America: Promised Land (2017–…): Season 1, Episode 1 - Episode #1.1 - full transcript
[dramatic music]
[explosions]
- [shouting]
[gunfire, explosions]
- [speaking German]
♪
[speaking German]
- About 1/10 of the Union army
was composed
of German-born soldiers.
- [speaking German]
- Some units give their orders
in German.
[men shouting]
♪
- Immigration hasn't just
transformed America.
Immigration is America.
♪
- In the history of mankind,
no society has received
more immigrants
than the United States.
♪
male narrator:
America is a tapestry.
Every dot is one of us.
Using the latest population
data and archive records,
this is who we are.
Each cluster of color,
an ancestral group.
♪
If you're German-American,
these blue areas are where
you're most likely living,
the largest group in the nation.
Just one part of a giant puzzle
that includes Cubans,
shown in yellow;
Italians, this cluster of pink.
Here are the Scandinavians,
and here the Chinese,
shown in green.
♪
What made 1/3
of the population of Norway
move to the Great Lakes
and Pacific Northwest?
How did this small cluster
of Mennonites from Russia
transform Kansas?
Why did the invention
of the stamp
help send over 2 million Irish
to these cities?
How did new railroads
impact the African-Americans'
Great Migration north
to these red areas?
♪
If you're living
in the U.S. right now,
you're about to find out
why you are where you are.
♪
[wind blowing]
[bird cawing]
♪
- [exhales deeply]
narrator:
Harmen van den Bogaert,
a Dutch migrant
from the settlement
of New Amsterdam...
- [breathing heavily]
narrator: On a mission
to save the fur trade.
♪
- Young, energetic,
smart, courageous,
not afraid of what's beyond
the horizon.
If you have a very,
very difficult job out there,
you turn to people
like Harmen van den Bogaert.
- [speaks indistinctly]
♪
narrator:
If you're Dutch-American,
your ancestry could reach back
four centuries...
- [speaking Dutch]
narrator: Where you helped
secure the future
of America's biggest city.
♪
- Three men going off into the
wilderness have essentially
the fate of the colony
on their shoulders,
and without van den Bogaert,
you could say
New York City
would not have happened.
♪
narrator: 22 years old,
hungry for success.
He's typical of America's
earliest immigrants.
♪
- Most of the migrants
to America at this time
were young men
in their twenties,
because young men are desperate
for social improvement,
and they're stupid.
They're naive enough to think
that nothing bad
can happen to them.
♪
- In order to have the courage
to leave one's homeland,
to venture across the seas
into a foreign
and unknown place,
those individuals are already
highly motivated.
♪
narrator: Ships' manifests and
archive records show Bogaert
is one of some 5,000
early Dutch migrants.
Alongside him come the
ancestors of Humphrey Bogart
and Franklin Roosevelt.
Most land in New Amsterdam,
the future New York City.
♪
- The Dutch founded the colony
around the beaver trade.
Europe is in the midst
of a mini ice age.
It's cold there.
♪
narrator: Temperatures are up to
three degrees colder than today.
Fur prices spiral.
A beaver fur hat
costs $500 in today's money.
In Europe,
they're nearly extinct,
but America has
a huge beaver population.
- The French and the Dutch
in particular
were very interested in trading
with the Indians for beavers.
narrator: But the Native
Iroquois Confederacy
has cut off the fur supply...
♪
And Bogaert has been sent
to find out why.
- [speaking Dutch]
♪
narrator:
Almost four centuries later,
his descendant,
a U.S. Army colonel,
retraces his steps.
♪
- I am Colonel Adrian Bogart,
and I am descended
from Harmen van den Bogaert.
♪
From my time in the army,
what Van Den Bogaert does?
We would never do.
Our patrol planning
is very intensive.
We make sure that the routes
are secure.
Bogaert has done
none of this preparation.
Risk assessment: high.
♪
narrator: The last Dutch
expedition into this territory
was attacked and killed.
♪
Rumors say their captain
was roasted...
eaten.
[birds cawing loudly]
Standing between Bogaert
and his goal:
the Mohawk River.
- This is very dangerous,
extremely hazardous.
You can see how fast
the river is now.
It's treacherous.
Is he taking a chance?
A big chance.
But he's got to go.
- [gasping]
- The first thing
that happens is...
[gasps]
This gasp.
It's not hypothermia.
It's cold shock.
♪
He's got about 10 minutes
before he loses
all manual function.
♪
- [gasping]
- He makes it.
One major step
towards his ultimate goal
of getting to strike the deal
with the Oneida Indians.
♪
narrator: The Oneida are one
of five Iroquois nations
in the future upstate New York.
♪
DNA evidence shows
that Native Americans
are descended
from Siberian nomads
who entered North America
at least 15,000 years ago.
♪
On first European contact,
they number approximately
12 million people,
some 2,000 nations
spread across the continent.
♪
Now, an eternal migrant battle
for land, for status
is about to begin.
♪
- In telling the history
of immigration
to the United States,
one can't neglect to talk about
the conflict that existed
between established groups
and new immigrants
that were coming in
on a constant basis over time.
This is part of
the fundamental history
of immigration
in American society.
♪
[man shouts]
narrator:
100 miles from safety...
♪
Bogaert comes face-to-face
with the Iroquois chieftains.
[all shouting]
♪
- You don't know
if you can trust them.
You don't know
if it's safe or not,
but this is the moment of truth.
♪
narrator: At last,
Bogaert discovers
why fur supplies have stopped.
They're trading with the French.
♪
- One of the Oneida chiefs
puts his hand
onto Bogaert's heart
and feels his heartbeat.
If it's a fast heartbeat,
it's over.
If it's a slow,
normal heartbeat,
then they can talk to him.
[heart beating]
It's normal.
Let's do business.
♪
narrator: Bogaert seals
a new trade deal,
and the Dutch colony booms.
♪
- That is the beginning
of this thriving culture
that centuries later
would become very familiar
as New York City.
narrator: Today,
4 1/2 million Americans
claim Dutch heritage,
descendants of these
early trailblazers.
♪
The first piece of the modern
American jigsaw is in place,
a small corner
of a vast continent.
♪
A tiny population,
but through the 1600s,
colonial numbers grow
to over 200,000.
♪
The cities of Philadelphia
and Boston
are founded by the English.
♪
- Most of the English
settled the colonies
in families,
and you'll see that evidence
in some of the DNA data
that we have today,
a little footprint
from each of our ancestors
giving us part of our heritage.
- As more and more people came,
as communities were established,
it was easier to come here
as a family,
because there was a setting
that you could move into.
♪
narrator:
Advances in shipbuilding
allow more families to travel,
some on the adventure
of a lifetime...
♪
Others desperate to escape.
♪
War, disaster, persecution.
These eternal factors will
drive millions to migrate.
♪
In the 1600s, it's the turn
of English Quakers...
♪
Victims of
a religious crackdown.
♪
- [gasping]
- In England, church and state
went hand in hand.
The king was the head of
the Church of England as well,
and so to believe in a different
religious ideology
was also seen as being
disloyal to the country.
♪
narrator: Heads of households
are targeted.
- [gasps]
♪
narrator: Pushed by persecution,
thousands of Quakers
will quit England
for a new life in America.
[man exclaiming]
♪
narrator: But how will they
revolutionize a continent
armed only with a handshake?
[dramatic music]
narrator: English Quakers
are crossing the Atlantic.
If your ancestors
were among them,
then you are where you are
because of faith
and a dream of freedom.
♪
- They aspire to come to America
'cause they imagine
they can literally,
out of whole cloth,
make something new
of themselves.
- Gentlemen,
if you could follow me.
♪
narrator: Like immigrants
before and after,
the Quakers carry ideas
that will shape America.
♪
- Please be careful with this.
Thank you.
♪
narrator: William Buckman
is a Quaker by religion
and a carpenter by trade.
- Just set the trunk down
over here.
- This is a chest that came over
on the ship "Welcome"
with William Buckman,
and there is a ship's log
that lists all the articles
and things that they brought.
♪
narrator:
This 330-year-old chest
left England in 1682.
♪
And what the family packed
reveals how unprepared
for America they really were.
- Some of them were bringing
family heirlooms,
chests, tea services,
things that were not suitable
to the harsh climate
and the rugged conditions
of the New World.
- I think they brought
absolutely everything with them
with no idea
what they were heading into,
what to expect
or what to experience.
♪
narrator: The Buckman family
leaves England in August 1682.
♪
Among 2,000 passengers
are the founder of Pennsylvania
and an ancestor
of President Herbert Hoover.
♪
23 ships head for
the Delaware River
on America's eastern seaboard.
[birds calling]
Pamphlets sell America
as a land of plenty,
getting there
as straightforward.
But two weeks
into an eight-week voyage,
smallpox breaks out.
♪
- They're packed down
into these holds,
and there's no hygiene.
And you're basically
opening the door wide
for cholera, dysentery,
smallpox,
these historical diseases
which can destroy nations.
- There you are.
♪
narrator: The Buckmans suffer
more than most.
- They lost his mother,
his two brothers,
his young child, his son.
♪
narrator:
One in three passengers die.
♪
- I imagine he felt very guilty.
That had to test his faith.
♪
He had to question whether
he made the right decision
to board that ship.
[ship creaking softly]
narrator: 57 days
after leaving England,
they finally make landfall.
♪
- Migration is a kind of gamble
but also a kind of
second chance...
♪
The ability to move
to a different society
in a different part of the world
and start over again.
- You, sir.
Thank you.
Please follow me.
narrator: They reach a
continent already home
to more than a dozen
European nationalities
that already rely on the labor
of enslaved Africans.
♪
But like millions of
immigrants who will follow,
the Buckmans are starting
from scratch.
♪
Winter comes before they have
even built houses.
- Most of these early migrants
coming from Europe
didn't have
great survival skills.
♪
A lot of them were coming
from cities,
but even the farmers were coming
from a cultivated place.
♪
- Some migrants
had enough knowledge
to understand the challenges
that awaited them
on this side of the Atlantic.
Others simply did not.
And instead they learned
by doing.
♪
narrator: After a tough start,
the Quakers adapt and thrive.
In just three years,
90 more ships arrive,
carrying English colonists.
- It was almost exclusively
English settlers.
They were all speaking
the same language, obviously,
and establishing sort of
institutions and customs,
and they were the ones that
clearly had the most influence
on the original character
of America as a nation.
narrator: It will be centuries
before enslaved Africans
or Native Americans
are recognized as citizens.
But Quaker ideas of equality,
freedom, and government
are at the heart
of our democracy.
- The United States
owes a heavy debt
to the written document
drafted to govern Pennsylvania.
It speaks to the kinds
of individual liberties
which were incorporated into
the United States Constitution.
narrator: And if you
have Quaker ancestors,
we owe them another debt.
Quakers never use
the submissive bow.
Instead, they popularize
the handshake,
a simple symbol of equality.
Today, almost
26 million Americans
claim English descent,
2,000 of them
descendants of William Buckman.
♪
The puzzle of who we are
and where we are
begins to take shape.
♪
Within a century,
the first official census
of 1790
will show a population
of nearly 4 million,
more than 90% of them
of foreign heritage,
most living east
of the Mississippi.
- We have a country
that was founded
through a migration of people,
yet the very process
and processes
of those migrations
greatly varied.
narrator: While the Quakers
brought ideas
that shaped our democracy,
new migrants also bring things
that fuel our country's growth.
- America was like ancient Rome,
where you had all of these
different influences
from different regions,
because immigrants
bring certain skills.
♪
narrator: As northern
Europeans fill the east,
some 2 million Spanish
settle to the south.
They carry one of the most
important cargos
in American history:
cattle.
[cheers and applause]
♪
Simón de Arocha:
a Spanish cowboy and soldier,
a pioneer of America's
ranching industry.
♪
If you're Spanish-American,
your ancestry
could stretch right back
to the first ranchers,
and a cattle drive,
that helped save the Revolution.
♪
- I am so proud
to have had a family
who contributed
to the American Revolution,
and this is my family's story.
♪
narrator: The Arochas
are among 16 families
that migrate from Spain's
Canary Islands.
♪
They join millions of Spanish
heading to a vast
colonial empire.
Landing in what will
become Mexico,
the Arochas reach Spanish Texas in 1731.
- Every immigrant group
contributed something different.
Our current economic makeup
is the result
of all of these streams coming
in from different countries,
different peoples
with their different skills.
♪
narrator: Today, America is
the world's largest
beef producer,
and if your ancestors
were Spanish,
it's them we can thank.
♪
Until the Spanish arrived,
there wasn't a single cow
in the Americas.
- The Spanish bring horses,
cattle, foodstuffs,
things that are gonna change
the nature of everyday life.
♪
narrator: Simón de Arocha
wrangles thousands
of longhorn cows
that run wild on the grasslands
of what will become Texas.
- The Spanish ranchers
simply set them free
in what we call the open range.
