
03:57when most of the middle area of North America was covered by a vast inland sea known as the Western Interior Seaway.
04:04To the east was a landmass geologists have named Appalachia,
04:09and to the west, another they call Laramidia.
04:13In between, and underwater, was all of the region that's now the Great Plains.
04:21It was roughly 70 million years ago that this inland sea started to disappear.
04:26Continental plates that form the Earth's crust collided and started pushing up the Earth.
04:35It was that uplift that created the Rocky Mountains.
04:40As the Rockies rose, they pulled up the land to the east with them, and caused the ocean to drain away.
04:49What was once the bed of the sea rose out of the water, and the Great Plains was born.
04:57Today, stunning forms suddenly rise from the land in western Kansas.
05:05They're known as Monument Rocks.
05:09This white limestone, or chalk, was created from sediment in the sea,
05:13and the bones of primeval sea creatures over millions of years.
05:22They are soft to the touch, and slowly vanishing, trumbling away with the prairie winds and rain.
05:30There is so much chalk in the Kansas soil, that all you have to do is scratch the surface to find it.
05:36It's what turns the long, straight country roads of this state bright white.
05:42And it's what inspired the famous chant, Rock Chalk Jayhawk,
05:46sung by fans of the University of Kansas Jayhawk sports team.
05:51As the Rockies rose, rivers and streams started running down and out of the mountains.
05:58Scientists estimate that half the original mass of the Rocky Mountains
06:02ended up being washed onto the Great Plains.
06:07It's easy to be convinced that the Great Plains is a flat region,
06:11especially when you fly over a Nebraska cornfield.
06:14But in fact, it starts out as a plain.
06:18But in fact, it starts out at an elevation of nearly 6,000 feet in the west,
06:23at the base of the Rockies,
06:25and drops down to just 1,500 feet on its eastern fringe, along the Missouri border.
06:35The nutrient-rich sediment of the high plains eventually allowed tall grass prairies here to thrive.
06:41They, in turn, came to support a wide variety of remarkable species.
06:47Scientists know this thanks to what they discovered
06:50in one of the most dazzling natural landscapes in all of the Great Plains states,
06:54South Dakota's Badlands.
06:58Native Americans called this area Makosika, or Land Bad,
07:03which is how the Badlands got their name.
07:08These dramatic forms were created by erosion over millions of years
07:12as soft sedimentary rock crumbled away,
07:15exposing layers of earth that date back to the age when the Great Plains was covered by the sea.
07:20Even today, it's easy to imagine ocean waters lapping at the bases of these prehistoric pinnacles.
07:29In layers of sediment here,
07:31archaeologists have unearthed the fossils of fascinating creatures that once called North America home,
07:38including rhinoceri,
07:40large-headed pigs,
07:42horses,
07:44and saber-toothed cats.
07:47Evidence from here has also revealed that the world's first camels
07:51wandered the Great Plains nearly 50 million years ago.
07:57When those prehistoric species died out, new ones replaced them,
08:02including the ancestors of these elk,
08:05which now run free on the Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge in northern Nebraska.
08:14Over a millennia, the carbon-rich vegetation on which the creatures of the Great Plains thrived
08:20was compacted under layer after layer of earth.
08:24It created the vast deposits of coal that now lie under the northern Great Plains,
08:30and that many Americans rely on today to keep their lights on.
08:36This is the Black Thunder Coal Mine in Wyoming.
08:42It's also home to one of the biggest machines on the planet.
08:46It's known as Ursa Major, or Big Bear.
08:54This monster dragline excavator weighs more than 6,700 tons
08:59and is armed with a 360-foot-long boom.
09:03It takes just one operator to swing its enormous bucket,
09:07scrape it across the earth, and move up to 160 cubic yards of dirt in a single pass,
09:13enough to fill two swimming pools.
09:17In just minutes, it rips through layers of earth that took millions of years to form.
09:22Mining companies first have to get rid of this overburden
09:25so they can access the valuable dark veins of coal deep below.
09:31In 2012 alone, the nearby North Antelope Rochelle Mine
09:35removed 100 million tons of coal from the earth,
09:38which made it the biggest coal mine in the nation.
