COWBOY: They shot him in the back. Shot him in the back.
CHELSEA: From a young age I was obsessed with the Wild West.
COWBOY: I'm only gonna tell you once more.
CHELSEA: Stories of dusty streets and the gunslingers,
(gun shuts)
cowboys and Indians,
good and bad, rags to riches.
WOMAN: Oh! Oh! Oh, Jim!
CHELSEA: But there are lots of people that have
a stake in this story that are totally ignored.
NARRATOR: What really happened at the Battle of the Little Bighorn?
DR DOUG: We use a crime scene technique.
We use the physical evidence, the forensic science.
ERNIE: I'm one of the last survivors who has a story about this,
and I'm passing it on.
NARRATOR: What can a boat, buried in a Nebraskan field,
reveal about the pioneers who headed West?
DR ANNALIES: This is not a little three by three test excavation.
This is filled with the stuff that made America.
RON: We said it was like Christmas every day.
There wasn't one of anything, there were hundreds of everything.
NARRATOR: And how do the crumbling remain of a ghost town
uncover new truths about life in the Wild West?
CHELSEA: It's time to update the outdated narratives
and to challenge the stereotypes.
The real story is much more interesting than what Hollywood will tell you.
RON: Sam Corbino was a businessman in Omaha, and Jesse Purcell was a pilot,
but they were also treasure hunters.
They took a fluxgate magnetometer
and they started looking in an area of several square miles,
on and surrounding DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge.
Pretty much like a radar, it sends out a signal and if it finds a metallic object,
it sends a signal back to the instrument.
Just a few days later, they found several of these magnetic anomalies.
They knew that they had hit a stash of artefacts of some kind.
NARRATOR: Whatever it is, it lies just half-a-mile from the Missouri River.
RON: This first picture is obviously one of the drilling
rigs where they put down some test holes.
Well, in one of them, up came fragments of boots,
fragments of broken glass, the smell of alcohol.
They had a lotta newspaper people out there all the time.
They obviously were fascinated with the idea
that they had found something pertaining to the frontier
and wanted to know what it was.
They stripped the overburden off as best they could.
The problem was that being below water table, the water wanted to flood the hole.
Water, water everywhere.
I'm a dry land archaeologist and dealing with something like this
is not something I was familiar with.
I was Curator of Collections and Research at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology
at the University of New Mexico.
When I was visited by the guys overseeing the project and they said,
"How would you like a job?"
Well, I was a teaching fellow making $8,000 a year and starving to death,
and that sounded pretty good, because they offered me $11,500, with a promotion.
I was talking to my mother about my new job and she said,
"You don't know anything about that."
And I said, 'No, but I'm going to learn fast.'
NARRATOR: In April 1969, Ron Switzer joins the excavation team
to preserve whatever they find.
RON: Well, that's one of the 500-horse diesel pumps
we were using to pump water outta the ground.
And this was when we finally knew that we had a boat.
NARRATOR: Digging further they look for clues about the type of vessel they found.
RON: The super-structure above the deck was gone, of course,
so all that was left was the deck
and some of the heavy machinery,
spokes that contained paddle wheels, steam boilers.
We pretty much knew that we had a steamboat then.
That's the bow of the boat there.
Yeah, that's the bow.
Over time, the Missouri changed its course and the riverbed became a field.
The boat was found 18ft below water table
in a cut-off meander of the Missouri River.
Essentially, it was just entombed in mud.
So, the problem was, of course, trying to identify it
and we didn't know where it was bound for.
BILL: Between the 1850s and the 1930s,
somewhere around 400 steamboats sank on the Missouri River.
There were quite a few boats that actually sank in this general area.
It was pretty notorious for sinking boats.
So, they really wouldn't know which boat they had found
until they had excavated it and found proof.
Once they finally saw the decking, they had to figure out a way
to get the mud off of it.
RON: If you've never experienced Missouri River mud,
you don't know what mud is.
BILL: They actually found the stern bilge hatch,
so they started pulling artefacts out from there,
and eventually they found a soap crate, and on the top of the crate
had been hand-stenciled, "Stores Bertrand."
RON: And it was brought into the lab and everybody celebrated,
and we knew then that we had the Steamboat Bertrand.