They propagated to the millions
very quickly.
narrator:
Some 3 million longhorn cows
roam the grasslands.
Rounding them up demands skills
honed by the Spanish vaqueros.
- Are y'all ready?
♪
Everything the American cowboy
and North American ranching does
is from the vaqueros.
- [mooing]
[cheers and applause]
- I can only begin to imagine
what it must have been like.
The fortitude
that they must have had...
it's just absolutely
fascinating.
♪
- They perfected
all of the skills
of horsemanship
and working cattle.
♪
narrator: In 1779,
Spanish skills are called upon
to save American soldiers.
♪
An army of immigrants
wants its own flag.
♪
But more than half
of the American soldiers
are farmers.
Fighting means they can't
tend their crops.
Food supplies are running out.
- They were having to carry out
wagons of the dead soldiers
that were literally starving.
♪
narrator: Now, Simón de Arocha
will lead a rescue mission
that will help turn the tide
of the Revolutionary War
and change American
cattle farming forever.
♪
[dramatic music]
narrator: This map shows
a portrait of America.
Every pixel is one of us,
each color an ancestral group.
If you're Hispanic or Latino,
this red area is most likely
where you're living.
♪
If it hadn't been
for Spanish migrants,
we might never
have won our freedom.
♪
- By the time the colonies
decided to declare
their independence,
they were a patchwork
of different ethnic, racial,
and religious groups.
♪
narrator: But their army
is starving.
♪
As America's ally,
the king of Spain calls on
the Spanish cattle ranchers
of Texas to help.
- He asks the ranchers
to drive cattle
from Texas to Louisiana
to help feed the Americans
during the American Revolution.
♪
narrator: In successive waves,
rancheros use skills
brought from Spain
and honed in America
to lead some 15,000
head of cattle
across 500 miles to Louisiana.
♪
- These people perfected
the ability
to bring down a bull,
and in order to do that,
they used the riata, a rope.
♪
It was a life and death skill,
and they had to get it right
every time.
narrator:
16 weeks in the saddle,
living off the land,
sleeping rough.
♪
But the beef gets through
and helps tip the balance
of the war.
♪
Jefferson himself
writes the Spanish
to thank them for their help.
♪
- I am so proud
to have had a family
who contributed to
not only the community
but also to our nation.
♪
narrator: Over the centuries,
millions more of Spanish descent
will become American citizens.
♪
Today, some 50 million Americans
identify as Hispanic or Latino.
♪
200 years of colonial growth
have created
the United States of America.
But in 1790,
a country born of immigrants
passes its first
anti-immigrant laws.
- Once we became a new country,
the Founding Fathers
were immediately wary
of the old countries
that they'd all come from.
narrator:
The law limits citizenship
to free white residents
who have lived in America
for two years.
- For much of our period
of history,
Americanness has been
defined by whiteness,
and that still has some impact
on who is welcomed
into the United States
and who is not.
♪
- There was still a sense
that we had foreign enemies.
We were very unsure
about French-speaking people,
Spanish-speaking people,
people who had...
spoke different languages
than the English settlers.
narrator:
Anti-immigrant prejudice
will echo through the centuries.
- People think there's only
so much America to go around,
and once they're here,
it's like,
"Wait, this is enough.
"We're crowded already.
We don't need more people."
♪
narrator:
But America is expanding.
When President Jefferson
buys a vast territory
from the French,
the U.S. almost doubles in size.
Another piece
of the American jigsaw.
Some 75,000 colonists
are added to our population
overnight...
♪
Foreigners who will help fight
our greatest enemy...
- Monsieur!
narrator: Disease.
- Monsieur!
♪
narrator: A city on lockdown.
[people coughing]
narrator:
Thousands dying or dead.
♪
Wiped out
by an incurable disease.
- [coughing]
narrator: Amid the chaos,
a young French immigrant,
Louis Joseph Dufilho,
a maverick medic who will
put his life on the line
to save a dying city.
♪
Born in southern France,
Louis left his homeland
in 1800 with his family.
They're among 750,000 French
who migrate to America
across the centuries,
a constant, steady flow.
The Dufilhos' destination:
New Orleans,
once a critical part
of the French Empire,
now American.
♪
- Immigrants bring
certain skills,
and what we see with Dufilho
is that medical knowledge
is beginning to spread
from one country to another.
♪
narrator: Dufilho will apply
that knowledge
in the world's fastest-growing
metropolis: New Orleans.
Slaves and cotton have made it
America's richest city,
a melting pot
of 25 nationalities.
♪
- As we get into
the 19th century,
we have Germans,
Irish, Italians.
We have a tremendous
slave population,
as well as the largest free
people of color population.
narrator: But the trade ships
that make it rich
bring a deadly cargo...
- [retching]
narrator: Disease.
- [coughing]
- Human migration
and human diseases
have always gone hand in hand.
Almost every great
contagious disease that we have
started somewhere else and moved
along with human populations.
narrator: Leprosy originated
in East Africa around 3000 B.C.
Bubonic plague first appeared
in central Asia in 224 B.C.
And smallpox is first recorded
in Egypt 3,500 years ago.
♪
But of all
the deadly sicknesses,
it's yellow fever
that hammers New Orleans.
- The city of New Orleans
is surrounded by a swamp.
It's a breeding ground
for mosquitoes
that carry
the yellow fever disease.
narrator: Yellow fever arrived
in the first slave ships.
[knock at door]
Some Africans are immune,
but Europeans suffer
in the thousands,
among them Louis' brother.
♪
- There's a lot of quackery
in New Orleans.
It's not very effective,
because we still have no idea
of bacteria
or viruses at this point.
♪
narrator: In a migrant city
of 14,000 people...
- [speaking French]
narrator: Yellow fever kills
one in six.
- The understanding of disease
was so poor
until relatively recently
that we didn't know
where it came from,
so we tended to blame
the latest people off the boat.
narrator: After the death
of his brother,
Louis dedicates his life
to helping the people
of New Orleans...
♪
Using knowledge brought
from France
and one of medicine's
greatest discoveries:
quinine, found in the bark
of a Peruvian tree,
adapted and exported
by migrants.
- New Orleans
was such a crossroads
of ideas and cultures.
In the face of
this yellow fever epidemic,
he's trying out new ideas
and really attempting to take
a scientific approach
with knowledge that he'd
acquired in Europe.
narrator: Like immigrants
down the centuries,
Dufilho's experience will
shape the future of America.
♪
He is declared the nation's
very first licensed pharmacist.
His pharmacy
is still there today.
- The pharmacist was more like
a doctor today
in that people would go to him
to diagnose
what their problem was,
and they would be treated
accordingly.
♪
- Those who come to this country
come with particular skills,
and they come to this country
and capitalize on those skills.
♪
- [speaking French]
♪
narrator: Louis and the city
survive the epidemic.
♪
He joins the Howard Association,
an early version
of the Red Cross.
- Thank you.
♪
narrator: They will treat
more than 130,000 victims
of yellow fever
and other diseases.
- They were the front line
on fighting any of these
diseases,
and it makes you very proud
that that same blood
that ran through his veins
runs through mine.
♪
narrator:
If you have French ancestry,
you share it with 10 million
other Americans,
most of whom still live in
lands once owned by France.
♪
Like the people of New Orleans,
Native Americans have also been
ravaged by foreign diseases.
♪
Their population has fallen 90%
since European contact.
♪
- The biggest killer
is smallpox,
but you're also talking about
all kinds of European diseases
that were brought
with Europeans.
♪
narrator:
As more Europeans flood in,
46,000 Native Americans
are forced west
of the Mississippi.
- You had dispossession
of American Indian groupings
and confinement to smaller
and smaller parcels of land.
♪
narrator:
As their numbers tumble,
immigration accelerates.
America's population grows 30%
in ten years.
But a country of almost
2 million square miles
has vast space to spare.
Now, as America claims
the Oregon territory,
it will fuel immigration
by giving away
one of history's greatest
magnets to migration...
♪
Land.
[horse whinnying]
- Walk on!
Walk on!
♪
John Andrew, take the reins!
narrator: Lucinda Brown,
a housewife
of English descent...
♪
- [shouting]
narrator: On the final leg
of the Oregon Trail.
♪
- One, two, three, push!
♪
[horse whinnying]
- [shouting]
[dramatic music]
narrator: In the 1840s,
half the world
is technically owned
by just eight people,
leaders of the great empires.
But the United States
is offering land for free
in the Oregon Territory.
320 acres to anyone
who moves there
and claims it.
- Land meant opportunity.
Land meant farming.
Land meant being able
to establish yourself
in a new society.
And of course the United
States, with abundant land,
was that magnet
attracting these folks.
♪
narrator: If your ancestors
took the Oregon Trail,
they helped make America
what it is today:
a nation stretching
coast to coast.
- Unlike the small countries
and principalities of Europe,
the United States was wide open.
It was very,
very sparsely populated,
and in some ways still is.
♪
narrator: In 30 years,
400,000 people
living east of the Mississippi
sell what they can't
transport, uproot, and move.
♪
They include one of the first
women's rights activists,
the founder of Eugene City,
Oregon,
and Lucinda Brown
with her family.
♪
It's a 2,000-mile journey
to a new life.
♪
- To make the journey
and have the promise
of a square mile of land
was a huge deal,
because it was all yours.
It was all for the taking.
The... the sky was the limit.
- When we move today,
we might pack up a U-Haul
or pack up our car
and get on a highway.
And that's just
not how it worked.
This is a very,
very big expedition.
narrator: Lucinda faces six
to eight months on the trail,
her three children
and all their possessions
in a one-ton wagon costing
$12,000 in today's money.
- They were families.
They were farmers.
They were kids.
And they had very, very little
support, almost no support.
Only the things they had
with them in their wagon.
So there's this incredible
endurance aspect.
- [clicking tongue]
Walk on.
narrator: 170 years
after Lucinda set off,
one of the items
she took on the trail
still exists.
- This is gonna be
really something.
narrator: Unearthed
from an Oregon museum
and never before seen
by her descendant.
♪
- Lucinda's pot.
narrator:
A tangible family relic
linked to a tragic past.
♪
- Leave me with your father.
- Elias Brown developed
chills and a fever...
♪
And it got to be really bad.
♪
- Come on, Elias.
Come on.
- The fact that she used that
across the trail
during all the events
that they experienced...
it's just overwhelming to me.
♪
- Dear Lord, receive...
narrator: Elias is one
of 20,000 pioneers
who never reach
their destination.
- Amen.
all: Amen.
narrator: Ten graves
for every mile.
♪
- Lucinda had no choice
but to go on.
♪
So on they went.
♪
narrator: Military forts
and trading posts
spring up along
the westward trails.
♪
Built to protect
and supply the pioneers,
they become home
to the thousands
who stop en route.
- The importance
of this migration
is not only that it gets people
to the Pacific Coast,
but that people
are actually traversing
the middle of the continent.
So that's another way in which
this landscape becomes populated
with more Americans
of European descent.
♪
- People who migrated together
tended to make
little genetic communities,
and you can still see
that genetic signal
in people who are alive today.
You can see that they moved
together as a clan.
♪
narrator: Lucinda is heading
for the fertile land of Oregon,
but in her way
lie the Cascade Mountains.
♪
- They're near the end
of their 2,000-mile journey,
but they still have
this huge obstacle,
the hardest mountain range
on the continent to cross.
narrator: Trailblazers
have cut a direct route
across the mountains,
the Barlow Road.
But it's treacherous.
-Wow.
So this is it.
♪
It's not only steep,
but it's covered
in rocks and boulders.
It's completely uneven.
♪
All the immigrants
like Lucinda knew
that if they took
the Barlow Road,
they were going to have to
go down this chute.
♪
narrator: At the foot of it,
the torrential rains
of the Pacific Northwest.
[horse whinnying]
- They had hail.
They had wind.
They had lightning
that when it struck the ground,
it shook the whole earth.
- [groaning]
- When the rain comes,
it turns into
a veritable quagmire of mud.
It means your
thousand-pound wagon
can get stuck down in the mud.
It means your oxen
can get stuck down in the mud.
- Come help!
narrator:
But Lucinda doesn't give up.
- Push!
- One, two, three!
narrator: 250 days
after her migration began...
- [shouting]
narrator:
She stakes her claim to land.
"Lucinda Brown claims
640 acres..."
that would be a square mile...
"in Benton County, Oregon."
And I have never seen
this document before.
This is absolutely mind-blowing.
You know she's spent
seven months on the trail...
♪
Hoping to get her own land
claim with her husband.
♪
This is an amazing thing
to have achieved that,
been through all of the fears,
the pain, the toil,
the perseverance
that she had to display
in order to come to this point.
♪
narrator:
Within the next decade,
pioneers will claim
2 1/2 million acres
of prime West Coast farmland.
The Homestead Acts that follow
will give away
10% of all U.S. land
to more than
1 1/2 million families.