09:42Coal couldn't be mined on this scale at this speed
09:45without a fleet of machines like Ursa Major.
09:54But the carbon wealth under the Great Plains isn't limited to coal.
09:58Take a look at a satellite image of the night sky over Williston, North Dakota,
10:03and you can see what looks like the cluster of lights of a major city.
10:08In fact, these are the flares of fracking wells
10:11that have been driving a new boom in American oil and natural gas.
10:16That boom later went bust due to low oil prices,
10:19but it's touched just about every corner of the Great Plains,
10:23from here in North Dakota, across the prairies of Oklahoma,
10:27where bison share the range with pump jacks,
10:30to the vast oil fields of the Permian Basin in Texas.
10:37But long before miners and oil companies were tapping treasures deep under the Great Plains,
10:42others here made staggering fortunes
10:45from the tens of millions of creatures that called its grasslands home.
10:51There may be no single image that better captures the timeless spirit of the Great Plains than this.
11:01A herd of bison, on the move, across the prairie.
11:06As many as 60 million of these majestic animals,
11:09also known as American buffalo, once blanketed the Great Plains.
11:15In fact, their range is believed to have stretched all the way from what's now eastern Washington
11:20to western New York State.
11:23For Plains Indians, bison have long been sacred creatures,
11:27in part because of their remarkable size and impressive strength.
11:33But they have also been an important source of sustenance.
11:37A single bison could provide hunters with up to 400 pounds of meat.
11:42It's why for thousands of years, Plains tribes gathered for seasonal bison hunts.
11:49One of the places they did it was here,
11:51at what's now known as First People's Buffalo Jump State Park in Montana.
11:58For miles away, hunters from the Blackfeet tribe guided herds of wild bison
12:03into a drive lane they had built from piled rocks and brush.
12:07It led right up to a cliff.
12:10When the cornered animals finally got there, they had no choice but to jump over the edge.
12:16Down below, more hunters were ready to finish off the injured animals with clubs, spears, and arrows.
12:24Native Americans used just about every part of the bison they killed.
12:31Dried meat helped sustain them during the long, cold winters on the Plains.
12:36Bones became tools, and the animals' skin, clothing, and shelter.
12:43But the age-old hunting practices of the tribes were transformed in the 17th century
12:49by the arrival of the horse.
12:53Prehistoric horses once inhabited the Plains, but eventually died out.
12:58It was the Spanish who reintroduced horses here in the 1600s.
13:03They brought them up from the South through what's now Mexico.
13:07Many Native American tribes, including the Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne,
13:12mastered horse riding almost overnight.
13:16Suddenly, they could travel much longer distances, launch devastating raids on other tribes,
13:22and track and hunt bison with greater ease than ever before.
13:26Soon, Native Americans from outside the Plains poured into the region
13:30to take part in the hunts and to trade the meat, hides, and bones of the creatures they killed.
13:37In doing so, they created one of the most legendary hunting cultures in history.
13:47The hunting prowess of these tribes enabled them to provide a staggering quantity of pelts
13:52for the European and American fur traders who arrived from the Plains starting in the 1700s.
14:01The most famous of those traders was a man named John Jacob Astor.
14:07In 1828, Astor's American Fur Company established a trading post here at Fort Union,
14:14near where the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers meet in what's now North Dakota.
14:18It became a key hub in a vast network of forts, suppliers, traders, and exporters
14:23that stretched across the Northern Plains.
14:27Here at Fort Union, which has since been reconstructed,
14:31Astor's men traded with members of the Ojibwe, Blackfeet, Crow, and Cree, among others.
14:38They bought as many beaver pelts as they could to ship off to Europe,
14:41where they were turned into stylish hats,
14:43including top hats, which were the height of fashion at the time.
14:47But in the 1830s, the American Fur Company also shipped 25,000 robes,
14:53made from bison fur, out of the Great Plains each year.
15:00By the time Astor died in 1848, the great slaughter of the American bison had begun.
15:06Over the coming decades, settlers, hunters, and others nearly wiped out this species.
15:15In the 1860s, one hunter earned his famous nickname, Buffalo Bill,
15:21after claiming to kill more than 4,200 bison at a rate of roughly eight creatures a day.