BILL: The Bertrand steams from St. Louis
and was headed to Fort Benton into the Montana territory,
and that was the very last outpost at the end of the Missouri River.
We know from the newspaper accounts that at three o'clock on April 1st, 1865, it sank.
The Civil War was just winding down.
Within a few weeks, Abraham Lincoln would be assassinated,
so it was a very turbulent period in American history,
a time of massive territorial expansion and human movement.
RON: When the cargo began to be recovered, we didn't know how much there was,
but there were tens of thousands of artefacts.
So, then we had a new problem.
There was so much of it.
We had to keep them wet, we had to get them into a temperature-controlled
environment if we could, or we were going to lose that cargo.
There was just no question about it.
(music)
Well, this brings back memories.
That's me trying to decide what to do with that cargo
as it came off the boat by the truckload.
NARRATOR: Within nine months, Ron Switzer's team preserve 500,000 artefacts
from the Steamboat Bertrand.
DR ANNALIES: Ron gets so many extra bonus points in my book,
because these steamboat wrecks,
we've excavated so few of them for a reason.
This is not a little three by three test excavation,
this is back hoes, this is, you know, water pumps, this is epic.
You just can't possibly comprehend how much stuff
was loaded on to these steamboats, headed West.
Prior to the Transcontinental Railroad, we really,
really used these interior waterways
as a primary way to move goods and people as efficiently as possible,
and so these steamboat wrecks, they are filled with the stuff that made America.
There weren't a lotta folks that had done much work on the Bertrand after the initial
excavation, and so every time we grab an object now,
we can learn stuff we've never learned before.
Because of Hollywood movies, we tend to think of people
on the frontier as just a bunch of rough and rowdy men.
For me, as an archaeologist,
if I can get to these collections of artefacts coming off this
steamboat, can I use those objects to figure out, you know, why,
why do you pick up and go West?
Hi, Bill! BILL: Hi! How are you doing?
DR ANNALIES: Good! How are you?
I vividly remember the first time I walked into the Bertrand Museum.
I was just blown away. That's exactly how I felt.
The things that always surprise me the most are the real high-end luxury goods.
When were you gonna use that, you know, in the American West?
Imagine this covered in mud.
When it was initially found, they had no idea what the heck is this thing?
It was a mess. It turns out it's a mink stole.
A number of different types of china
or everyday stoneware that was on board the Bertrand,
lovely pieces that, you know, any frontier home would be really,
really pleased to be able to, if guests came over, to put on their table.
RON: The Bertrand had fancy food stuffs; you know?
Pickles and preserves and wines and liquor.
I mean, these were high-class goods going into the frontier.
We had Piper Heidsieck champagne.
We uncorked a bottle of it. It was still good champagne.
(laughs)
BILL: Back in the 1860s, they found gold in Montana territory,
and people were heading West, trying to look for gold
and, if they actually hit it,
hit it rich, they had a lot of disposable income.
People in the Wild West were actually a little more sophisticated
than people think of them as.
RON: Once we got all of the cargo out,
we had to decide what to do about the boat itself.
Were they going to try to preserve it or not?
We couldn't do it.
There was just no way logistically, economically, rationally to do that.
So, they decided then to let the Bertrand go back to her grave.
But before they pulled the plug, we wanted to figure out why she sank,
so measured drawings were made of literally every inch of that boat,
so we could build a reconstructed version of the Steamboat Bertrand.
(laughs)
That's a good job. Beautiful!
She was such a shallow-draft boat, she sat on the water like a duck.
It makes you wonder if there is a clue here as to why she sank.
BILL: It was a very risky business taking a steamboat up the Missouri River.
It was a notoriously difficult river to navigate, it was shallow,
it had lots of sandbars, lots of sunken logs, a lot of snags.
RON: The first boats to reach Fort Benton
on the Upper Missouri in the springtime were
the ones who got the most profit, so naturally
you wanted to get as much cargo up there as fast as you could.
It was common practice in those days to overload your boats.
DR ANNALIES: We learned from the Council Bluffs newspaper account
that another vessel that was a partner with the Bertrand, the Deer Lodge,
actually had to leave about 100 tons of freight
at Sioux City, because the water levels were dropping really fast.
So, what that tells us is that literally a few days prior when the Bertrand left,
taking her full cargo with her, she was probably too heavy
for the journey she was making.
