WHITE MEN BEHAVING BADLY

By Richard Zoglin

You have to wade through nearly 10 hours of the 12 1/2-hour documentary series The West--past Lewis and Clark's expedition and the gold rush and Brigham Young and George Armstrong Custer--to reach the man who historian Richard White contends is "the one true genius the 19th century West created." He is none other than William F. ("Buffalo Bill") Cody, the former Indian fighter and buffalo hunter whose touring "Wild West" show forever fixed the myth of the West for the rest of the world. Cody's show, which began touring in the 1880s, re-created Indian attacks on wagon trains and raids on settlers' villages, with Buffalo Bill always riding to the rescue. As a grand finale, the show even re-enacted Custer's defeat at Little Bighorn. Buffalo Bill arrived there too, but this time accompanied by a sign: TOO LATE.

Locating the reality behind the myth is what TV documentarian Ken Burns does for a living, most famously in The Civil War, his hugely popular 1990 PBS mini-series. Yet even as he cuts through the myth, Burns doesn't shy away from the mythic. History, in his view, is full of seminal characters and emblematic stories, of great deeds that launched new eras and small discoveries that "changed everything." The Burns style has by now become as familiar, not to say formulaic, as an episode of Friends: the long, slow pans over archival photographs, the dramatically lighted talking heads, the period letters brought to life by well-known voices (if it's Jason Robards, this must be Burnsland). In his last series, Baseball, that style veered into self-parody: every home run and World Series victory sounded like the Battle of Gettysburg--and it went on for 18 hours.

The West--produced and directed by a Burns protege, Stephen Ives, but overseen by Burns as executive producer--is both more restrained and more resonant: a sweeping, thoughtful, often moving look at America's conquest of the West, from the early European explorers to the dawn of the 20th century. PBS is airing the series on eight nights over the next two weeks, smack in the middle of the networks' well-hyped fall premieres. (Little, Brown has also published a handsome companion book.) It's a mission that might seem as foolhardy as Custer's, but The West has much of the same appeal that drew record audiences (for PBS) to The Civil War.

It's also a reminder that among the things TV does well at the moment, popular history is possibly the best. Since The Civil War, PBS has aired such outstanding historical series as The Great Depression and The Promised Land, and The American Experience keeps turning out high-quality work after eight seasons. The History Channel, launched in January 1995, is one of the fastest-growing networks on cable. Burns himself is juggling several new projects, including a series of historical profiles (the first, on Thomas Jefferson, will air in February) and a 12 1/2-hour history of jazz, and he wants to set up workshops in his hometown of Walpole, New Hampshire, to help aspiring Ken Burnses learn everything from fund raising to "how we work with scholars and how we adjudicate very thorny issues of historical 'fact.'"

Burns had been planning to do a series on the West for more than a decade, but when funding became available, he was involved with Baseball and turned the project over to Ives. A graduate of Harvard who began making corporate and documentary films in Texas, Ives was the co-producer of Burns' 1989 film The Congress, worked on The Civil War, and produced and directed a film on Charles Lindbergh for PBS before tackling The West. He has inherited his mentor's passion and volubility on the subject of American history. Ives likes to call the West the "great four-way stop sign of American history, where everyone was changed by the encounters they had." He adds, "I don't think it's possible to understand this country without exploring the experience by which we became a continental nation."

The problem in telling the history of the West is that it is really two stories. One is a grand adventure, the inspiring story of how Americans tamed the wilderness, linked the continent, formed a nation--the white man's story. The other is a grimmer tale, of the native peoples who were displaced and subjugated in the process. The West tries to tell both simultaneously and does so with admirable evenhandedness. To be sure, some of the most powerful sequences are those of white men behaving badly and of Native Americans making their last, futile stands against the invaders--like Chief Joseph's 1877 flight toward Canada with his hitherto peaceful Nez Perce tribe, which launched deadly raids against the pursuing Army troops while trying to outrun them, only to surrender, in the brutal cold of Montana, just 40 miles from the border. Yet the series does not ignore complexities (the inter-tribal hatreds, for example), and the matter-of-fact tone of its Native American spokespeople (particularly the mellifluous novelist N. Scott Momaday) is largely free of sentimentality and moral hauteur.

Moreover, the series recognizes that injustices and cruelties don't invalidate the real feats of courage and enterprise that helped settle the West, from the Mormons' trek to Utah to the building of the first transcontinental railroad. As usual, Burns and Ives use personal stories to humanize large events. We learn, for example, about Charles Goodnight, the Texas rancher who returned from the Civil War, found that cattle prices had plummeted and decided to take his herd north to look for buyers--thus helping launch the era of the great cattle drives. The story of the California gold rush is framed by the diary and letters of William Swain, who left his wife and family in western New York State, endured a grueling overland journey to California to seek his fortune, only to head back 18 months later with barely enough money to book his passage home.

The West, wonderfully narrated by Peter Coyote, doesn't have the tight focus or cumulative force of The Civil War; with so much ground to cover, this wagon train can't linger too long in any one spot. And we miss at least some discussion of how the legendary figures of the West fit into the story. Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok are dismissed in a sentence; Jesse James and the O.K. Corral aren't mentioned at all. Viewers weaned on TV and movie westerns will be mildly disappointed. And Buffalo Bill would have been appalled.

--With reporting by William Tynan/New York

With reporting by William Tynan/New York