The West stretches from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, from the northern plains to the Rio Grande – more than two million square miles of the most extraordinary landscape on earth.

It is a land of broad rivers and vast deserts, deep canyons and impenetrable mountains, boundless prairies and endless forests, a place where towering monoliths and boiling waters rise naturally from the earth.

One Sky Above Us

As settlers race to claim tribal lands, Native Americans take up the Ghost Dance, trusting in its power to restore a lost way of life until their hopes are crushed at Wounded Knee. The new century marks a new era in the West, an age of aqueducts and smelters. But the West remains what it has always been, a world waiting for a dream.

PBS The West