♪
- The constant desire
to move the nation
from its eastern origins
to its western future
has shaped
the inevitable destiny
of a single nation
across this massive landscape.
♪
narrator: Within three years,
100,000 migrants
will be enjoying the freedoms
of new homes out west.
♪
But at the same time,
nearly 15%
of the U.S. population
is enslaved.
- The slave trade represents
the largest forced migration
that has existed
in world history.
And the world we live in today
is a world fundamentally
shaped by that moment.
♪
- [breathing heavily]
♪
narrator: John Andrew Jackson.
♪
An enslaved African-American
with a price on his head.
- Individuals who had been
enslaved were property.
They did not
own their own lives.
- By law, they were defined
as commodities.
♪
narrator:
How does this runaway slave
gain his citizenship
and inspire one
of our most famous books?
♪
Over four centuries,
some 12 million Africans
were sold into slavery,
6 million to South America,
4 million to the Caribbean,
1/2 a million to Europe,
and almost 400,000
to the United States.
♪
If you're African-American,
your ancestors' arrival
was just the start
of their journey.
♪
- As a black person,
you know somewhere on your tree
you have someone
that was a slave,
but to really know details,
it's really hard.
♪
narrator: Jackson's
grandfather arrived
before the U.S.
banned importation
of enslaved Africans in 1807.
♪
Born on a plantation,
Jackson lives with 56 slaves.
He records his life
in an incredible memoir.
- When we were picking cotton,
we used to see the wild geese
flying over our heads
and to say to each other,
"O that we had wings
like those geese,
"then we could fly
over the heads of our masters
to the 'land of the free.'"
- It's so belittling.
He was a piece of property.
He wasn't a person.
He was almost like a dog.
♪
narrator: But Jackson
won't be shackled.
He'll run for freedom...
♪
Part of an internal migration
that will take tens of thousands
of African-Americans north.
♪
[dramatic music]
narrator: By 1860,
enslaved labor
will make the South
the world's
fourth-largest economy.
- 4 million people,
representing 90%
of the black population,
were worth $3 billion.
$3 billion in 1860,
on the eve of the demise
of slavery,
was worth 3 times
all of the manufacturing
and railroads in America,
7 times the banks,
and 48 times the expenditures
of the federal government.
♪
- The entire economy
of the United States
was built on the backs
of enslaved African people.
narrator: Exact numbers
are hard to come by,
but every year,
thousands of slaves flee.
♪
Some just for a few hours,
others a lifetime.
♪
- We know thousands did it.
But the chances of being
successful at it
were incredibly long.
♪
[dog barking in distance]
♪
- I'm sure he had
a tremendous amount of fear.
♪
"I still might get caught."
♪
But that's the brave decision
that he made.
- [breathing heavily]
I had often been to Charleston,
150 miles from our plantation.
It struck me that if I could
hide in one of the vessels,
I should be able to get to
the "free country."
♪
narrator: The free states
are hundreds of miles away.
♪
While some runaways flee south,
and others hide
in the Virginia swamps,
most try to reach the North.
♪
Up to 50,000 find freedom
in Canada
using a network
of secret contacts,
the Underground Railroad.
♪
Jackson's plan works.
He stows away on a boat
out of Charleston.
♪
Six weeks and 1,000 miles
from the plantation,
he arrives in Boston.
- I thanked God that I had
escaped from hell to heaven.
♪
narrator: But the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
means runaways risk capture,
no matter where they are.
- The article essentially says
that if slaves were to escape
to the North
that a Southerner
in a Southern state
could make a claim.
- And he knew
that his former owners
would send slave catchers
to the urban North to find him.
♪
narrator: Jackson takes refuge
with a writer,
Harriet Beecher Stowe.
She'll write the most famous
anti-slavery book of all time.
- We know that he met
Harriet Beecher Stowe,
and then sometime thereafter,
she was inspired, fired up,
and ultimately this resulted
in her penning
"Uncle Tom's Cabin."
♪
narrator: Its depiction
of African-Americans
is controversial,
but it becomes
the second-best-selling book
of the 19th century
and changes opinions
about slavery worldwide.
♪
At the end of a civil war
fought over slavery,
two amendments
to the Constitution
declare enslaved people
free citizens.
♪
- The moment
when African-Americans
gain full citizenship rights
is really the final nail
in the coffin of slavery.
♪
narrator: In 1870,
Jackson appears on the census,
no longer a slave or a number,
no longer listed property
like his African forebears.
- He finally felt free.
"I can walk as I please.
I can come and go as I please."
Simple things.
♪
He made it.
♪
- America became a land of
the free for African-Americans
at least on paper,
but in reality,
freedom was something
that African-Americans
had to fight for
on a daily basis.
♪
- The founding principles
of our nation...
liberty, equality, freedom...
these were fairly abstract
principles,
but it was African-Americans
who often made them
living realities.
♪
[people chanting]
♪
narrator: In 1838,
the first steamship
travels from England
to New York.
♪
A six-week journey
now takes 15 days...
♪
Transatlantic traffic
carrying people and news.
♪
- Information
is what drives migration.
How does one know
about the opportunities
of American life
without communication?
♪
narrator: Now a piece of paper
less than an inch square
will help accelerate immigration
into the tens of millions.
♪
[wooden plane scraping]
♪
In Ireland's County Armagh,
William Porter,
eldest of five brothers.
♪
He's about to receive something
that is changing the lives
of millions:
a letter from a relative
in America...
- It's from our brother.
- Sent quickly and cheaply
with a new invention:
the adhesive stamp.
- What that facilitates
of course
is an enormous revolution
in communications.
And it was a revolution
in communications.
- They're good.
They're good.
They made their crossing.
- It allowed people
to articulate desires
and excitement
about the New World
to people back home.
Family talked to family,
and friends talked to friends,
and by extension,
people began to move
because of that communication.
narrator: Letters like these
will help tens of thousands
to cross the Atlantic...
♪
From a homeland in crisis.
♪
[dramatic music]
narrator: This map
shows a portrait of America.
Every pixel is one of us,
each color an ancestral group.
♪
If you're Irish-American,
this gold area is most likely
where you're living.
♪
Letters, stamps,
and a catastrophe
sent millions of your ancestors
on a dangerous voyage.
♪
- It means a lot to me to know
how I'm connected
to Ireland now.
I've always been proud
of my Irish roots.
I've always wanted to know more.
♪
- When you really dig into many
of history's great disasters,
you find out
they're more complicated
than they look on the surface.
narrator: From 1800 to 1850,
Ireland's population doubles.
♪
- Approximately 8 million people
live in an area the size
of the state of Indiana.
narrator: The country
is dangerously reliant
on a food imported
from American colonies...
♪
The potato.
- Potatoes were
so much more productive
than anything else
you could grow
that it became the only thing
they were living on
in a lot of cases.
♪
- This is a map
in the Cavan County Museum.
What it clearly demonstrates
is the level of subdivision
of land
for those who were on the bottom
rung of the social ladder,
to try and eke out
a very basic existence
by growing the potato crop.
narrator: In 1845,
disaster strikes.
♪
Potato blight,
a fungus that wipes out crops...
and with it food.
♪
- When the fungus came in,
it spread like wildfire,
and it was too late for them
to turn to some other
food source.
narrator: An estimated
1 million people
starve to death.
- People would be
scavenging for food
or what might
approximate to food
or what might replace food.
♪
narrator: Pushed by famine,
pulled by promises
of a better future...
♪
Survivors flee the country.
♪
William Porter joins
more than a million people
who leave Ireland for the U.S.
in just ten years.
Among them the car-making
Ford family
and the great-grandfather
of JFK.
♪
1/8 of Ireland's population
makes a journey
fraught with danger.
- Those were mighty
miserable weeks.
narrator: 50,000 Irish migrants
die during the crossing.
♪
- They called them
"coffin ships"
because so many people died
on their way here.
♪
- There was ship-board cholera
among other diseases,
their bodies disposed of at sea.
♪
[birds cawing]
narrator: The Porter family
hear nothing
of William's fate for months.
Then a sign of life.
♪
A letter.
- I'm just blown away by this.
narrator: The first of many.
♪
- I'm literally sitting here
staring at a letter
written by one of my ancestors.
I can imagine
this is your only way
of getting ahold of your family.
This is all you've got.
♪
- I bought a farm of 80 acres
of the nicest land you ever saw.
I could make more money here
in one year
than you could do there in ten.
- "We would never think
of going back
"to live in that misruled
land again.
"For here you can
hold up your head
and not take off your hat
to any man."
That freedom,
it's got to be appealing
to them.
♪
narrator: In 1857,
7 million letters
reach Ireland annually.
♪
Envelopes containing
not just news,
but money too.
Some $260 million
in just 50 years.
- Sending money
through remittances
is one way of maintaining
those family ties,
fulfilling their obligations,
and creating lifelines
between the U.S.
and those homelands.
narrator: By 1858,
Joseph follows
his brother's advice.
He travels 3,500 miles
to Illinois.
♪
- Joseph!
narrator: Two brothers...
- You made it!
narrator: Reunited.
- Give me a hug.
♪
- It means a lot to me to know
some of the names, the places,
the trials they went through.
It is amazing to me.
♪
narrator: Today more than
32 million Americans
claim Irish descent,
five times more
than the population
of Ireland itself.
♪
Within two decades,
almost 90 million
letters and cards
will flow between America
and Europe.
♪
- Advances in communications
technology
make mass migration
across continents,
across oceans, much easier.
narrator: Now the biggest
single news story
out of western America
will attract migrants
from across the globe.
♪
And like the Dutch
two centuries earlier,
they come seeking one thing...
♪
Wealth.
- This is gold.
- This is gold.
[laughter]
[dramatic music]
♪
narrator: Rudolf Jordan,
a 30-year-old German...
♪
Dying of thirst
in the Mexican desert.
♪
One of 100,000 migrants
bound for California in 1849,
risking their lives for gold.
♪
- Gold finds play
on people's imagination,
because if I can get there
fast enough,
I'll really benefit.
I can get rich quick.
♪
narrator: The discovery of gold in 1848
triggers a mass migration
from all corners of the planet.
♪
From Australians to Chinese,
Germans to Swedes,
Mexicans to Chileans,
some 300,000 migrants
will flock to California
from more than
25 different countries...
alongside them, Rudolf Jordan,
setting out from Cuba.
♪
If you live in California,
it's the prospectors
you can thank
for putting it on the map.
♪
- If gold hadn't been
discovered,
San Francisco wouldn't be here.
It's an instant city.
It just springs up overnight.
The journalist who covers it
says it's amazing.
It's like Aladdin just
wished it into existence
and history will never believe
that it could happen
as fast as this.
♪
narrator: Jordan,
an early photographer
and avid adventurer,
reads about California gold
in the newspaper.
- Every year brought some news
of some great opportunity
in America
that hadn't been there before.
Mines, industry...
- [speaking German]
- Agriculture, furs,
timber, you name it.
- Within a year, worldwide,
people heard about California,
most of them
for the very first time,
and that there was gold
in abundance there.
narrator: Pulled by the prospect
of riches and adventure,
Rudolf and colleague
George Mollenhauer
head for San Francisco...
[both speaking German]
narrator: A journey he records
in a memoir.
♪
- A great future was held out
for that territory,
and excitement there ran high.
From that very moment,
we laid our plans
to proceed to California.
♪
narrator: They've sailed
from Cuba.
Now they will ride
across the Mexican desert
to the Pacific, then sail north
for San Francisco.
♪
- California and San Francisco
were the far side of the moon
as far as most people
were concerned.
♪
You have suddenly got hundreds
of thousands of people
who want to get across
the planet
to a remote area,
and there's no way to get there.
♪
- It wasn't just like
following the highway
or taking the bus.
But that was the way
things were then.
This was a very
adventuresome thing to do.
♪
- When people found that so many
wanted to go west for gold,
this instigated
a secondary industry,
the travel industry.
♪
People who were enterprising
figured out ways
to institute things
like a timetable system,
or offer first-class
and second-class passage.
narrator:
Travel routes open up
that are still there today.
♪
The Panama route:
the quickest but most expensive.
The Cape Horn route:
long, cheap, dangerous.
♪
The cross-country route:
following the Oregon Trail,
then turning south
through Colorado.
- The gold rush in many ways
is connecting the world
for the first time in history.
Everyone is trying to get
there as quickly as possible.
♪
narrator: Rudolf and George
ride hard across Mexico,
but they've underestimated
the dangers of the desert.
♪
- We suffered much
from the heat,
one day being compelled
to make 75 miles to reach water.
This seemed too much
of a hazardous journey.
♪
- The margins of survival
are thin,
and he's pushing too far,
too fast,
and he's risking his life.
♪
- This is a desperate situation,
but they've got this idea
that if they could just
get there,
they could make their fortunes.
♪
- Rudolf!