She's sitting too low in the water that's not
deep enough for the snags to flow underneath the vessel.
BILL: The newspaper account says it was heading up river towards Montana,
at 3 o'clock on April 1st, 1865, and struck one of these snags
and immediately started taking on water.
The pilot managed to drive it to the western side of the river,
and everyone got off safely.
DR ANNALIES: We know there were passenger boxes
that were left behind inside the hull of the Bertrand,
so can I use those passenger items to figure out
what everyday life was like on the frontier?
I was really, really intrigued to find out who the actual passengers were.
NARRATOR: A hundred years after sinking,
passengers' possessions recovered from the Steamboat
Bertrand are a time capsule of life on the American frontier.
DR ANNALIES: The most intriguing box in the Bertrand collection
held a school slate.
BILL: At the top of the slate is carved the name, "Fannie."
DR ANNALIES: We have learned from the newspaper accounts
that Anna and Fannie Campbell were two young women who are travelling
from boarding school into the Montana territory to meet their family.
Fannie sorta had a larger than life sorta persona,
so she turned up frequently in historical records.
This is basically sorta showing what everybody in the County does,
and under Fannie's entry, it says that she's, "Teaching school."
It says, "Tomorrow, the Tree School will be opened under the direction
and superintendence of Miss. Fannie Campbell,
a lady and a scholar in every manner, calculated to take charge of the youthful mind."
This is an article about when Fannie bought a ranch.
She had horses and cattle, talking about how snug her income must be because
she was such a successful rancher. You gotta love that!
In her fifties she ranched 1,000 acres That's crazy! This is a census from 1910.
It lists Fannie Campbell as the Head of Family.
That is really, really unusual at this time period.
That's just fabulous!
Fannie embodies that sorta frontier spirit, because she was fearless.
I think I loved her from the moment I, you know, saw her slate with that bold child
writing "Fannie" on it.
So, oftentimes it's the small, tiny items that are really, really telling.
These objects are a way for us to sorta get a better understanding
of what everyday life was like in the American West.
NARRATOR: Settlers continue to push westward.
In 1874, gold is found in the Great Sioux Reservation.
DR MELISSA: The entire westward push was in a public policy
called the Manifest Destiny,
but the indigenous peoples were really not thought of as part of that.
Instead, the idea is putting them on reservations, giving them land.
The Black Hills is traditional Sioux land,
was given to the Sioux as long as the sky was blue and the grass was green.
It did not mention a darn word about the hills becoming gold.
DR DOUG: By the 1870s, and particularly with gold being discovered
in the Black Hills, and the Black Hills being opened up by Congress,
the Army was given the task of protecting
the miners from the Indians, so Custer was following
his orders to find the Indians that had
been out and left the reservation.
NARRATOR: On June 25th, 1876, the 7th US Cavalry, led by Lieutenant Colonel George
Custer, confronts a large Native American encampment.
DR DOUG: To take that traditional view of what happened,
it was Custer surprised by the number of Indians
and his command was surrounded quickly,
and destroyed by all these mounted warriors.
The archaeological record tells us it was much more complex than that.
ERNIE: My name's Ernie Lapointe, and I am Lakota.
My relationship to this battlefield is my great-grandfather,
Sitting Bull.
My story about this battle was told to me orally.
My two grand-uncles were there.
And I'm one of the last survivors who has the story about this,
and I'm passing it on.
DR DOUG: There were Native American accounts, but they had been largely discounted.
The traditional story of this battle is largely based on the military accounts.
Custer and his command all clustered together on Last Stand Hill,
with the warriors just swarming and swirling around him.
ERNIE: They're going, "Ah, ah, ah, ah!"
and they're running round in a circle, you know?
They said, "We outnumber him." They try to make
Custer look like he's some kind of a hero who was massacred.
DR DOUG: That's the traditional view of what happened at that battle.
And it wasn't until 1983 and those remarkable
discoveries being made that it all changes.
It started due to a careless smoker who passed by and threw a cigarette butt out,
started a wild land fire.
And what that did was remove all the vegetation, and it gave us access to a field.
This gave us the opportunity to actually do archaeology on the park.
DICK: Have the archaeologists solved the riddles of Custer's Last Stand?