15:27He was under contract to provide food for workers and cattle.
15:30When trains finally started running across the Great Plains,
15:33passengers often stuck their guns out of the windows and fired away on herds of bison as they passed, just for sport.
15:41By the end of the century, of the tens of millions of wild bison that covered the plains,
15:46only about 1,000 were left.
16:01Today, 5,000 descendants of those survivors live here at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
16:09It's one of a handful of conservation projects that are working to ensure that wild bison still have a place to roam on the Great Plains.
16:17The land that the Great Plains covers is so vast,
16:20it's virtually impossible to say exactly where the boundaries of this region start and end.
16:27Over the years, geologists, historians, and others have created at least 50 different maps of the Great Plains region.
16:35But in 2003, a geography professor named David Wishart had to come up with a new map of the Great Plains.
16:42But in 2003, a geography professor named David Wishart had to come up with a new map of the Great Plains.
16:53At the southernmost edge of the Great Plains is the Rio Grande River, along the Texas-Mexico border.
17:01To the west, the boundary follows the base of the Rocky Mountains north, up past Denver, Colorado.
17:08The northern part of the Great Plains stretches across Wyoming and Montana, deep into Canada.
17:15While in the U.S., its eastern boundary is usually defined as the borders of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas,
17:23and then cuts back across Oklahoma and Texas.
17:28The Great Plains covers all or parts of 10 U.S. states,
17:32and a vast area of more than half a billion square miles of land in the U.S. alone.
17:38It's easy to see why it's called America's Heartland.
17:43During the first half of the 19th century, the only sight on the horizon here would have been smoke wafting up from Native American villages,
17:53or the covered wagons of settlers crossing the prairie.
17:58Reports of rich farmland in Oregon and gold in California in the 1840s and 50s caused a flood of Americans to travel west.
18:07But to get there by land, they had to endure a long and arduous trek across the Great Plains.
18:17As more and more settlers started to make that journey starting in the 1840s,
18:21the routes they forged became the famous Oregon, California, and Mormon trails.
18:28And they all converged here, in the Black Hills.
18:32Thousands of adventurers, emigrant families, religious exiles, hopeful prospectors, and others,
18:38turned this valley into a superhighway of its day.
18:47More than a century and a half later, it's still possible to see the deep ruts,
18:52the paths, and the trails that make up the Great Plains.
18:57More than a century and a half later, it's still possible to see the deep ruts that the wheels of their wagons etched into the earth.
19:05They left these lasting scars because they were often loaded down with just about everything that the pioneers owned.
19:12Settler after settler followed exactly the same well-trodden trail.
19:18As they rolled west at a rate of about 15 miles a day,
19:23what appeared to be a featureless landscape surrounded them in all directions.
19:29For these travelers, the Great Plains was not a destination.
19:34It was only a bridge to the promised land of the west.
19:40It's why many of them eagerly waited for their first sighting of this on the horizon.
19:46A striking spire called Chimney Rock that now lies in western Nebraska.
19:56For many a traveler, this stunning rock form was their first sign of the dramatic western landscapes they were so eager to reach.
20:07It was also proof that the Great Plains would one day soon be behind them.
20:12One reason they were eager to reach the end was because they still believed that the Great Plains was hostile Indian territory.
20:21But in 1848, the U.S. seized ownership of the southern Great Plains when it won the Mexican-American War.
20:29Six years later, President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law.
20:35It carved the new Kansas and Nebraska territories out of Native American lands and permitted white Americans to start settling the region.
20:44Railroad companies were also finally allowed to build new lines across the plains.
20:49Soon, new towns and cities were sprouting up along the new lines.
20:54The settlement of the Great Plains had begun.
20:58One of the biggest railroad towns was Cheyenne, Wyoming.
21:03Its streets were laid out in 1867 by the Union Pacific Railroad Company, and it's remained an important hub for freight train traffic right up to today.
21:13Cheyenne grew so fast that it was known as the Magic City of the Plains.
21:18It was one of a number of important early railroad towns on the Great Plains.
21:23They included Omaha, Nebraska, Kansas City, Kansas, Wichita, and Dodge City.