- It was said
that in 1849 and 1850
that you could find your way
all the way to California
simply going grave to grave
of the people
who were trying to get there
ahead of you.
- [speaking German]
[grunts]
[speaking German]
♪
narrator: Five months
after setting out from Cuba,
they reach the Pacific Ocean.
♪
From there it's another month
sailing north
to San Francisco...
where they find a bay
full of empty ships.
♪
narrator: Today, California
is the most heavily populated
state in our nation.
[dramatic music]
But it would be nothing
without the gold-hunting
immigrants
who kick-started its history.
♪
When Rudolf Jordan reaches
San Francisco in 1849...
♪
It's a ghost town.
♪
- San Francisco Bay
was practically
the black hole of the Pacific.
Ships would come in,
and they would not
sail out again.
narrator: Thousands
of passengers and crew
abandon ship...
♪
For the gold fields.
♪
- When the gold rush began,
it's like turning on the faucet.
♪
narrator: For five months,
Rudolf and George toil
in the dirt.
♪
- George.
♪
George.
[speaking German]
♪
This is gold.
- This is gold.
- This is gold.
- This is gold.
- This is gold!
[laughter]
both: This is gold!
- It's gold!
- Whoo!
♪
This is gold.
- For Rudolf
to come all this way
and actually finding gold
connects you to that moment.
It wasn't a waste.
This was the real thing.
♪
narrator: The gold rush helps
grow California's population
nearly 400% in 12 years.
Today it has more immigrants
and more billionaires
than any other state...
another piece
of the American puzzle.
♪
By 1860, the U.S. population
reaches 31 million.
♪
But almost a century since
winning its independence,
the country risks falling apart.
- The United States is
two different societies in 1860:
a Northern society
that is industrializing
and a Southern economy
that is agricultural
and is peopled by slaves.
♪
narrator: The issue of slavery
will now set the U.S.
against itself.
♪
The South secedes from the Union
and forms a Confederacy,
winning a string of victories.
But the North
has a secret weapon:
it has seven out of every
eight new migrants...
- [speaking German]
narrator: And they're not afraid to fight.
- [speaking German]
[explosions]
[men shouting]
narrator:
This is Marcus Spiegel,
a colonel in the Union Army,
a German-American,
Jewish.
♪
Like the Quakers
three centuries earlier,
he's fled oppression in Europe,
seeking democracy in America.
♪
[explosion]
♪
Now he's fighting to save it.
♪
- He was brave.
He was gallant.
♪
It makes me very grateful
that he fought
to preserve America,
and for me as an American,
it means everything.
♪
narrator: In 1848, an attempt
to establish democracy
in the German states
is brutally crushed.
♪
- In the mid-19th century,
democracy
was a novel concept
for much of Europe.
[gunfire]
But it was alive and well
and being practiced
in the United States.
♪
narrator: Spiegel and other
political refugees flee,
pulled to America
by dreams of freedom.
♪
In the 40 years to 1860,
almost 1 1/2 million Germans
migrate to the U.S.
Among them,
the grandfathers of Babe Ruth
and John Steinbeck.
♪
More than any other
immigrant group,
they spread throughout
our entire nation.
♪
If you're German-American,
you're here
because your ancestors
came seeking opportunities
that thousands would die for.
- If we take the ethnicity
of everybody
in the United States
and kind of come up
with one big pie chart,
you would have a lot
of different slices of pie,
because Americans
came from all over the world.
However, Germany
would probably have the...
the biggest sliver of that pie,
because they contributed
a huge number of immigrants
during the 1800s.
narrator: For 150 years,
Marcus Spiegel's wartime story
has been preserved
in a family archive.
♪
- He comes to America
for freedom.
Freedom of religion,
freedom to live
where he would want to live,
freedom to marry
who he would want to marry,
and for all these reasons
I think he saw America
as a beacon.
♪
narrator:
Spiegel learns English,
marries an American Quaker,
and opens a goods store in Ohio.
♪
But a peaceful life
in his adopted country
is shattered
with the outbreak...
[explosions]
Of the Civil War.
narrator: In 1861,
Abraham Lincoln
recruits German immigrants
to fight to save the Union.
[dramatic music]
- Abraham Lincoln
had a very warm relationship
with German immigrants
in the United States.
He even bought an interest
in a German newspaper.
And when Lincoln
had been elected in 1860,
he had drawn
a significant number
of German voters as well.
♪
narrator: German-Americans
sign up in droves...
♪
Marcus Spiegel among them.
- He knew what it was like
to live in Germany
without these rights,
and he wanted to fight
to preserve a united America.
♪
narrator:
After two years of war,
Spiegel has become a colonel
and a staunch abolitionist.
♪
- Since I've been here,
I have learned and seen
more of what the horrors
of slavery was
than I ever knew before,
and I am glad indeed
that the signs of the times
show towards closing out
of that accursed institution.
♪
narrator: Port Gibson,
Mississippi.
May 1, 1863.
[explosions]
- [speaking German]
narrator: Spiegel leads
the 120th Ohio Regiment.
[gunfire]
He is one of 200,000
German-born troops.
[gunfire]
- [speaking German]
narrator: 10% of the Union army,
the largest immigrant group
to fight in the Civil War.
- [speaking German]
[all shouting]
- Some German units actually
give their orders in German.
[explosions]
[high-pitched tone]
- The scene here on May the 1st
would've been absolute chaos.
[gunfire]
You have bullets flying.
You have artillery roaring.
You have men screaming
in agony and pain.
Officers barking orders.
[explosions]
It's just a cacophony
of sounds and fright.
[gunfire]
narrator:
At the height of battle,
Spiegel leads a daring attack
on the enemy flank.
- [speaking German]
[gunfire]
- From all their different
backgrounds,
they had this common ground
that they were fighting for.
♪
narrator: That unity helps
the Union forces win the day
and the war.
♪
Spiegel is recommended
for brigadier general...
♪
But is killed in an ambush
soon after.
- People like Colonel Spiegel
gave their lives
to preserve this Union
and to abolish slavery,
and that is a major factor
in how this war turns out.
♪
- One thing is certain,
that my fighting in this war
will leave an inheritance
to my beloved children
of more value
than of all the gold in India.
♪
- This American patriot
gave his life
so that we could
have the freedoms
that he did not have in Germany.
And to me, this is
the ultimate sacrifice.
♪
He was a true American now.
♪
narrator: Today,
almost 50 million Americans
claim German heritage...
♪
The largest ancestral group
in the United States.
♪
1863.
Work begins on 1,776 miles
of iron track.
A new technology is poised
to unite east and west.
♪
- Transformations
in transportation technology
and the advent of the railroad
and the steamship
makes mass migration
across great distances
much, much easier than before.
narrator:
Now, as through history,
the need for workers
will fuel immigration.
- The United States
had an insatiable appetite
for cheap labor
from mass migration,
for immigrants to work
in factories,
to work in mines,
to work on railroads.
- There was a great demand
for labor in the west
that could not be satisfied
by the people
who were living there.
♪
narrator:
If you're Chinese-American,
this could be where
your ancestors came from...
♪
Guangdong Province
near Hong Kong,
home to an army
of hired laborers.
Among them: teenager
Hung Lai Wah and his brother.
♪
- My name is Russell Low,
and my great-grandfather
was Hung Lai Wah.
- [speaking foreign language]
narrator: In 1865,
recruitment agents come,
offering jobs in America.
- [speaking foreign language]
[men exclaiming]
- The villages
were impoverished.
Guangdong Province was
in a state of crisis.
There was civil war.
There was famine.
♪
narrator: To sweeten the deal
and attract more workers,
agents offer $75
to buy a ticket...
♪
Soap, a razor, a leather trunk,
and food for the voyage.
♪
- He had it in him
to be an adventurer,
and he followed that
sense of adventure to America.
♪
narrator: 12,000 impoverished
Chinese sign up,
95% of them
from Guangdong Province,
including Hung Lai Wah.
♪
They travel up to four weeks
by steamship,
a journey of 7,000 miles
to San Francisco.
♪
Importing these men
is the brainchild
of Central Pacific boss
Charles Crocker.
♪
Irish and American workers
are building
the eastern half
of the railroad.
But for the western section,
it's quicker to bring workers
from China
than it is New York.
- There's a direct
steamship route
that can take them there,
whereas there's no direct route
going across the United States.
narrator: The future
of Crocker's company
depends on his new Chinese
recruits working quickly.
But America's latest immigrants
will face brutal conditions,
deadly accidents,
and a backlash
of anti-immigrant anger.
[slow guitar music]
- 1866 was by far
the worst winter on record.
There were
44 separate snowstorms.
The average depth
of the snowdrifts
was 10 to 20 feet.
- They came wearing
very light clothing
and probably no shoes
to work in the winter
under these snowy conditions,
and it must have been
an absolute shock to them.
♪
narrator: They get to work
gouging out 15 tunnels,
working harder and faster
than anyone else.
The secret?
Their diet.
- The Irish immigrants
are getting sick more often.
It turns out that while they're
drinking regular water,
the Chinese are accustomed
to drinking tea,
are of course
boiling their water,
and they're not getting sick
from diseases like dysentery.
♪
narrator:
But while Irish workers
are paid $35 per month
plus free room and board,
the Chinese will be paid
just $28.
- It's actually estimated that
the Central Pacific Railroad
saved maybe a 1/3 of the cost
because they charged
the Chinese workers
for their food
and for their housing.
narrator: But they still save
2/3 of their wage,
and like millions of
immigrants before and after,
send it home
to support their families.
- The key to Chinese culture,
of course, was family.
Lives depended on them,
lives back home.
Hung Lai Wah knew
that he represented his family.
♪
narrator: In August 1865,
the Chinese face
their toughest obstacle.
♪
The Donner Summit,
7,050 feet up.
- We are at the face
of Summit Tunnel,
the length of a football field.
♪
narrator:
Crocker orders the Chinese
to blast through the mountain
using highly unstable
nitroglycerin,
deadly work others won't do.
♪
- We do know that Jick Wah,
my great-grandfather's brother,
was injured.
He actually lost an eye
in a blasting accident.
narrator: Others don't survive.
[explosion]
♪
- The accumulated bones
of perhaps 1,200 Chinamen
came in by the eastern train
yesterday
from along the line of the
Central Pacific Railroad.
narrator: An estimated
1,500 Chinese will die
in explosions, rock slides,
and avalanches,
their bones repatriated,
as per their customs
and their contracts.
- They knew that if they died
that their bodies
would be recovered
and their bones sent back
to their village in China,
and they would be part of
this whole ancestral legacy.
♪
narrator: On May 10, 1869,
east finally meets west
at Promontory Point in Utah.
- The transcontinental railroad
and its building
was a task
of monumental proportions.
It required Herculean effort,
and the contribution
of these young boys
who had come from Guangdong
and known nothing
about building a railroad,
they had become
the very best railroad workers
the world had ever seen.
♪
[camera bulb flashes]
narrator: But when the event
is recorded in a photograph,
not one Chinese is included.
- The Chinese were not invited
to be part of the ceremonies.
They were not thanked
in any of the official speeches,
and essentially their labors
were ignored.
- They're really seen
as temporary labor to be used
and exploited and then hopefully
returned home.
♪
narrator: 1/3 of workers
return to China.
Those who remain face
a rising tide of hostility.
♪
13 years later,
the Chinese Exclusion Act
is passed,
legislation that limits
new Chinese immigration
and bars citizenship.
- Once the railroad was finished
and once some of the mines
began to become less productive,
you had all this Chinese labor
in the United States,
and then the sense was,
they were taking jobs.
- We are a country of immigrants
that on some level is always
fearful of immigrants.
We're afraid that they're going
to drive down wages.
We're afraid that they're going
to import terrorism.
We start talking about
how they're going to bring in
un-American ways.
narrator: Despite the hardships,
Hung Lai Wah
settles in San Francisco.
♪
Today, he has
more than 100 descendants,
including engineers, doctors,
and a female fighter pilot.
- Ultimately, each of us is
a descendant of some person
who bravely decided to face
hardship and the unknown,
to come to this country
in the firm belief
that this country
held a better future
for themselves
and for their children.
♪
narrator:
Some 2 million Chinese
have migrated to America,
and today
over 4 million Americans
claim Chinese ancestry.
Many of them can still
trace their genes
back to the Guangdong Province
were Hung Lai Wah was born.
♪
narrator: In 1886,
the Statue of Liberty
is complete.
♪
Six years later,
Ellis Island opens.
♪
Over the next 137 years,
the American puzzle grows.
♪
A nation of 50 million
becomes a superpower
of over 300.
Now, the puzzle that is
our nation takes new shape.
A revolution sends children
to our door.
♪
A volcano
sparks an Italian exodus.
And an invitation
to help win a war
tears down borders.
- The scale of migration
to the U.S. is unprecedented.
- To the Irish!
narrator: Together...
These people
will make the United States
the most productive...