DR DOUG: At that point, certainly, those would be the areas that often held.
DR MELISSA: Who is that guy with the beard?
DR DOUG: Me! (laughs)
I was 36 when we did the project.
I was a supervisory archaeologist with the National Park Service
at the time.
Melissa and I worked together. We knew each other in Lincoln.
DR MELISSA: We worked together '84 and '85 as colleagues,
and then we started going out together,
and, of course, in '87 we were married.
So, yeah, I guess it became more than a collegial situation.
(laughs)
DR DOUG: There are marble markers on the field today
that allegedly mark where men died in battle.
DR MELISSA: Part of the reason the Custer story
became such a legend was because tons of people
have made battlefield reconstructions based on the location of those markers.
But, of course, the markers weren't put in till, like, 15 years after the battle,
so it's not surprising that those markers
and the whole legend have the potential not to be accurate.
DR DOUG: Split. Looks like it's been.
So, we wanted to find the physical evidence
so we could then use that physical evidence
to reconstruct what really happened at that battle.
What we did not know was how much stuff had been salvaged
right after the battle by the victorious warriors.
We got our crews lined up and we set a crew out.
Yeah, we were worried that maybe there wasn't anything left.
Now we've been looking for those bodies.
And in the first hour they were walking around, they found absolutely nothing.
Literally, nothing.
Right behind them we had a group of metal detectorists
anxious to show us what they could do.
The use of metal detector's a little controversial.
They have largely been passed off by archaeologists as the tool of the Devil,
because they were used in looting, but we decided
that we would try it in a controlled environment there.
DR MELISSA: So, you'd start to hear them, "Ding, ding, ding!
Ding, ding, ding! Ding, ding!"
REPORTER: Detector machines began to sing wildly. Finds were made along the.
DR DOUG: In the same time period of that first hour,
they had found over 100 battle-related artefacts.
Bits and pieces of saddle gear.
DR MELISSA: Boot nails that were in boots
that were attached to human leg bones.
DR DOUG: We had the back strap from a Colt Army revolver.
DR MELISSA: It was just a lot of fun.
I mean, it's like the greatest Easter egg hunt in the world.
DR DOUG: But more importantly was the discovery of bullets
and cartridge cases. There were hundreds of them.
People think of Little Bighorn as basically from the Hollywood perspective
of a bow and arrow fight.
We found, out of 5,000 artefacts, 12 arrowheads.
That tells us they were used, but they were not the most important thing.
This was a gun battle.
-That's a hammer DR MELISSA: Well, well!
DR DOUG: I'll be damned! That's a. 44 hammer.
The bullets and cartridge cases were bagged and labelled,
and we subjected them to what's called
"Firearms Identification." That allows us to determine
what type of weapon they were fired in,
whether it's Native American or soldier.
Around the soldier locations we recovered
mostly cartridge cases from single shot Springfield carbines,
and if you do a few tests, you find out something interesting.
MAN: This is the workhorse of the Army in the latter part of the 1800s,
and this is the model 1873 Springfield, accurate up to about 200 yards.
DR DOUG: They fire a high velocity bullet.
(gun shot)
But we found by experiment that they can take nearly ten seconds to reload,
re-aim and fire again.
Near the warrior sites we recovered cartridge cases from a variety of guns,
specifically a large number of Winchester rifles.
MAN: This is a model 1873 Winchester.
It's a lever action.
DR DOUG: Now, those can be pre-loaded with up to 14 cartridges,
and we found they can shoot a round about every two seconds.
(multiply gunshots)
Now, that's an entirely different type of fire power.
(multiply gunshots)
DR MELISSA: Wow! That'd be a little faster
than those soldier weapons would fire, wouldn't it?
DR DOUG: Quite a bit.
We began to appreciate more and more the skill set of the Native Americans.
They knew how to deal with a firearm.
They were sophisticated in their weapon systems;
they were sophisticated in the use of their weapons systems.
MAN: This is an expended. 45-70 cartridge here.
Probably this is a soldier's position.
DR DOUG: It quickly became obvious that those cartridge cases
and bullets were gonna tell us more.
There were microscopic striae in those firing pin marks
that would indicate that this cartridge case
and this cartridge case found 30ft from it were fired in the same gun.
