Voir The West, Season 1 - Episode 6

By the 1870s, only a few groups resisted the nation's push to conquer the West. On the Great Plains, Sitting Bull followed his mystical visions and urged his Lakota Sioux people to fight rather than surrender their sacred Black Hills and traditional way of life. On a hot summer day at the Little Big Horn, they defeated another warrior equally sure of his invincibility -- George Armstrong Custer. Custer's "Last Stand" also became, in effect, the last stand of the Sioux as a free people. In Utah, the Mormon patriarch Brigham Young, who had led his people to sanctuary in the desert, was forced to choose between saving his church or sacrificing his spiritual son. Farther west, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, who had struggled for peace all his life, found himself helping to lead one of the most extraordinary military campaigns in American history, as army after army relentlessly pursued him across the West. In the end, he was defeated not by rifles or cannons, but by starvation and freezing cold. This remarkable, eloquent man would also become the symbol of the pride, dignity and plight of all Native Americans.