♪
The most wealthy,
and the most powerful nation
in history.
♪
[explosions]
- [shouting]
[gunfire, explosions]
- [speaking German]
♪
[speaking German]
- About 1/10 of the Union army
was composed
of German-born soldiers.
- [speaking German]
- Some units give their orders
in German.
[men shouting]
♪
- Immigration hasn't just
transformed America.
Immigration is America.
♪
- In the history of mankind,
no society has received
more immigrants
than the United States.
♪
male narrator:
America is a tapestry.
Every dot is one of us.
Using the latest population
data and archive records,
this is who we are.
Each cluster of color,
an ancestral group.
♪
If you're German-American,
these blue areas are where
you're most likely living,
the largest group in the nation.
Just one part of a giant puzzle
that includes Cubans,
shown in yellow;
Italians, this cluster of pink.
Here are the Scandinavians,
and here the Chinese,
shown in green.
♪
What made 1/3
of the population of Norway
move to the Great Lakes
and Pacific Northwest?
How did this small cluster
of Mennonites from Russia
transform Kansas?
Why did the invention
of the stamp
help send over 2 million Irish
to these cities?
How did new railroads
impact the African-Americans'
Great Migration north
to these red areas?
♪
If you're living
in the U.S. right now,
you're about to find out
why you are where you are.
♪
[wind blowing]
[bird cawing]
♪
- [exhales deeply]
narrator:
Harmen van den Bogaert,
a Dutch migrant
from the settlement
of New Amsterdam...
- [breathing heavily]
narrator: On a mission
to save the fur trade.
♪
- Young, energetic,
smart, courageous,
not afraid of what's beyond
the horizon.
If you have a very,
very difficult job out there,
you turn to people
like Harmen van den Bogaert.
- [speaks indistinctly]
♪
narrator:
If you're Dutch-American,
your ancestry could reach back
four centuries...
- [speaking Dutch]
narrator: Where you helped
secure the future
of America's biggest city.
♪
- Three men going off into the
wilderness have essentially
the fate of the colony
on their shoulders,
and without van den Bogaert,
you could say
New York City
would not have happened.
♪
narrator: 22 years old,
hungry for success.
He's typical of America's
earliest immigrants.
♪
- Most of the migrants
to America at this time
were young men
in their twenties,
because young men are desperate
for social improvement,
and they're stupid.
They're naive enough to think
that nothing bad
can happen to them.
♪
- In order to have the courage
to leave one's homeland,
to venture across the seas
into a foreign
and unknown place,
those individuals are already
highly motivated.
♪
narrator: Ships' manifests and
archive records show Bogaert
is one of some 5,000
early Dutch migrants.
Alongside him come the
ancestors of Humphrey Bogart
and Franklin Roosevelt.
Most land in New Amsterdam,
the future New York City.
♪
- The Dutch founded the colony
around the beaver trade.
Europe is in the midst
of a mini ice age.
It's cold there.
♪
narrator: Temperatures are up to
three degrees colder than today.
Fur prices spiral.
A beaver fur hat
costs $500 in today's money.
In Europe,
they're nearly extinct,
but America has
a huge beaver population.
- The French and the Dutch
in particular
were very interested in trading
with the Indians for beavers.
narrator: But the Native
Iroquois Confederacy
has cut off the fur supply...
♪
And Bogaert has been sent
to find out why.
- [speaking Dutch]
♪
narrator:
Almost four centuries later,
his descendant,
a U.S. Army colonel,
retraces his steps.
♪
- I am Colonel Adrian Bogart,
and I am descended
from Harmen van den Bogaert.
♪
From my time in the army,
what Van Den Bogaert does?
We would never do.
Our patrol planning
is very intensive.
We make sure that the routes
are secure.
Bogaert has done
none of this preparation.
Risk assessment: high.
♪
narrator: The last Dutch
expedition into this territory
was attacked and killed.
♪
Rumors say their captain
was roasted...
eaten.
[birds cawing loudly]
Standing between Bogaert
and his goal:
the Mohawk River.
- This is very dangerous,
extremely hazardous.
You can see how fast
the river is now.
It's treacherous.
Is he taking a chance?
A big chance.
But he's got to go.
- [gasping]
- The first thing
that happens is...
[gasps]
This gasp.
It's not hypothermia.
It's cold shock.
♪
He's got about 10 minutes
before he loses
all manual function.
♪
- [gasping]
- He makes it.
One major step
towards his ultimate goal
of getting to strike the deal
with the Oneida Indians.
♪
narrator: The Oneida are one
of five Iroquois nations
in the future upstate New York.
♪
DNA evidence shows
that Native Americans
are descended
from Siberian nomads
who entered North America
at least 15,000 years ago.
♪
On first European contact,
they number approximately
12 million people,
some 2,000 nations
spread across the continent.
♪
Now, an eternal migrant battle
for land, for status
is about to begin.
♪
- In telling the history
of immigration
to the United States,
one can't neglect to talk about
the conflict that existed
between established groups
and new immigrants
that were coming in
on a constant basis over time.
This is part of
the fundamental history
of immigration
in American society.
♪
[man shouts]
narrator:
100 miles from safety...
♪
Bogaert comes face-to-face
with the Iroquois chieftains.
[all shouting]
♪
- You don't know
if you can trust them.
You don't know
if it's safe or not,
but this is the moment of truth.
♪
narrator: At last,
Bogaert discovers
why fur supplies have stopped.
They're trading with the French.
♪
- One of the Oneida chiefs
puts his hand
onto Bogaert's heart
and feels his heartbeat.
If it's a fast heartbeat,
it's over.
If it's a slow,
normal heartbeat,
then they can talk to him.
[heart beating]
It's normal.
Let's do business.
♪
narrator: Bogaert seals
a new trade deal,
and the Dutch colony booms.
♪
- That is the beginning
of this thriving culture
that centuries later
would become very familiar
as New York City.
narrator: Today,
4 1/2 million Americans
claim Dutch heritage,
descendants of these
early trailblazers.
♪
The first piece of the modern
American jigsaw is in place,
a small corner
of a vast continent.
♪
A tiny population,
but through the 1600s,
colonial numbers grow
to over 200,000.
♪
The cities of Philadelphia
and Boston
are founded by the English.
♪
- Most of the English
settled the colonies
in families,
and you'll see that evidence
in some of the DNA data
that we have today,
a little footprint
from each of our ancestors
giving us part of our heritage.
- As more and more people came,
as communities were established,
it was easier to come here
as a family,
because there was a setting
that you could move into.
♪
narrator:
Advances in shipbuilding
allow more families to travel,
some on the adventure
of a lifetime...
♪
Others desperate to escape.
♪
War, disaster, persecution.
These eternal factors will
drive millions to migrate.
♪
In the 1600s, it's the turn
of English Quakers...
♪
Victims of
a religious crackdown.
♪
- [gasping]
- In England, church and state
went hand in hand.
The king was the head of
the Church of England as well,
and so to believe in a different
religious ideology
was also seen as being
disloyal to the country.
♪
narrator: Heads of households
are targeted.
- [gasps]
♪
narrator: Pushed by persecution,
thousands of Quakers
will quit England
for a new life in America.
[man exclaiming]
♪
narrator: But how will they
revolutionize a continent
armed only with a handshake?
[dramatic music]
narrator: English Quakers
are crossing the Atlantic.
If your ancestors
were among them,
then you are where you are
because of faith
and a dream of freedom.
♪
- They aspire to come to America
'cause they imagine
they can literally,
out of whole cloth,
make something new
of themselves.
- Gentlemen,
if you could follow me.
♪
narrator: Like immigrants
before and after,
the Quakers carry ideas
that will shape America.
♪
- Please be careful with this.
Thank you.
♪
narrator: William Buckman
is a Quaker by religion
and a carpenter by trade.
- Just set the trunk down
over here.
- This is a chest that came over
on the ship "Welcome"
with William Buckman,
and there is a ship's log
that lists all the articles
and things that they brought.
♪
narrator:
This 330-year-old chest
left England in 1682.
♪
And what the family packed
reveals how unprepared
for America they really were.
- Some of them were bringing
family heirlooms,
chests, tea services,
things that were not suitable
to the harsh climate
and the rugged conditions
of the New World.
- I think they brought
absolutely everything with them
with no idea
what they were heading into,
what to expect
or what to experience.
♪
narrator: The Buckman family
leaves England in August 1682.
♪
Among 2,000 passengers
are the founder of Pennsylvania
and an ancestor
of President Herbert Hoover.
♪
23 ships head for
the Delaware River
on America's eastern seaboard.
[birds calling]
Pamphlets sell America
as a land of plenty,
getting there
as straightforward.
But two weeks
into an eight-week voyage,
smallpox breaks out.
♪
- They're packed down
into these holds,
and there's no hygiene.
And you're basically
opening the door wide
for cholera, dysentery,
smallpox,
these historical diseases
which can destroy nations.
- There you are.
♪
narrator: The Buckmans suffer
more than most.
- They lost his mother,
his two brothers,
his young child, his son.
♪
narrator:
One in three passengers die.
♪
- I imagine he felt very guilty.
That had to test his faith.
♪
He had to question whether
he made the right decision
to board that ship.
[ship creaking softly]
narrator: 57 days
after leaving England,
they finally make landfall.
♪
- Migration is a kind of gamble
but also a kind of
second chance...
♪
The ability to move
to a different society
in a different part of the world
and start over again.
- You, sir.
Thank you.
Please follow me.
narrator: They reach a
continent already home
to more than a dozen
European nationalities
that already rely on the labor
of enslaved Africans.
♪
But like millions of
immigrants who will follow,
the Buckmans are starting
from scratch.
♪
Winter comes before they have
even built houses.
- Most of these early migrants
coming from Europe
didn't have
great survival skills.
♪
A lot of them were coming
from cities,
but even the farmers were coming
from a cultivated place.
♪
- Some migrants
had enough knowledge
to understand the challenges
that awaited them
on this side of the Atlantic.
Others simply did not.
And instead they learned
by doing.
♪
narrator: After a tough start,
the Quakers adapt and thrive.
In just three years,
90 more ships arrive,
carrying English colonists.
- It was almost exclusively
English settlers.
They were all speaking
the same language, obviously,
and establishing sort of
institutions and customs,
and they were the ones that
clearly had the most influence
on the original character
of America as a nation.
narrator: It will be centuries
before enslaved Africans
or Native Americans
are recognized as citizens.
But Quaker ideas of equality,
freedom, and government
are at the heart
of our democracy.
- The United States
owes a heavy debt
to the written document
drafted to govern Pennsylvania.
It speaks to the kinds
of individual liberties
which were incorporated into
the United States Constitution.
narrator: And if you
have Quaker ancestors,
we owe them another debt.
Quakers never use
the submissive bow.
Instead, they popularize
the handshake,
a simple symbol of equality.
Today, almost
26 million Americans
claim English descent,
2,000 of them
descendants of William Buckman.
♪
The puzzle of who we are
and where we are
begins to take shape.
♪
Within a century,
the first official census
of 1790
will show a population
of nearly 4 million,
more than 90% of them
of foreign heritage,
most living east
of the Mississippi.
- We have a country
that was founded
through a migration of people,
yet the very process
and processes
of those migrations
greatly varied.
narrator: While the Quakers
brought ideas
that shaped our democracy,
new migrants also bring things
that fuel our country's growth.
- America was like ancient Rome,
where you had all of these
different influences
from different regions,
because immigrants
bring certain skills.
♪
narrator: As northern
Europeans fill the east,
some 2 million Spanish
settle to the south.
They carry one of the most
important cargos
in American history:
cattle.
[cheers and applause]
♪
Simón de Arocha:
a Spanish cowboy and soldier,
a pioneer of America's
ranching industry.
♪
If you're Spanish-American,
your ancestry
could stretch right back
to the first ranchers,
and a cattle drive,
that helped save the Revolution.
♪
- I am so proud
to have had a family
who contributed
to the American Revolution,
and this is my family's story.
♪
narrator: The Arochas
are among 16 families
that migrate from Spain's
Canary Islands.
♪
They join millions of Spanish
heading to a vast
colonial empire.
Landing in what will
become Mexico,
the Arochas reach Spanish Texas in 1731.
- Every immigrant group
contributed something different.
Our current economic makeup
is the result
of all of these streams coming
in from different countries,
different peoples
with their different skills.
♪
narrator: Today, America is
the world's largest
beef producer,
and if your ancestors
were Spanish,
it's them we can thank.
♪
Until the Spanish arrived,
there wasn't a single cow
in the Americas.
- The Spanish bring horses,
cattle, foodstuffs,
things that are gonna change
the nature of everyday life.
♪
narrator: Simón de Arocha
wrangles thousands
of longhorn cows
that run wild on the grasslands
of what will become Texas.
- The Spanish ranchers
simply set them free
in what we call the open range.