We can literally follow the movement of some of those
weapons around the battlefield,
and then we can make presumptions about who carried them.
We have clusters of soldiers.
A couple of those three guys and guns moved down,
and then we don't see any more movement.
Soldiers were trained to fight in place,
to get in skirmish line and do what they were told, and they did.
And the warriors, on the other hand, were fighting in much more looser war groups.
They might stay in one position and shoot,
and then move to another position and shoot.
They used that terrain to protect themselves.
ERNIE: Each individual Lakota man had his own style
of understanding how to defend the people, how to defend the land.
DR DOUG: Custer's men were outgunned and outfought,
based on the analysis of the terrain
and where those cartridge cases and bullets were found.
The traditional view of the end of the battle
is that some element of Custer's immediate command is surrounded,
and there's this grand Last Stand.
You know, you've got to think about this as
what's great on screen is not the way these battles played out.
Custer's body was positively identified on Last Stand Hill.
He had been shot in the chest, and also a gunshot wound to the left temple.
ERNIE: There's so many stories, you know, that come out
from all the historians, saying, "Custer was the last guy on the hill."
Most of the stories that was told to me from my grand-uncles,
they never speculated or wondered, it was what they seen.
DR DOUG: Probably at the end of the battle,
some men tried to break away from the Last Stand Hill
and tried to go into Deep Ravine.
At Marker Number Two, at the head of Deep Ravine itself,
there were some soldier cartridges, indicating that a soldier had fallen there.
But, more importantly, there were at least six different Native American firearms
represented in the bullets that impacted in that position.
Well, if you've got six different warriors firing at that one guy,
it suggests you've got the time to have a bunch
of warriors clustered together and fire at somebody,
which, to me, suggests that this might be one of the last guys
on the field. Not Custer.
Your story and our archaeological record
are all consistent with how this thing plays out.
ERNIE: Right. It was guerrilla fighting skills that helped 'em defeat Custer.
DR DOUG: People think of Little Bighorn,
and especially from the Hollywood perspective,
of good guys and bad guys, and the good guys win and all that sorta thing.
But both the historical record, the archaeological record
and the Native narrative, the oral history,
tell us it as much more complex.
We really do have a better understanding of the past and what happened at that battle.
NARRATOR: Despite the Native American victory at the Little Bighorn,
westward expansion continues, in search of more gold.
CHELSEA: When you start to really dig into the real story of the Wild West,
you realise that there are lots of people that have a stake in this story
that are totally ignored.
And, as an archaeologist, I feel a responsibility
to those people to do the best I can to tell their story,
to challenge the stereotypes,
to bring in all the other people that were part of the story,
but are missing from the history books.
Bumpy!
Coming out of the valley, you drive around these windy hills,
and it just seems like it goes forever and forever,
and you can just see so far in the distance.
And all of a sudden you come around the corner.
And there's Bodie.
Oh, my gosh, that's awesome!
When you think about gold fever, when you come to a place like Bodie,
you see the power of that mineral.
Nothing about living here would have been easy. Nothing!
Getting here, getting food in, getting shelter.
Everything was an uphill battle, but people did it
because of the potential to go out and get rich.
From a young age I was obsessed with the Wild West.
When I was a kid, my dad took me to Virginia City, a silver mining town,
and I thought that was so much cooler than Disneyland.
Hi! DENISE: Hi! Welcome to Bodie!
CHELSEA: Greetings! How are you?
DENISE: I'm good. Good.
Gold mining here in Bodie really declined over time,
and so people started to move on.
That's when Bodie became more of a ghost mining town in the 1920s.
My job is to preserve Bodie, freeze it in time, essentially.
Today, there's about 150 buildings total.
Back in the day, at the height of Bodie, about 2,000.
Here we are at the crossroads, Green Street and then Main Street.
This would have been the commercial court.
CHELSEA: Yeah. DENISE: Right.
And it was about one mile in length.
CHELSEA: Uh-huh? Wow! Jeez! DENISE: Mm-hm!
CHELSEA: There are parts that have been preserved, but there's key neighborhoods,
key parts of this story that are no longer here.
Do you have maps or any sort of imagery from this area to give
us a sense of how many buildings would have been here?
DENISE: What we've been working on is trying to recreate
the town in that boom years, right,
in the 1880s, to basically recreate in a 3D model form, and bring it back to life.