21:33The railroads kicked off a population boom, and they gave birth to an American icon, the Great Plains Cowboys.
21:43It all started down in the rugged, empty expanses of western Texas.
21:49In the middle of the 19th century, thousands of wild cows roamed free here, including a breed known today as the Texas Longhorn.
21:58They were descendants of cows first imported by Spanish colonists to the United States.
22:02Facing high rates of unemployment, Civil War soldiers came here to try and make a living from ranching,
22:08since all they had to do to get started was to round up a herd of wild cows and find a piece of land to raise them on.
22:16Today, that ranching tradition is still alive and well.
22:20The Texas Longhorn is one of the most popular breeds of cattle in the United States.
22:24The Daniel family has been raising cattle here for five generations.
22:29Their Circle Bar Ranch now covers 43,000 acres.
22:33Today, Colton Daniel is gathering one of his herds, with the help of some of his cowboy neighbors.
22:39Colton Daniel is the oldest rancher in the state.
22:43He is the oldest rancher in the state.
22:46He is the oldest rancher in the state.
22:48Today, Colton Daniel is gathering one of his herds, with the help of some of his cowboy neighbors.
22:54The reason ranching grew rapidly in the 1860s and 70s was because of a rising demand for beef in growing cities like San Francisco and Chicago.
23:03The problem was, the railroads had not yet reached the ranches of western Texas.
23:09So, the only way for a rancher like Colton Daniel to sell his cattle to northern buyers was to drive them hundreds of miles across the Great Plains to the rail lines.
23:20This great movement of cowboys and cattle created what is known as the Chisholm Trail.
23:27In 1871 alone, as many as 700,000 head of cattle headed north out of Texas, under the watchful eyes of Texas cowboys.
23:37They sold their herds in what came to be known as cow towns along the rail lines.
23:42One of the biggest was Dodge City, Kansas.
23:46It was full of saloons, gambling halls and brothels, all happy to take a cut of a cowboy's earnings after a successful drive.
23:58When the trains finally reached Texas, cowboys no longer needed to herd them up the Chisholm Trail to get them to market.
24:04But today, cowboys still roam the range all across the Great Plains.
24:10And rodeos are where they come to show off their skills.
24:15One of the biggest events on the Great Plains Rodeo Circuit takes place every summer here in Sheridan, Wyoming, just as it has for more than 80 years.
24:24Cowboys and cowgirls come here to compete for a range of prizes.
24:28Bronco busting is the toughest competition of all, since riders have to stay on a bucking horse for at least eight full seconds in order to score points.
24:37In the dual calf roping category, pairs of riders have to rope a calf by its neck and rear leg at exactly the same time, just as they do out on the range.
24:47There are dozens of annual rodeos across the Great Plains, and plenty of chances to practice real cowboy skills out on the prairie.
24:54Altogether, Great Plains states supply about half the nation's beef cattle.
25:00Here in Wyoming, cows outnumber humans two to one.
25:06But these days, cows don't spend their entire lives grazing on prairie grasses.
25:14Today's beef industry relies on giant feedlots.
25:18Ranchers send their cows here for the final month or two, or more, to fatten them up just before they're sold for slaughter.
25:25Fed constantly, a cow in a feedlot like this one can gain up to four pounds a day.
25:31These facilities are models of efficiency.
25:35The ratio of cows to humans here can reach as high as 1,000 to one.
25:40Critics of the industry say that cows in feedlots are much more efficient than cows in feedlots.
25:45Critics of the industry say that cows in feedlots are more prone to disease, and that antibiotics in their feed can be bad for humans.
25:54But ranchers and others argue that feedlots help develop high-grade meat, and the marbling in beef that they say makes it taste better.
26:02Once they've reached their maximum weight, these cows will leave the feedlot and be shipped to meat processing plants, like this one here in Grand Island, Nebraska.
26:13A single facility can process up to 6,000 head of cattle each day.
26:18Outside, the stock of different ranchers is carefully separated by fencing, and constantly kept cool in the hot summer sun.
26:27In the days of the Texas cattle drives, cows were shipped off by rail live to cities like Chicago, that soon became famous for its stockyards, slaughterhouses, and meat packers.
26:39But today, a majority of American cattle is born, raised, and slaughtered right here on the Great Plains.