They propagated to the millions
very quickly.
narrator:
Some 3 million longhorn cows
roam the grasslands.
Rounding them up demands skills
honed by the Spanish vaqueros.
- Are y'all ready?
♪
Everything the American cowboy
and North American ranching does
is from the vaqueros.
- [mooing]
[cheers and applause]
- I can only begin to imagine
what it must have been like.
The fortitude
that they must have had...
it's just absolutely
fascinating.
♪
- They perfected
all of the skills
of horsemanship
and working cattle.
♪
narrator: In 1779,
Spanish skills are called upon
to save American soldiers.
♪
An army of immigrants
wants its own flag.
♪
But more than half
of the American soldiers
are farmers.
Fighting means they can't
tend their crops.
Food supplies are running out.
- They were having to carry out
wagons of the dead soldiers
that were literally starving.
♪
narrator: Now, Simón de Arocha
will lead a rescue mission
that will help turn the tide
of the Revolutionary War
and change American
cattle farming forever.
♪
[dramatic music]
narrator: This map shows
a portrait of America.
Every pixel is one of us,
each color an ancestral group.
If you're Hispanic or Latino,
this red area is most likely
where you're living.
♪
If it hadn't been
for Spanish migrants,
we might never
have won our freedom.
♪
- By the time the colonies
decided to declare
their independence,
they were a patchwork
of different ethnic, racial,
and religious groups.
♪
narrator: But their army
is starving.
♪
As America's ally,
the king of Spain calls on
the Spanish cattle ranchers
of Texas to help.
- He asks the ranchers
to drive cattle
from Texas to Louisiana
to help feed the Americans
during the American Revolution.
♪
narrator: In successive waves,
rancheros use skills
brought from Spain
and honed in America
to lead some 15,000
head of cattle
across 500 miles to Louisiana.
♪
- These people perfected
the ability
to bring down a bull,
and in order to do that,
they used the riata, a rope.
♪
It was a life and death skill,
and they had to get it right
every time.
narrator:
16 weeks in the saddle,
living off the land,
sleeping rough.
♪
But the beef gets through
and helps tip the balance
of the war.
♪
Jefferson himself
writes the Spanish
to thank them for their help.
♪
- I am so proud
to have had a family
who contributed to
not only the community
but also to our nation.
♪
narrator: Over the centuries,
millions more of Spanish descent
will become American citizens.
♪
Today, some 50 million Americans
identify as Hispanic or Latino.
♪
200 years of colonial growth
have created
the United States of America.
But in 1790,
a country born of immigrants
passes its first
anti-immigrant laws.
- Once we became a new country,
the Founding Fathers
were immediately wary
of the old countries
that they'd all come from.
narrator:
The law limits citizenship
to free white residents
who have lived in America
for two years.
- For much of our period
of history,
Americanness has been
defined by whiteness,
and that still has some impact
on who is welcomed
into the United States
and who is not.
♪
- There was still a sense
that we had foreign enemies.
We were very unsure
about French-speaking people,
Spanish-speaking people,
people who had...
spoke different languages
than the English settlers.
narrator:
Anti-immigrant prejudice
will echo through the centuries.
- People think there's only
so much America to go around,
and once they're here,
it's like,
"Wait, this is enough.
"We're crowded already.
We don't need more people."
♪
narrator:
But America is expanding.
When President Jefferson
buys a vast territory
from the French,
the U.S. almost doubles in size.
Another piece
of the American jigsaw.
Some 75,000 colonists
are added to our population
overnight...
♪
Foreigners who will help fight
our greatest enemy...
- Monsieur!
narrator: Disease.
- Monsieur!
♪
narrator: A city on lockdown.
[people coughing]
narrator:
Thousands dying or dead.
♪
Wiped out
by an incurable disease.
- [coughing]
narrator: Amid the chaos,
a young French immigrant,
Louis Joseph Dufilho,
a maverick medic who will
put his life on the line
to save a dying city.
♪
Born in southern France,
Louis left his homeland
in 1800 with his family.
They're among 750,000 French
who migrate to America
across the centuries,
a constant, steady flow.
The Dufilhos' destination:
New Orleans,
once a critical part
of the French Empire,
now American.
♪
- Immigrants bring
certain skills,
and what we see with Dufilho
is that medical knowledge
is beginning to spread
from one country to another.
♪
narrator: Dufilho will apply
that knowledge
in the world's fastest-growing
metropolis: New Orleans.
Slaves and cotton have made it
America's richest city,
a melting pot
of 25 nationalities.
♪
- As we get into
the 19th century,
we have Germans,
Irish, Italians.
We have a tremendous
slave population,
as well as the largest free
people of color population.
narrator: But the trade ships
that make it rich
bring a deadly cargo...
- [retching]
narrator: Disease.
- [coughing]
- Human migration
and human diseases
have always gone hand in hand.
Almost every great
contagious disease that we have
started somewhere else and moved
along with human populations.
narrator: Leprosy originated
in East Africa around 3000 B.C.
Bubonic plague first appeared
in central Asia in 224 B.C.
And smallpox is first recorded
in Egypt 3,500 years ago.
♪
But of all
the deadly sicknesses,
it's yellow fever
that hammers New Orleans.
- The city of New Orleans
is surrounded by a swamp.
It's a breeding ground
for mosquitoes
that carry
the yellow fever disease.
narrator: Yellow fever arrived
in the first slave ships.
[knock at door]
Some Africans are immune,
but Europeans suffer
in the thousands,
among them Louis' brother.
♪
- There's a lot of quackery
in New Orleans.
It's not very effective,
because we still have no idea
of bacteria
or viruses at this point.
♪
narrator: In a migrant city
of 14,000 people...
- [speaking French]
narrator: Yellow fever kills
one in six.
- The understanding of disease
was so poor
until relatively recently
that we didn't know
where it came from,
so we tended to blame
the latest people off the boat.
narrator: After the death
of his brother,
Louis dedicates his life
to helping the people
of New Orleans...
♪
Using knowledge brought
from France
and one of medicine's
greatest discoveries:
quinine, found in the bark
of a Peruvian tree,
adapted and exported
by migrants.
- New Orleans
was such a crossroads
of ideas and cultures.
In the face of
this yellow fever epidemic,
he's trying out new ideas
and really attempting to take
a scientific approach
with knowledge that he'd
acquired in Europe.
narrator: Like immigrants
down the centuries,
Dufilho's experience will
shape the future of America.
♪
He is declared the nation's
very first licensed pharmacist.
His pharmacy
is still there today.
- The pharmacist was more like
a doctor today
in that people would go to him
to diagnose
what their problem was,
and they would be treated
accordingly.
♪
- Those who come to this country
come with particular skills,
and they come to this country
and capitalize on those skills.
♪
- [speaking French]
♪
narrator: Louis and the city
survive the epidemic.
♪
He joins the Howard Association,
an early version
of the Red Cross.
- Thank you.
♪
narrator: They will treat
more than 130,000 victims
of yellow fever
and other diseases.
- They were the front line
on fighting any of these
diseases,
and it makes you very proud
that that same blood
that ran through his veins
runs through mine.
♪
narrator:
If you have French ancestry,
you share it with 10 million
other Americans,
most of whom still live in
lands once owned by France.
♪
Like the people of New Orleans,
Native Americans have also been
ravaged by foreign diseases.
♪
Their population has fallen 90%
since European contact.
♪
- The biggest killer
is smallpox,
but you're also talking about
all kinds of European diseases
that were brought
with Europeans.
♪
narrator:
As more Europeans flood in,
46,000 Native Americans
are forced west
of the Mississippi.
- You had dispossession
of American Indian groupings
and confinement to smaller
and smaller parcels of land.
♪
narrator:
As their numbers tumble,
immigration accelerates.
America's population grows 30%
in ten years.
But a country of almost
2 million square miles
has vast space to spare.
Now, as America claims
the Oregon territory,
it will fuel immigration
by giving away
one of history's greatest
magnets to migration...
♪
Land.
[horse whinnying]
- Walk on!
Walk on!
♪
John Andrew, take the reins!
narrator: Lucinda Brown,
a housewife
of English descent...
♪
- [shouting]
narrator: On the final leg
of the Oregon Trail.
♪
- One, two, three, push!
♪
[horse whinnying]
- [shouting]
[dramatic music]
narrator: In the 1840s,
half the world
is technically owned
by just eight people,
leaders of the great empires.
But the United States
is offering land for free
in the Oregon Territory.
320 acres to anyone
who moves there
and claims it.
- Land meant opportunity.
Land meant farming.
Land meant being able
to establish yourself
in a new society.
And of course the United
States, with abundant land,
was that magnet
attracting these folks.
♪
narrator: If your ancestors
took the Oregon Trail,
they helped make America
what it is today:
a nation stretching
coast to coast.
- Unlike the small countries
and principalities of Europe,
the United States was wide open.
It was very,
very sparsely populated,
and in some ways still is.
♪
narrator: In 30 years,
400,000 people
living east of the Mississippi
sell what they can't
transport, uproot, and move.
♪
They include one of the first
women's rights activists,
the founder of Eugene City,
Oregon,
and Lucinda Brown
with her family.
♪
It's a 2,000-mile journey
to a new life.
♪
- To make the journey
and have the promise
of a square mile of land
was a huge deal,
because it was all yours.
It was all for the taking.
The... the sky was the limit.
- When we move today,
we might pack up a U-Haul
or pack up our car
and get on a highway.
And that's just
not how it worked.
This is a very,
very big expedition.
narrator: Lucinda faces six
to eight months on the trail,
her three children
and all their possessions
in a one-ton wagon costing
$12,000 in today's money.
- They were families.
They were farmers.
They were kids.
And they had very, very little
support, almost no support.
Only the things they had
with them in their wagon.
So there's this incredible
endurance aspect.
- [clicking tongue]
Walk on.
narrator: 170 years
after Lucinda set off,
one of the items
she took on the trail
still exists.
- This is gonna be
really something.
narrator: Unearthed
from an Oregon museum
and never before seen
by her descendant.
♪
- Lucinda's pot.
narrator:
A tangible family relic
linked to a tragic past.
♪
- Leave me with your father.
- Elias Brown developed
chills and a fever...
♪
And it got to be really bad.
♪
- Come on, Elias.
Come on.
- The fact that she used that
across the trail
during all the events
that they experienced...
it's just overwhelming to me.
♪
- Dear Lord, receive...
narrator: Elias is one
of 20,000 pioneers
who never reach
their destination.
- Amen.
all: Amen.
narrator: Ten graves
for every mile.
♪
- Lucinda had no choice
but to go on.
♪
So on they went.
♪
narrator: Military forts
and trading posts
spring up along
the westward trails.
♪
Built to protect
and supply the pioneers,
they become home
to the thousands
who stop en route.
- The importance
of this migration
is not only that it gets people
to the Pacific Coast,
but that people
are actually traversing
the middle of the continent.
So that's another way in which
this landscape becomes populated
with more Americans
of European descent.
♪
- People who migrated together
tended to make
little genetic communities,
and you can still see
that genetic signal
in people who are alive today.
You can see that they moved
together as a clan.
♪
narrator: Lucinda is heading
for the fertile land of Oregon,
but in her way
lie the Cascade Mountains.
♪
- They're near the end
of their 2,000-mile journey,
but they still have
this huge obstacle,
the hardest mountain range
on the continent to cross.
narrator: Trailblazers
have cut a direct route
across the mountains,
the Barlow Road.
But it's treacherous.
-Wow.
So this is it.
♪
It's not only steep,
but it's covered
in rocks and boulders.
It's completely uneven.
♪
All the immigrants
like Lucinda knew
that if they took
the Barlow Road,
they were going to have to
go down this chute.
♪
narrator: At the foot of it,
the torrential rains
of the Pacific Northwest.
[horse whinnying]
- They had hail.
They had wind.
They had lightning
that when it struck the ground,
it shook the whole earth.
- [groaning]
- When the rain comes,
it turns into
a veritable quagmire of mud.
It means your
thousand-pound wagon
can get stuck down in the mud.
It means your oxen
can get stuck down in the mud.
- Come help!
narrator:
But Lucinda doesn't give up.
- Push!
- One, two, three!
narrator: 250 days
after her migration began...
- [shouting]
narrator:
She stakes her claim to land.
"Lucinda Brown claims
640 acres..."
that would be a square mile...
"in Benton County, Oregon."
And I have never seen
this document before.
This is absolutely mind-blowing.
You know she's spent
seven months on the trail...
♪
Hoping to get her own land
claim with her husband.
♪
This is an amazing thing
to have achieved that,
been through all of the fears,
the pain, the toil,
the perseverance
that she had to display
in order to come to this point.
♪
narrator:
Within the next decade,
pioneers will claim
2 1/2 million acres
of prime West Coast farmland.
The Homestead Acts that follow
will give away
10% of all U.S. land
to more than
1 1/2 million families.
