:09:03
Far behind the mountains,
beyond the rolling plains...
:09:07
... they had left the people of the East...
:09:10
... people who were restless in another way.
:09:13
The kind who would look at the mountain
and see a watershed...
:09:16
... look at the forest
and see lumber for houses...
:09:19
... look at a stony field and see a farm.
:09:22
Their faces and their instincts
had been turned to the West...
:09:26
... ever since Plymouth Rock
and James Town.
:09:29
The trapper"s road was the trade
of the wolf or the bend of the canyon.
:09:33
But for whole families following the sun,
there had to be broader ways.
:09:39
There were no roads into the woodlands,
only rivers...
:09:44
... and they flowed in the wrong direction,
north or south.
:09:47
Or else they stopped at the Alleghanys.
:09:50
Until one day...
:09:52
... a new river took source in the mind
of a man named DeWitt Clinton.
:09:57
He conceived of a river that would go west.
:10:00
And in the way Americans have
of acting out their dreams, it came to be.
:10:05
The Erie Canal left the Hudson
above Albany...
:10:08
... and carried clear across
to the Great Lakes.
:10:12
People who yearned for virgin land
and the new life...
:10:15
... now had a highway to take them.
And they moved along.
:10:19
Pride of Utica now loading.
:10:22
All aboard for the Pride of Utica.
:10:26
The Ramsey family, Peter Smith...
:10:30
...the Skoga family...
:10:32
...all eight of 'em.
:10:34
All aboard for the Pride of Utica.
:10:40
Is the laddie's health
the reason you're heading west?
:10:43
Partly.
:10:44
Only partly.
Mostly our trouble East was rocks.
:10:47
I had me a farm where some years
I'd raise 100 bushels of rocks a year.
:10:50
Zebulon, you hadn't oughta lie
to the man like that.
:10:53
Wife, I'm a God-fearing soul,
and I tell the truth as I see it.
:10:57
I never used a plow.
I'd blast out the furrows with gunpowder.