26:50Beef cattle are just one piece of the staggering agricultural output of the Great Plains states.
26:57Fly over Nebraska in the summer, and fields of corn stretch right up to the horizon.
27:03In South Dakota, there's even a corn palace to celebrate the annual harvest of this one crop.
27:10And down in Oklahoma, white giants rise from the land, in the town of Enid.
27:16This was once the largest grain silo in the world, built to hold 70 million bushels of the most famous crop in the Great Plains, wheat.
27:25When the rains are good, farmers on the plains can reap amazing riches from their fields, which has caused the cost of land here to skyrocket.
27:34But not that long ago, the U.S. government was giving away vast stretches of the Great Plains for free to anyone willing to farm.
27:46By the middle of the 19th century, the U.S. Congress was eager to expand its power over Indian lands in the West,
27:52even if it meant breaking the treaties it had signed with the tribes.
27:57In 1862, it passed what's known as the Homestead Act, which President Abraham Lincoln signed into law.
28:05Under the act, any U.S. citizen could claim 160 acres of land in areas the government had targeted for settlement.
28:13Many of the giant squares that one sees when flying across the Great Plains today are those very same 160-acre plots that were forged out of the prairie in the late 19th century by homesteaders.
28:26After the Homestead Act was passed, hordes of hopeful pioneers raced to the Great Plains to claim their own piece of American soil.
28:34One of the biggest of these land grabs happened in 1889, when President Benjamin Harrison opened up two million acres of prime land in Oklahoma.
28:45Up to 100,000 people camped out all around the territory, waiting to be able to rush in and grab themselves a piece of the West.
28:53One of the places they gathered was here on the banks of the Canadian River.
28:57One pioneer named Elmer Childers described the scene on April 22, 1889.
29:03All of the men along the South Canadian River got as far in the river as they possibly could without sinking in the quicksand.
29:10There, waited for the hour of noon to come.
29:15When the clock struck 12, the land rushers raced across the river and into Oklahoma to stake a claim to their own 160 acres.
29:22A bronze, life-size statue at the Centennial Land Run Monument in downtown Oklahoma City depicts that frenzied scene.
29:38Oklahoma land rushers were predominantly white single men and families.
29:44But the law also allowed women to be a part of the land rush.
29:48But they all quickly discovered that free land did not mean a free ride.
29:54Prairie soil was extremely tough, and it required back-breaking work to turn it into productive farmland.
30:02There were also punishing winds, cycles of rain and drought, blizzards, tornadoes, and harsh temperatures.
30:09Since there were few natural building materials available, settlers constructed homes, like this one, from hay, sod, and clay.
30:17And then, there was the extreme loneliness of life out on the prairie.
30:23One new bride in the Dakotas wrote home in a letter that she felt 900 miles away from home.
30:30In the late 1880s, half of those who were trying to create new farms here in western Nebraska gave up and returned to the east.
30:39But the vast openness of the Great Plains was also what gave it exciting potential.
30:46Plains author Willa Cather, a writer who wrote a book about the Great Plains,
30:52But the vast openness of the Great Plains was also what gave it exciting potential.
30:58Plains author Willa Cather arrived as a homesteader in Nebraska as a young girl.
31:05She later described the exquisite combination of emptiness and possibility.
31:10There was nothing but land.
31:13Not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
31:19In the early 1900s, the rains were good and crop prices were high, thanks in part to rising demand in Europe for Great Plains wheat.
31:30But the new settlers who were transforming the plains knew little of the region's age-old cycles of rain and drought.
31:37And soon, their own farming practices would turn what they had hoped would be a Garden of Eden into a barren land of dashed dreams and dust-filled skies.
31:55When Americans first started exploring their new nation's western territories, some had doubts about whether the Great Plains could ever be farmed.
32:05One was a surveyor for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers named Stephen Long.
32:12He traveled across what is now the middle of the Great Plains.
32:16At the time, the region was still considered Indian Territory in the north and Spanish Territory in the south.
32:23Long believed that the land he was crossing was so dry and forbidding that it could never be cultivated.
32:30And so, on his map, he simply wrote it off as the Great Desert.