♪
- The constant desire
to move the nation
from its eastern origins
to its western future
has shaped
the inevitable destiny
of a single nation
across this massive landscape.
♪
narrator: Within three years,
100,000 migrants
will be enjoying the freedoms
of new homes out west.
♪
But at the same time,
nearly 15%
of the U.S. population
is enslaved.
- The slave trade represents
the largest forced migration
that has existed
in world history.
And the world we live in today
is a world fundamentally
shaped by that moment.
♪
- [breathing heavily]
♪
narrator: John Andrew Jackson.
♪
An enslaved African-American
with a price on his head.
- Individuals who had been
enslaved were property.
They did not
own their own lives.
- By law, they were defined
as commodities.
♪
narrator:
How does this runaway slave
gain his citizenship
and inspire one
of our most famous books?
♪
Over four centuries,
some 12 million Africans
were sold into slavery,
6 million to South America,
4 million to the Caribbean,
1/2 a million to Europe,
and almost 400,000
to the United States.
♪
If you're African-American,
your ancestors' arrival
was just the start
of their journey.
♪
- As a black person,
you know somewhere on your tree
you have someone
that was a slave,
but to really know details,
it's really hard.
♪
narrator: Jackson's
grandfather arrived
before the U.S.
banned importation
of enslaved Africans in 1807.
♪
Born on a plantation,
Jackson lives with 56 slaves.
He records his life
in an incredible memoir.
- When we were picking cotton,
we used to see the wild geese
flying over our heads
and to say to each other,
"O that we had wings
like those geese,
"then we could fly
over the heads of our masters
to the 'land of the free.'"
- It's so belittling.
He was a piece of property.
He wasn't a person.
He was almost like a dog.
♪
narrator: But Jackson
won't be shackled.
He'll run for freedom...
♪
Part of an internal migration
that will take tens of thousands
of African-Americans north.
♪
[dramatic music]
narrator: By 1860,
enslaved labor
will make the South
the world's
fourth-largest economy.
- 4 million people,
representing 90%
of the black population,
were worth $3 billion.
$3 billion in 1860,
on the eve of the demise
of slavery,
was worth 3 times
all of the manufacturing
and railroads in America,
7 times the banks,
and 48 times the expenditures
of the federal government.
♪
- The entire economy
of the United States
was built on the backs
of enslaved African people.
narrator: Exact numbers
are hard to come by,
but every year,
thousands of slaves flee.
♪
Some just for a few hours,
others a lifetime.
♪
- We know thousands did it.
But the chances of being
successful at it
were incredibly long.
♪
[dog barking in distance]
♪
- I'm sure he had
a tremendous amount of fear.
♪
"I still might get caught."
♪
But that's the brave decision
that he made.
- [breathing heavily]
I had often been to Charleston,
150 miles from our plantation.
It struck me that if I could
hide in one of the vessels,
I should be able to get to
the "free country."
♪
narrator: The free states
are hundreds of miles away.
♪
While some runaways flee south,
and others hide
in the Virginia swamps,
most try to reach the North.
♪
Up to 50,000 find freedom
in Canada
using a network
of secret contacts,
the Underground Railroad.
♪
Jackson's plan works.
He stows away on a boat
out of Charleston.
♪
Six weeks and 1,000 miles
from the plantation,
he arrives in Boston.
- I thanked God that I had
escaped from hell to heaven.
♪
narrator: But the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
means runaways risk capture,
no matter where they are.
- The article essentially says
that if slaves were to escape
to the North
that a Southerner
in a Southern state
could make a claim.
- And he knew
that his former owners
would send slave catchers
to the urban North to find him.
♪
narrator: Jackson takes refuge
with a writer,
Harriet Beecher Stowe.
She'll write the most famous
anti-slavery book of all time.
- We know that he met
Harriet Beecher Stowe,
and then sometime thereafter,
she was inspired, fired up,
and ultimately this resulted
in her penning
"Uncle Tom's Cabin."
♪
narrator: Its depiction
of African-Americans
is controversial,
but it becomes
the second-best-selling book
of the 19th century
and changes opinions
about slavery worldwide.
♪
At the end of a civil war
fought over slavery,
two amendments
to the Constitution
declare enslaved people
free citizens.
♪
- The moment
when African-Americans
gain full citizenship rights
is really the final nail
in the coffin of slavery.
♪
narrator: In 1870,
Jackson appears on the census,
no longer a slave or a number,
no longer listed property
like his African forebears.
- He finally felt free.
"I can walk as I please.
I can come and go as I please."
Simple things.
♪
He made it.
♪
- America became a land of
the free for African-Americans
at least on paper,
but in reality,
freedom was something
that African-Americans
had to fight for
on a daily basis.
♪
- The founding principles
of our nation...
liberty, equality, freedom...
these were fairly abstract
principles,
but it was African-Americans
who often made them
living realities.
♪
[people chanting]
♪
narrator: In 1838,
the first steamship
travels from England
to New York.
♪
A six-week journey
now takes 15 days...
♪
Transatlantic traffic
carrying people and news.
♪
- Information
is what drives migration.
How does one know
about the opportunities
of American life
without communication?
♪
narrator: Now a piece of paper
less than an inch square
will help accelerate immigration
into the tens of millions.
♪
[wooden plane scraping]
♪
In Ireland's County Armagh,
William Porter,
eldest of five brothers.
♪
He's about to receive something
that is changing the lives
of millions:
a letter from a relative
in America...
- It's from our brother.
- Sent quickly and cheaply
with a new invention:
the adhesive stamp.
- What that facilitates
of course
is an enormous revolution
in communications.
And it was a revolution
in communications.
- They're good.
They're good.
They made their crossing.
- It allowed people
to articulate desires
and excitement
about the New World
to people back home.
Family talked to family,
and friends talked to friends,
and by extension,
people began to move
because of that communication.
narrator: Letters like these
will help tens of thousands
to cross the Atlantic...
♪
From a homeland in crisis.
♪
[dramatic music]
narrator: This map
shows a portrait of America.
Every pixel is one of us,
each color an ancestral group.
♪
If you're Irish-American,
this gold area is most likely
where you're living.
♪
Letters, stamps,
and a catastrophe
sent millions of your ancestors
on a dangerous voyage.
♪
- It means a lot to me to know
how I'm connected
to Ireland now.
I've always been proud
of my Irish roots.
I've always wanted to know more.
♪
- When you really dig into many
of history's great disasters,
you find out
they're more complicated
than they look on the surface.
narrator: From 1800 to 1850,
Ireland's population doubles.
♪
- Approximately 8 million people
live in an area the size
of the state of Indiana.
narrator: The country
is dangerously reliant
on a food imported
from American colonies...
♪
The potato.
- Potatoes were
so much more productive
than anything else
you could grow
that it became the only thing
they were living on
in a lot of cases.
♪
- This is a map
in the Cavan County Museum.
What it clearly demonstrates
is the level of subdivision
of land
for those who were on the bottom
rung of the social ladder,
to try and eke out
a very basic existence
by growing the potato crop.
narrator: In 1845,
disaster strikes.
♪
Potato blight,
a fungus that wipes out crops...
and with it food.
♪
- When the fungus came in,
it spread like wildfire,
and it was too late for them
to turn to some other
food source.
narrator: An estimated
1 million people
starve to death.
- People would be
scavenging for food
or what might
approximate to food
or what might replace food.
♪
narrator: Pushed by famine,
pulled by promises
of a better future...
♪
Survivors flee the country.
♪
William Porter joins
more than a million people
who leave Ireland for the U.S.
in just ten years.
Among them the car-making
Ford family
and the great-grandfather
of JFK.
♪
1/8 of Ireland's population
makes a journey
fraught with danger.
- Those were mighty
miserable weeks.
narrator: 50,000 Irish migrants
die during the crossing.
♪
- They called them
"coffin ships"
because so many people died
on their way here.
♪
- There was ship-board cholera
among other diseases,
their bodies disposed of at sea.
♪
[birds cawing]
narrator: The Porter family
hear nothing
of William's fate for months.
Then a sign of life.
♪
A letter.
- I'm just blown away by this.
narrator: The first of many.
♪
- I'm literally sitting here
staring at a letter
written by one of my ancestors.
I can imagine
this is your only way
of getting ahold of your family.
This is all you've got.
♪
- I bought a farm of 80 acres
of the nicest land you ever saw.
I could make more money here
in one year
than you could do there in ten.
- "We would never think
of going back
"to live in that misruled
land again.
"For here you can
hold up your head
and not take off your hat
to any man."
That freedom,
it's got to be appealing
to them.
♪
narrator: In 1857,
7 million letters
reach Ireland annually.
♪
Envelopes containing
not just news,
but money too.
Some $260 million
in just 50 years.
- Sending money
through remittances
is one way of maintaining
those family ties,
fulfilling their obligations,
and creating lifelines
between the U.S.
and those homelands.
narrator: By 1858,
Joseph follows
his brother's advice.
He travels 3,500 miles
to Illinois.
♪
- Joseph!
narrator: Two brothers...
- You made it!
narrator: Reunited.
- Give me a hug.
♪
- It means a lot to me to know
some of the names, the places,
the trials they went through.
It is amazing to me.
♪
narrator: Today more than
32 million Americans
claim Irish descent,
five times more
than the population
of Ireland itself.
♪
Within two decades,
almost 90 million
letters and cards
will flow between America
and Europe.
♪
- Advances in communications
technology
make mass migration
across continents,
across oceans, much easier.
narrator: Now the biggest
single news story
out of western America
will attract migrants
from across the globe.
♪
And like the Dutch
two centuries earlier,
they come seeking one thing...
♪
Wealth.
- This is gold.
- This is gold.
[laughter]
[dramatic music]
♪
narrator: Rudolf Jordan,
a 30-year-old German...
♪
Dying of thirst
in the Mexican desert.
♪
One of 100,000 migrants
bound for California in 1849,
risking their lives for gold.
♪
- Gold finds play
on people's imagination,
because if I can get there
fast enough,
I'll really benefit.
I can get rich quick.
♪
narrator: The discovery of gold in 1848
triggers a mass migration
from all corners of the planet.
♪
From Australians to Chinese,
Germans to Swedes,
Mexicans to Chileans,
some 300,000 migrants
will flock to California
from more than
25 different countries...
alongside them, Rudolf Jordan,
setting out from Cuba.
♪
If you live in California,
it's the prospectors
you can thank
for putting it on the map.
♪
- If gold hadn't been
discovered,
San Francisco wouldn't be here.
It's an instant city.
It just springs up overnight.
The journalist who covers it
says it's amazing.
It's like Aladdin just
wished it into existence
and history will never believe
that it could happen
as fast as this.
♪
narrator: Jordan,
an early photographer
and avid adventurer,
reads about California gold
in the newspaper.
- Every year brought some news
of some great opportunity
in America
that hadn't been there before.
Mines, industry...
- [speaking German]
- Agriculture, furs,
timber, you name it.
- Within a year, worldwide,
people heard about California,
most of them
for the very first time,
and that there was gold
in abundance there.
narrator: Pulled by the prospect
of riches and adventure,
Rudolf and colleague
George Mollenhauer
head for San Francisco...
[both speaking German]
narrator: A journey he records
in a memoir.
♪
- A great future was held out
for that territory,
and excitement there ran high.
From that very moment,
we laid our plans
to proceed to California.
♪
narrator: They've sailed
from Cuba.
Now they will ride
across the Mexican desert
to the Pacific, then sail north
for San Francisco.
♪
- California and San Francisco
were the far side of the moon
as far as most people
were concerned.
♪
You have suddenly got hundreds
of thousands of people
who want to get across
the planet
to a remote area,
and there's no way to get there.
♪
- It wasn't just like
following the highway
or taking the bus.
But that was the way
things were then.
This was a very
adventuresome thing to do.
♪
- When people found that so many
wanted to go west for gold,
this instigated
a secondary industry,
the travel industry.
♪
People who were enterprising
figured out ways
to institute things
like a timetable system,
or offer first-class
and second-class passage.
narrator:
Travel routes open up
that are still there today.
♪
The Panama route:
the quickest but most expensive.
The Cape Horn route:
long, cheap, dangerous.
♪
The cross-country route:
following the Oregon Trail,
then turning south
through Colorado.
- The gold rush in many ways
is connecting the world
for the first time in history.
Everyone is trying to get
there as quickly as possible.
♪
narrator: Rudolf and George
ride hard across Mexico,
but they've underestimated
the dangers of the desert.
♪
- We suffered much
from the heat,
one day being compelled
to make 75 miles to reach water.
This seemed too much
of a hazardous journey.
♪
- The margins of survival
are thin,
and he's pushing too far,
too fast,
and he's risking his life.
♪
- This is a desperate situation,
but they've got this idea
that if they could just
get there,
they could make their fortunes.
♪
- Rudolf!
- It was said
that in 1849 and 1850
that you could find your way
all the way to California
simply going grave to grave
of the people
who were trying to get there
ahead of you.
