Voir The West, Season 1 - Episode 5

After the Civil War reunited North and South, Americans set out with renewed energy and optimism to finally unite the nation, East and West. To do this, they embarked on one of the greatest technological achievements of the age -- building the first transcontinental railroad, conquering forbidding mountains, harsh deserts and awesome distances. Railroads soon transformed the West. Cowpokes such as Teddy Blue Abbott rode dusty cattle trails to deliver herds of longhorns to boisterous railheads like Dodge and Abilene, while buffalo hunters like Frank Mayer drove a magnificent animal that symbolized the West to the brink of extinction. For Emmeline Wells, suffragette and seventh wife of a prominent Mormon leader, the rails meant non-Mormon neighbors and Eastern ideas -- as well as the prospect of the West's becoming the first place in America where a woman could vote. And railroads brought in landless Europeans as well as poor but determined American families like Uriah and Mattie Oblinger, whose dream was a farm they could call their own. The binding of the country by iron rails would signal, as nothing else had, that the United States was not only a continental nation, but an emerging world power.