32:37One reason that the western region of the Great Plains is so dry is because, unlike the eastern plains, it gets very little rainfall.
32:46As winds from the west cross the Rockies, they lose their moisture and arrive on the western plains as cool, dry air.
32:55More dry air also sweeps north across the plains from the southwest.
33:00But in the east, warm, moist air arrives from the Gulf of Mexico.
33:05When these three weather systems meet, they can spawn some of the fiercest tornadoes on the planet.
33:14It's why the Great Plains is home to Tornado Alley.
33:19It's April 16, 2012.
33:22Just one day after a tornado ripped through the small Oklahoma town of Woodward.
33:27Its path is still visible from the air.
33:32Woodward, like many towns across the Great Plains, is no stranger to the devastating power of tornadoes.
33:39In 1947, the most powerful twister in Oklahoma history at the time leveled 100 city blocks here.
33:48It took just seconds for this more recent tornado to turn these houses into tinder.
33:55The raging winds of the Great Plains can be terrifying on their own.
34:00But when those winds here start to blow during extreme drought conditions, they can cause years of havoc on an unimaginable scale.
34:09That's what happened during the famous Dust Bowl period in the 1930s.
34:14In the first decades of the 20th century, plentiful rains yielded bountiful harvests for the new homesteaders.
34:22But as farmers plowed under millions of acres of prairie grasses to make fields of gold,
34:27they overlooked the important role that those grasses played in the delicate ecosystem of the Great Plains.
34:34When the rains stopped falling in 1931, Great Plains farmers began to realize their mistake.
34:42Without native plants to hold down the topsoil, colossal dust storms began to rage across the region.
34:49The National Weather Service described one of these storms as
34:52Singer Woody Guthrie, an Oklahoma native, wrote one of the most vivid descriptions of life in the Dust Bowl.
34:59A dust storm hit, and it hit like thunder.
35:03It dusted us over and it covered us under, blocked out the traffic and blocked out the sun.
35:09Straight down the road, the dust storm hit again.
35:13The dust storm hit again.
35:16The dust storm hit again.
35:18It covered out the traffic and blocked out the sun.
35:22Straight from home, all the people did run.
35:31Drought and storms continued for years.
35:37With no crops to harvest and no money to spare, many here gave up hope of surviving the drought.
35:44Already beaten down by the Great Depression, two and a half million people packed up everything they could carry and left.
35:52Most headed west in search of better lives in California.
35:57But in the end, two-thirds of those in the Dust Bowl remained,
36:01and managed to endure the drought as they waited for the rains to return so they could plant again.
36:08American settlers had learned the hard way about the Great Plains' delicate ecosystem
36:13and its powerful cycles of rain and drought.
36:18But these cycles were already well known to Plains Indians,
36:22who had survived and even thrived in this harsh environment for thousands of years.
36:29The first humans arrived on the Great Plains as early as 15,000 years ago.
36:33Over time, their descendants separated into more than a dozen different tribes.
36:39Some, including the Hidatsa and Mandan, settled in fortified villages on the banks of the Missouri River.
36:46Others, like the Apache, became nomadic and migrated south to follow the animals they hunted.
36:53It was these tribes that surveyor Stephen Long had probably encountered when he crossed the Great Plains in 1860.
37:00He wrote on his map,
37:01The Great Desert is frequented by roving bands of Indians who have no fixed places of residence,
37:07but roam from place to place in quest of gain.
37:15From the air, there's very little physical evidence left of how these Native Americans lived.
37:22But there are plenty of stories that tell of the fate that they suffered,
37:26when white settlers began moving onto their land.
37:32Land like this mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
37:36It's known as Bear Butte.
37:39There is no more sacred site to members of the Lakota Sioux than Bear Butte's Peak.
37:46In 1868, the U.S. government signed a treaty guaranteeing that the Black Hills would remain a national park.
37:53But rumors started spreading that there was gold in the hills.
37:57So, the U.S. Army sent Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer to find out if it was true.
38:04He camped here near Bear Butte.
38:07When Custer and his party did find gold, the news spread like wildfire.
38:13Soon, thousands of fortune seekers from across the nation were racing to the Black Hills to search for gold.