- [speaking German]
[grunts]
[speaking German]
♪
narrator: Five months
after setting out from Cuba,
they reach the Pacific Ocean.
♪
From there it's another month
sailing north
to San Francisco...
where they find a bay
full of empty ships.
♪
narrator: Today, California
is the most heavily populated
state in our nation.
[dramatic music]
But it would be nothing
without the gold-hunting
immigrants
who kick-started its history.
♪
When Rudolf Jordan reaches
San Francisco in 1849...
♪
It's a ghost town.
♪
- San Francisco Bay
was practically
the black hole of the Pacific.
Ships would come in,
and they would not
sail out again.
narrator: Thousands
of passengers and crew
abandon ship...
♪
For the gold fields.
♪
- When the gold rush began,
it's like turning on the faucet.
♪
narrator: For five months,
Rudolf and George toil
in the dirt.
♪
- George.
♪
George.
[speaking German]
♪
This is gold.
- This is gold.
- This is gold.
- This is gold.
- This is gold!
[laughter]
both: This is gold!
- It's gold!
- Whoo!
♪
This is gold.
- For Rudolf
to come all this way
and actually finding gold
connects you to that moment.
It wasn't a waste.
This was the real thing.
♪
narrator: The gold rush helps
grow California's population
nearly 400% in 12 years.
Today it has more immigrants
and more billionaires
than any other state...
another piece
of the American puzzle.
♪
By 1860, the U.S. population
reaches 31 million.
♪
But almost a century since
winning its independence,
the country risks falling apart.
- The United States is
two different societies in 1860:
a Northern society
that is industrializing
and a Southern economy
that is agricultural
and is peopled by slaves.
♪
narrator: The issue of slavery
will now set the U.S.
against itself.
♪
The South secedes from the Union
and forms a Confederacy,
winning a string of victories.
But the North
has a secret weapon:
it has seven out of every
eight new migrants...
- [speaking German]
narrator: And they're not afraid to fight.
- [speaking German]
[explosions]
[men shouting]
narrator:
This is Marcus Spiegel,
a colonel in the Union Army,
a German-American,
Jewish.
♪
Like the Quakers
three centuries earlier,
he's fled oppression in Europe,
seeking democracy in America.
♪
[explosion]
♪
Now he's fighting to save it.
♪
- He was brave.
He was gallant.
♪
It makes me very grateful
that he fought
to preserve America,
and for me as an American,
it means everything.
♪
narrator: In 1848, an attempt
to establish democracy
in the German states
is brutally crushed.
♪
- In the mid-19th century,
democracy
was a novel concept
for much of Europe.
[gunfire]
But it was alive and well
and being practiced
in the United States.
♪
narrator: Spiegel and other
political refugees flee,
pulled to America
by dreams of freedom.
♪
In the 40 years to 1860,
almost 1 1/2 million Germans
migrate to the U.S.
Among them,
the grandfathers of Babe Ruth
and John Steinbeck.
♪
More than any other
immigrant group,
they spread throughout
our entire nation.
♪
If you're German-American,
you're here
because your ancestors
came seeking opportunities
that thousands would die for.
- If we take the ethnicity
of everybody
in the United States
and kind of come up
with one big pie chart,
you would have a lot
of different slices of pie,
because Americans
came from all over the world.
However, Germany
would probably have the...
the biggest sliver of that pie,
because they contributed
a huge number of immigrants
during the 1800s.
narrator: For 150 years,
Marcus Spiegel's wartime story
has been preserved
in a family archive.
♪
- He comes to America
for freedom.
Freedom of religion,
freedom to live
where he would want to live,
freedom to marry
who he would want to marry,
and for all these reasons
I think he saw America
as a beacon.
♪
narrator:
Spiegel learns English,
marries an American Quaker,
and opens a goods store in Ohio.
♪
But a peaceful life
in his adopted country
is shattered
with the outbreak...
[explosions]
Of the Civil War.
narrator: In 1861,
Abraham Lincoln
recruits German immigrants
to fight to save the Union.
[dramatic music]
- Abraham Lincoln
had a very warm relationship
with German immigrants
in the United States.
He even bought an interest
in a German newspaper.
And when Lincoln
had been elected in 1860,
he had drawn
a significant number
of German voters as well.
♪
narrator: German-Americans
sign up in droves...
♪
Marcus Spiegel among them.
- He knew what it was like
to live in Germany
without these rights,
and he wanted to fight
to preserve a united America.
♪
narrator:
After two years of war,
Spiegel has become a colonel
and a staunch abolitionist.
♪
- Since I've been here,
I have learned and seen
more of what the horrors
of slavery was
than I ever knew before,
and I am glad indeed
that the signs of the times
show towards closing out
of that accursed institution.
♪
narrator: Port Gibson,
Mississippi.
May 1, 1863.
[explosions]
- [speaking German]
narrator: Spiegel leads
the 120th Ohio Regiment.
[gunfire]
He is one of 200,000
German-born troops.
[gunfire]
- [speaking German]
narrator: 10% of the Union army,
the largest immigrant group
to fight in the Civil War.
- [speaking German]
[all shouting]
- Some German units actually
give their orders in German.
[explosions]
[high-pitched tone]
- The scene here on May the 1st
would've been absolute chaos.
[gunfire]
You have bullets flying.
You have artillery roaring.
You have men screaming
in agony and pain.
Officers barking orders.
[explosions]
It's just a cacophony
of sounds and fright.
[gunfire]
narrator:
At the height of battle,
Spiegel leads a daring attack
on the enemy flank.
- [speaking German]
[gunfire]
- From all their different
backgrounds,
they had this common ground
that they were fighting for.
♪
narrator: That unity helps
the Union forces win the day
and the war.
♪
Spiegel is recommended
for brigadier general...
♪
But is killed in an ambush
soon after.
- People like Colonel Spiegel
gave their lives
to preserve this Union
and to abolish slavery,
and that is a major factor
in how this war turns out.
♪
- One thing is certain,
that my fighting in this war
will leave an inheritance
to my beloved children
of more value
than of all the gold in India.
♪
- This American patriot
gave his life
so that we could
have the freedoms
that he did not have in Germany.
And to me, this is
the ultimate sacrifice.
♪
He was a true American now.
♪
narrator: Today,
almost 50 million Americans
claim German heritage...
♪
The largest ancestral group
in the United States.
♪
1863.
Work begins on 1,776 miles
of iron track.
A new technology is poised
to unite east and west.
♪
- Transformations
in transportation technology
and the advent of the railroad
and the steamship
makes mass migration
across great distances
much, much easier than before.
narrator:
Now, as through history,
the need for workers
will fuel immigration.
- The United States
had an insatiable appetite
for cheap labor
from mass migration,
for immigrants to work
in factories,
to work in mines,
to work on railroads.
- There was a great demand
for labor in the west
that could not be satisfied
by the people
who were living there.
♪
narrator:
If you're Chinese-American,
this could be where
your ancestors came from...
♪
Guangdong Province
near Hong Kong,
home to an army
of hired laborers.
Among them: teenager
Hung Lai Wah and his brother.
♪
- My name is Russell Low,
and my great-grandfather
was Hung Lai Wah.
- [speaking foreign language]
narrator: In 1865,
recruitment agents come,
offering jobs in America.
- [speaking foreign language]
[men exclaiming]
- The villages
were impoverished.
Guangdong Province was
in a state of crisis.
There was civil war.
There was famine.
♪
narrator: To sweeten the deal
and attract more workers,
agents offer $75
to buy a ticket...
♪
Soap, a razor, a leather trunk,
and food for the voyage.
♪
- He had it in him
to be an adventurer,
and he followed that
sense of adventure to America.
♪
narrator: 12,000 impoverished
Chinese sign up,
95% of them
from Guangdong Province,
including Hung Lai Wah.
♪
They travel up to four weeks
by steamship,
a journey of 7,000 miles
to San Francisco.
♪
Importing these men
is the brainchild
of Central Pacific boss
Charles Crocker.
♪
Irish and American workers
are building
the eastern half
of the railroad.
But for the western section,
it's quicker to bring workers
from China
than it is New York.
- There's a direct
steamship route
that can take them there,
whereas there's no direct route
going across the United States.
narrator: The future
of Crocker's company
depends on his new Chinese
recruits working quickly.
But America's latest immigrants
will face brutal conditions,
deadly accidents,
and a backlash
of anti-immigrant anger.
[slow guitar music]
- 1866 was by far
the worst winter on record.
There were
44 separate snowstorms.
The average depth
of the snowdrifts
was 10 to 20 feet.
- They came wearing
very light clothing
and probably no shoes
to work in the winter
under these snowy conditions,
and it must have been
an absolute shock to them.
♪
narrator: They get to work
gouging out 15 tunnels,
working harder and faster
than anyone else.
The secret?
Their diet.
- The Irish immigrants
are getting sick more often.
It turns out that while they're
drinking regular water,
the Chinese are accustomed
to drinking tea,
are of course
boiling their water,
and they're not getting sick
from diseases like dysentery.
♪
narrator:
But while Irish workers
are paid $35 per month
plus free room and board,
the Chinese will be paid
just $28.
- It's actually estimated that
the Central Pacific Railroad
saved maybe a 1/3 of the cost
because they charged
the Chinese workers
for their food
and for their housing.
narrator: But they still save
2/3 of their wage,
and like millions of
immigrants before and after,
send it home
to support their families.
- The key to Chinese culture,
of course, was family.
Lives depended on them,
lives back home.
Hung Lai Wah knew
that he represented his family.
♪
narrator: In August 1865,
the Chinese face
their toughest obstacle.
♪
The Donner Summit,
7,050 feet up.
- We are at the face
of Summit Tunnel,
the length of a football field.
♪
narrator:
Crocker orders the Chinese
to blast through the mountain
using highly unstable
nitroglycerin,
deadly work others won't do.
♪
- We do know that Jick Wah,
my great-grandfather's brother,
was injured.
He actually lost an eye
in a blasting accident.
narrator: Others don't survive.
[explosion]
♪
- The accumulated bones
of perhaps 1,200 Chinamen
came in by the eastern train
yesterday
from along the line of the
Central Pacific Railroad.
narrator: An estimated
1,500 Chinese will die
in explosions, rock slides,
and avalanches,
their bones repatriated,
as per their customs
and their contracts.
- They knew that if they died
that their bodies
would be recovered
and their bones sent back
to their village in China,
and they would be part of
this whole ancestral legacy.
♪
narrator: On May 10, 1869,
east finally meets west
at Promontory Point in Utah.
- The transcontinental railroad
and its building
was a task
of monumental proportions.
It required Herculean effort,
and the contribution
of these young boys
who had come from Guangdong
and known nothing
about building a railroad,
they had become
the very best railroad workers
the world had ever seen.
♪
[camera bulb flashes]
narrator: But when the event
is recorded in a photograph,
not one Chinese is included.
- The Chinese were not invited
to be part of the ceremonies.
They were not thanked
in any of the official speeches,
and essentially their labors
were ignored.
- They're really seen
as temporary labor to be used
and exploited and then hopefully
returned home.
♪
narrator: 1/3 of workers
return to China.
Those who remain face
a rising tide of hostility.
♪
13 years later,
the Chinese Exclusion Act
is passed,
legislation that limits
new Chinese immigration
and bars citizenship.
- Once the railroad was finished
and once some of the mines
began to become less productive,
you had all this Chinese labor
in the United States,
and then the sense was,
they were taking jobs.
- We are a country of immigrants
that on some level is always
fearful of immigrants.
We're afraid that they're going
to drive down wages.
We're afraid that they're going
to import terrorism.
We start talking about
how they're going to bring in
un-American ways.
narrator: Despite the hardships,
Hung Lai Wah
settles in San Francisco.
♪
Today, he has
more than 100 descendants,
including engineers, doctors,
and a female fighter pilot.
- Ultimately, each of us is
a descendant of some person
who bravely decided to face
hardship and the unknown,
to come to this country
in the firm belief
that this country
held a better future
for themselves
and for their children.
♪
narrator:
Some 2 million Chinese
have migrated to America,
and today
over 4 million Americans
claim Chinese ancestry.
Many of them can still
trace their genes
back to the Guangdong Province
were Hung Lai Wah was born.
♪
narrator: In 1886,
the Statue of Liberty
is complete.
♪
Six years later,
Ellis Island opens.
♪
Over the next 137 years,
the American puzzle grows.
♪
A nation of 50 million
becomes a superpower
of over 300.
Now, the puzzle that is
our nation takes new shape.
A revolution sends children
to our door.
♪
A volcano
sparks an Italian exodus.
And an invitation
to help win a war
tears down borders.
- The scale of migration
to the U.S. is unprecedented.
- To the Irish!
narrator: Together...
These people
will make the United States
the most productive...
♪
The most wealthy,
and the most powerful nation
in history.
♪