ridiculous rating

Dreadfully Boring

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

I found this series to be informative and balanced, explaining both the perspectives of the natives and the westward-pushing Americans. Along the way, tidbits of knowledge filled in gaps of my own. For example. I never knew that Sacagawea had been stolen as a child and was reunited with her brother while guiding Lewis and Clark - a fact that saved the expedition. The series abounds with these factoids.I have one complaint, though. Couldn't the producers have found a flat part of New Zealand to film some of the scenes in? I cringe when I see scenes supposedly of lower Michigan, northwest Ohio or central Indiana, filmed in a mountainous area. Those locales might pass for Wyoming or North Carolina, but not the flat flat flat Midwest.Nonetheless, the series is entertaining and I recommend it.

There's a lot of great stuff to enjoy in this series, but as usual it's a typical case of Anglo-American-centric history, ignoring two important players.Fur trader Anthony Sadowski was the first white man to explore the fledgling "western territories." His grandson Jacob Sadowski was by some accounts the first to guide Daniel Boone down the trails allegedly "blazed" by Boone.The Sadowskis, like the Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the earliest Polish settlers in the early 1600s, routinely get shafted by American historians (and the History Channel) who continue to toe the official Anglo-American party line - furthering an incomplete view of our national history to serve a political agenda instituted after the Revolution.

I've watched the first two episodes of the this show. I don't know which is more appalling: the ridiculous costumes, characterizations, and "settings", or the startling disregard for "fact" in telling this "history." To cite a few examples, perhaps the creators should recognize there is a proper way for a rifleman to carry his powder horn if he intends to use it. They might recognize that scruffy beard and "frontiersman" and not synonymous. There are perfectly good and fairly accurate renditions of Fort Mandan and Fort Clatsop already in existence that they could have used instead of the weird and completely inaccurate examples they depicted for Lewis and Clark's winter quarters. They might actually have them raise the proper flag over their forts as well. When it comes to the telling, the "general" William Henry Harrison was actually 21 years old at the Battle of Fallen Timbers--younger than William Clark. When a map of the Louisiana Purchase is shown, it should not cut off part of the Missouri River--the Purchase was the western drainage of the Mississippi River; so all the Missouri and its tributaries qualify. Lewis and Clark did not walk to the Pacific from Fort Mandan; they actually left a tributary of the Missouri River almost 1,000 miles further along their route. They were not led to the Pacific by Sacagawea (as they called her!), they didn't scale 14,000 foot mountains (there aren't any in Montana or Idaho), they didn't eat their pack horses, and if there were 2,000 American muskets at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the few men of Lewis and Clark's command didn't have the largest arsenal the frontier had ever seen. This series is low budget, lazy, and a gross distortion of "history." There's a great story to be told, and the History Channel is NOT telling it. Unless you just like to see how much they get wrong, don't waste your time. You'll actually know less when you finish than you did before you started.

I have only seen the Daniel Boone episode at this point, but I loved it. They left out a lot, but it's the History Channel and they tend to do that, plus they only had a certain amount of time.I like how they included Boone's daughter as being a strong woman.I beg of anyone who knows, to tell me the theme song.