38:19Thousands of fortune seekers from across the nation were racing to the Black Hills to stake a claim,
38:24even though this was all legally protected Indian land.
38:33Mining towns soon popped up here in the Black Hills.
38:37One of them became the famously colorful town of Deadwood, South Dakota.
38:43Here, famous frontier personalities like Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane
38:49became gamblers, drifters, and gold-crazed prospectors.
38:54One group of them staked a claim that kicked off the nearby Homestake Mine.
38:59Little did they know, it would eventually grow into the deepest gold mine in the country.
39:04During its 125-year life, this one mine ended up producing 10% of the world's gold, 39 million ounces of it.
39:14But none of that wealth went to the Sioux.
39:20At first, the U.S. government tried to protect the Sioux's rights and get rid of the trespassers.
39:26But then, in the fall of 1875, it changed its tune and tried to force the Sioux to sell the Black Hills to the government instead.
39:35In 1876, tensions with the Sioux reached a fever pitch and led to one of the most crushing defeats in U.S. military history.
39:44It happened here, in these rolling hills in eastern Montana.
39:49This was the site of a legendary battle known as Custer's Last Stand.
39:58In the spring of 1876, General Alfred Terry arrived here with 879 men to force the Lakota Sioux to surrender.
40:07But 1,800 Lakota warriors had already gathered here at Little Bighorn River to defend themselves and protect their land.
40:17When Terry discovered the encampment, and that he was outnumbered by more than two to one,
40:22he ordered Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry to cut the tribes off from the south.
40:30But Custer soon realized that his men had been spotted.
40:33And decided to attack, even though he had no backup.
40:42Little is known about what happened next, but it's believed that hundreds of Cheyenne and Lakota quickly overwhelmed Custer's troops
40:50and pursued them up to what's known as Last Stand Hill.
40:55By then, 40 to 50 of Custer's original 210 men were still alive.
40:59But little did they know, another native fighting force was approaching from the opposite direction.
41:05Custer and his men were soon under attack.
41:08Some managed to break free and escape down the hill, but they didn't get far.
41:13More native warriors were coming up from the river.
41:18It was here in this ravine that the last of Custer's men met their fate.
41:23Taken down by clubs, Custer's men were forced to retreat.
41:26Custer and his men met their fate.
41:29Taken down by clubs, arrows, and bullets.
41:37Custer was found near the top of Last Stand Hill, with bullet holes in his head and chest.
41:43A memorial to him now stands on the site.
41:46Legend has it that Lakota warrior Crazy Horse killed Custer himself, but no one knows for sure.
41:53All in all, the Battle of Little Bighorn probably lasted only about an hour.
41:59Not a single one of the soldiers in Custer's battalion lived to tell the tale.
42:05The Lakota and Cheyenne won this battle, but ultimately, they lost the war.
42:11The United States succeeded in forcing the tribes onto reservations,
42:16and settlers soon moved in to claim the Sioux's land for themselves.
42:20It was a story that was repeated across the Great Plains,
42:23as the region's Native American tribes were forced off their traditional lands,
42:28and the nation and its settlers expanded west.
42:40It wasn't until 1980 that the U.S. government was called to account
42:45for its failure to abide by the treaty it had signed with the Sioux.
42:50The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government had engaged in what it called
42:55a ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealing.
42:59It was ordered to pay more than $100 million to the tribe, but the Sioux refused the money.
43:06They said that nothing could compensate them for the loss of their homeland.
43:14That money, with interest, has remained in government coffers ever since.
43:19And was worth roughly $1.4 billion as of 2014.
43:27Today, the Lakota Sioux have only a small piece of their former land here, near the Black Hills.
43:34Their reservation is known as Pine Ridge, and is one of the poorest communities in the United States.
43:41A statue of Sitting Bull stands as a reminder of how this tribe lost its land.
43:49All around them is the vast territory their ancestors once called home,
43:55lands that include some of the greatest natural treasures of the Great Plains.
44:03One of those treasures is this, a giant rock column that shoots more than 1,000 feet from the land,
44:10right up into the sky.
44:12The Sioux and other tribes call this massive rock form Mato Tipila, which means Bear Lodge.