CHELSEA: We're lucky here at Bodie,
there's lots of evidence to help fill in the gaps in this story,
but I've got this image in my head,
but I'm really excited to see what Bodie looked like in 3D color in 1880.
PROF NICOLA: What is very well-studied about Bodie is the core, the downtown,
and mostly the buildings,
but it's been estimated that more than 90 percent of what's left of Bodie
is things that you cannot see across the landscape.
So, there is so much to still investigate.
The lidar that we're using now is called
"simultaneous location and mapping," or SLAM lidar,
which is a handheld device that I can carry around,
and then use it to scan the landscape and the environment
with great accuracy, to help us understand the archaeological signature,
even without digging.
Starting from the signature, from the ruins, if we collect the data in 3D,
we can use it to reconstruct the entire building, show we can show how the past was,
how building were before being demolished, and bring the past back to life.
DENISE: I do photogrammetry with this drone, basically capturing images.
And we're gonna map, this morning,
basically to complement the data that Nicola's capturing with the geo-SLAM.
Woo!
CHELSEA: I've seen early photographs, I've seen maps,
and one of the things that I've learned is
there's still so much that we don't know.
DENISE: It's amazing to see it come together like this.
CHELSEA: Wow! You can really see the size of Bodie.
It looks so much bigger.
DENISE: You would have shops, mercantile, barber shops, markets.
I think at the height there was about 60 saloons.
CHELSEA: This really shows you; I mean, this was a city. How cool!
DENISE: In this area, there's not much detail.
It would be interesting to take a closer look there.
There were some buildings that historians have documented,
although there's some interpretation of this part o' town, it's very minimal.
So, that's an area that really is screaming for more attention.
PROF NICOLA: I think this could be interesting.
I mean, this is definitely some type of ruin, remains of a building.
CHELSEA: Come, come, come!
This is a medicine bottle. That is so cool!
DENISE: Mm-hm. CHELSEA: These are distinctive Chinese medicine bottles.
So, they would contain liquid or pelletised pills. How awesome! (laughs)
One of the first places that the word of the discovery of gold
makes it is Hawaii and China, because that's where all the ships
were going out of this West coast of California.
It was way easier to get to places like that
via boats than it was to get across the United States.
So, I can tell right now we're in a Chinese residence
just by the suite of artefacts. Just in this one little spot.
This is so exciting. This is somebody's house. This is the garbage of somebody's life.
So, this is pretty cool. DENISE: Yeah!
CHELSEA: Even the Chinese, they had a name for California, "Gold Mountain,
because of the potential to go out and get rich.
PROF NICOLA: Come see right here, another ruin. CHELSEA: Oh, yeah!
PROF NICOLA: You can see here all the foundation.
CHELSEA: It looks like dry-stacked masonry,
and maybe there's some Chinese techniques in some of that architecture?
PROF NICOLA: Yeah, that's what we hope.
CHELSEA: So, a Chinese miner coming out to look for a gold strike
would come against several obstacles.
One of 'em was in many areas they were not allowed to stake a claim.
Chinese immigrants can't buy houses, or if you have a store, fine,
you have to pay 50 bucks a month, even though nobody else does.
It was just one thing after another,
targeting this population to kind of prevent them from putting down roots.
However, they figured workarounds.
They would partner with folks; they would buy used claims.
These folks persisted. They were not cowered in the corners.
They were still building lives; they were still being successful.
CHELSEA: Whoa! There's Chinatown!
(laughs)
Many of the Chinese chose to take up jobs working for individuals or restaurants,
doing laundry, doing domestic tasks.
CHELSEA: The Chinese populations contributed to the economy.
The money-built roads, built cities, that we all still enjoy today.
And that's lost if you don't look for it.
Places like Bodie, it's here.
These stories are just waiting to be told.
A more inclusive history is a more accurate way to tell American history.
DR ANNALIES: It's important to correct the story
because we can only move forward by having
a true understanding of what has been.
ERNIE: This running around in a circle thing
is just a figment of imagination as a movie maker.
Hollywood doesn't know anything about
what I just told you.
DR DOUG: When you get into the true history and realize how complex it is,
it breaks the myth, it blows the myth up.
Captioned by SubTitlePro LLC