Robert Redford's The American West | 1876: The Year America Fractured

This documentary traces a single, pivotal year that reshaped the nation—beginning with the Battle of Little Bighorn, where Lakota and Cheyenne warriors led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull annihilated George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. The stunning defeat shocked the country and ignited a brutal new phase of the Indian Wars, culminating in a deliberate campaign to destroy the buffalo and force Native nations into submission. At the same time, the wounds of the Civil War were far from healed. Outlaw Jesse James carried the rebellion into the North with the disastrous Northfield bank robbery, triggering the largest manhunt in U.S. history. Meanwhile, a bitterly disputed presidential election pushed the nation to the brink of renewed civil war, ending in the secret Compromise of 1877, a backroom deal that secured the presidency for Rutherford B. Hayes but effectively ended Reconstruction. The consequences were devastating. Federal troops withdrew from the South, leaving formerly enslaved African Americans unprotected, and white supremacist rule quickly returned. Native resistance was crushed through starvation, displacement, and total war. From battlefield to ballot box, from the plains to the banks of small-town America, this film reveals how violence, politics, and power converged in one year—and how the choices made in 1876 continue to shape the United States today. Welcome to Absolute Westerns, the home of the best westerns you can find online. For more tumbleweeds, horse riding and saloons, you can subscribe to the channel here: https://tinyurl.com/AbsoluteWesterns