The Wild West with Ray Mears

Cherokee Indians share “mountain medicine” with struggling settlers in the thickly wooded Appalachians. After the devastating Trail of Tears, a voracious logging industry transforms the land.

The towering Rocky Mountains pose a seemingly impenetrable barrier to westward progress. Undaunted, mountain men brave grizzly bear and Indian attacks in the quest for pelts, opening new trails westward.

Wagon trains set out across the prairie bearing families and cargo, but it isn’t smooth sailing for the “prairie schooners.” Disease, weather extremes, and impassable terrain plague travelers.

Homesteaders dig up “Nebraska marble” to survive in vast, treeless prairies. Cowboys live on the saddle, driving millions of cattle across the prairie until a prickly innovation ends their era.

Blackfoot tribe members stage a traditional buffalo hunt to demonstrate how nearly every part of the animal is harvested. Mears drops in on Dodge City, epicenter to an industry that shatters a way of life.

Gold fever sweeps the continent following a stunning discovery in a California stream. Mears walks the empty streets of Bodie, a California ghost town that once bustled with prospectors.