44:20According to Native American legends, a giant bear created the tower's distinctive vertical scars
44:26by scratching it with its claws.
44:30But when Colonel Richard Dodge led a U.S. government expedition here in 1875,
44:35a translator in the group misinterpreted the Indian name to mean Devil's Tower.
44:42Dodge reported that the site was one of the most remarkable peaks in this or any country.
44:48His description helped convince President Theodore Roosevelt to make Devil's Tower
44:54the first national monument in America in 1906.
44:59Native Americans have been lobbying to have its official name changed to Bear Lodge ever since.
45:08Dodge and his party never made it to the top of the tower.
45:12The group's head geologist, Henry Newton, wrote that the summit was so hard to reach,
45:17it was, he said, inaccessible to anything without wings.
45:23Today, it's possible to fly right over the top of this stunning national monument
45:29and look down on a place where early travelers in the Great Plains were unable to tread.
45:35Just a few decades after Dodge arrived here,
45:37a wide range of exciting new aircraft took to the skies over the Great Plains
45:42and turned a former Kansas cow town into a world capital of aviation.
45:49In the 1920s, a new kind of machine appeared high over the prairies of the Great Plains.
46:00A now legendary aviation pioneer named Lloyd Stearman
46:03took to the skies over Kansas in his new biplane.
46:10He wasn't the first aviator here, but he went on to become one of the most famous
46:15after selling his company to Boeing in 1929.
46:21Stearman's planes still fly over Kansas today, just as they do all across the country.
46:33But these days, they're joined by some of the most modern aircraft in the world,
46:37which is one reason that the Kansas City of Wichita is now known as Air Capital City.
46:45It was here that Clyde Cessna opened his business in 1927
46:50and started making the simple and safe private aircraft that most new pilots train in today.
46:56It was also here that his former business partner and rival Walter Beach launched Beechcraft
47:03and where William P. Lear set up shop in 1963 to produce Learjets
47:09that now rocket all around the world.
47:12A single Learjet costs well over 12 million dollars.
47:16But the wide-open skies of the Great Plains didn't just lure inventors of aircraft.
47:21They also inspired many here to learn to fly,
47:25including a young Kansas woman named Amelia Earhart
47:30who grew up in this white Victorian house high up on the banks of the Missouri River.
47:36Nearby lies an airfield known as the Kansas Airfield.
47:39It's a massive earthwork sculpture by Kansas artist Stan Hurd
47:43that is best seen from the air.
47:47It honors the first woman to pilot a plane across the Atlantic
47:51and one who tried to become the first female pilot to fly around the world.
48:00It was during that flight that the Kansas City of Wichita
48:05It was during that flight on July 2nd, 1937
48:10that Earhart's plane disappeared off Papua New Guinea
48:14and has never been found.
48:19Earhart got a chance to experience the thrill of flight throughout the world
48:24just as pilots do across the Great Plains today.
48:27As they look down on farmers hard at work transforming the land
48:35and discover the seemingly endless natural wonders of the Great Plains states
48:42like the hoodoos of the Palo Duro Canyon of Texas
48:50and the wildlife that call the Great Plains home.
48:53Like these pronghorn on the move in eastern New Mexico.
49:02But there's nothing like sharing the skies with the birds
49:06that make their epic annual migrations every autumn across the Great Plains.
49:17Their journeys take them from the northern states and Canada
49:20down to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond
49:24and then back again come spring.
49:28There's one place in the Great Plains
49:31where most of these migrating birds stop to rest.
49:34It's here at Cheyenne Bottoms near Great Bend, Kansas.
49:39It's the nation's largest inland marsh
49:42covering more than 60 square miles.
49:51Hundreds of species gather here, including 27 different kinds of ducks.
49:56Flocks of pelicans also stop off at Cheyenne Bottoms
50:00on their long flights between Central America and the Arctic.
50:03Scientists estimate that nearly half of all North American shorebirds
50:08visit this one marsh every year.
50:13They are part of the surprising wonder of the Great Plains.
50:20There's nothing like discovering America's heartland from the air
50:27and the fascinating, rugged, bountiful, and dazzlingly beautiful states
50:35that belong to the Great Plains.
50:50For more information, visit www.fema.gov