(logo zooming) (upbeat music) - Have you ever wondered what it was like to explore out West hundreds years ago?

Why would you leave home, travel for months, and trek thousands of miles to reach (screen exploding) some place called the Badlands?

Now this may look cool, but it was hard.... - Yeah!

The Badlands are bad.

How bad?

Bad to the bone.

Millions of years ago, there were dinosaurs stomping around right here.

Big ones, huge ones.

The same ones you would see in museums today.

- That's Core.

He's from a different dimension where people think it's cool to interrupt my history lessons.

As I was saying, the Badlands may look cool, but 200 years ago, it was difficult and dangerous to get here.

So why and how did the United States grow from my hometown in Western New York to the.... - You know some of these rocks?

Bones.

Dinosaur bones.

And how do we know?

Because of the Bone Wars?

This crazy competition that led this dude from Lockport, New York to discover famous dinos, like triceratops, stegosaurus, brontosaurus, the big ones, the small ones.

The ones that walk a little funny.

All of them!

- Some people can be so rude.

Sorry about that.

So, you all already know that after the Revolutionary War, the Mississippi River was our western boundary.

At the same time, Great Britain, Spain, France and Russia still claimed some of the continent, so it didn't take long for us to get locked in a tense rivalry with these superpowers to grab land in the West.

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson made a power move and bought the Louisiana Territory from France, doubling the size of the US.

The leaders of the time called it our manifest destiny.

In other words, they believed we had no choice but to grow from ♪ Sea to shining sea.

♪ - Yay!

- Who are you?

- So a new president, James K. Polk, went on to add Texas.

After Texas, Polk added Oregon by compromise with Great Britain.

And Polk didn't stop poking there.

After a war with Mexico, all of this territory called the Mexican Cession was taken as well.

Now, we had this ginormous country.

In fact, TJ, Thomas Jefferson, thought it might take 100 generations to fill it up.

- Ay.

Ay, hey, hey, hey, hey.

Did you all know that a generation is about 25 years?

So do the math with me.

25 times a hundred equals.... - Ah, whoa, whoa.

Core, this is Compact History, not Compact Algebra.

- 25 times 100 is 2,500 years.

But we did it in way less time than that, 'cause we bad like the Badlands.

(laughing) - How does he keep finding me?

Ah.

It's true.

People quickly journeyed to the frontier.

That's what they called the land out West.

See, they imagined it was uncivilized, untamed territory, full of riches to be discovered.

Just look at this painting.

That lady is supposed to represent American progress spreading across the continent.

But on the real, the frontier wasn't empty or uncivilized.

It was more of a borderland, because there were hundreds of indigenous nations thriving throughout the West.

Like the Sioux Confederacy who dominated the grasslands between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains.

You know, they were masters at huntin' bison on horseback.

But the idea of the empty frontier was powerful.

People wanted land.

Back then, America was all about farming.

So immigrants left behind their homes, loaded up wagons pulled by oxen, and walked thousands of miles across the country hoping to farm land of their own.

It was so risky that almost one out of every 10 immigrants died on the Oregon Trail.

But here's the crazy part.

They were so obsessed with making it all the way to Oregon that they walked over some of the best farmland in the world, the Great Plains.

- (in computerized voice) Yeah, it was also about shinin'.

The Gold Rush started.... - Hey, hey, stop it.

I was getting to that.

- Oh man, if you hatin' just say it.

- Gold was discovered on the American River on John Sutter's land in California.

He tried to keep it on the down low, until a general store owner thought, "Hey, yo, if there's gold here, people will come from all around to buy my stuff."

So he spilled the tea and got rich selling supplies to the miners.

Believe it or not, most of the cats who got rich off the Gold Rush weren't the miners.

They were the folks who sold stuff to the miners, while the miners beefed with each other over the best spots to dig.

- Let me put you all onto some beef for real, all right?

Shortly after the Gold Rush began, dinosaur bones were discovered.

I'm talking big, meaty jaws, horns, and reptilian ankles.

- All right, all right.

Yes, some people even traveled west for fossils.

- About time!

(video game sounds beeping) - Othniel Charles Marsh was born on a farm in Lockport in Western New York.

- Othniel?

Ain't anybody call that man that.

He was known as OC, and he dipped out of that farm as soon as he could.

- His uncle sent him to Germany where he studied fossils obsessively.

When he returned to the United States, Yale University hired him to teach paleontology.

That's what took OC from Lockport to the Badlands of South Dakota.

Large fields of fossilized dinosaur bones, sometimes sticking right up out of the ground.

- Did I tell you all he came up with the name triceratops?

(triceratops zooming) It means three horned face.

(triceratops roaring) That's also what my friends call me when I get mad.

Look.

(triceratops roaring) - Another paleontologist named Edward Drinker Cope from Philadelphia, also traveled west to discover fossils.

At first, OC and Cope were friends, but.... - Cope was a dope.

(screen zooming) When he discovered elasmosaurus, he put their head on the wrong end.

My man OC had to roast him for that.

- OC actually made similar mistakes too.

But after he embarrassed Cope, the competition fired up.

OC tried to control all the bone fields and Cope retaliated by trashing him in the papers.

- Their wicked rivalry became known as the Bone Wars.

They spied on each other.

They stole from each other.

They're workers threw rocks at each other on site.

- It was an embarrassment to the scientific community, and both ended up losing.... - The Bone Wars was lit.

All right, between OC and Cope, dozens of dinosaur discoveries filled museums with fossils.

And them bones were heavy.

Did you?

Did you tell about the Iron Horse yet?

- See, I was going to get to that before you started doing this thing.

(Core sighing) The Iron Horse, the Transcontinental Railroad, was a key piece to westward expansion.

We needed a better way to move people and fossils across the country.

So in 1862, under the Pacific Railroad Act, our government set up a contest between the Union Pacific building west from Nebraska and the Central Pacific building east from California.

(train whistle blowing) The more rail they laid, the more they got paid.

- Yo, that competition got them working fast, hard.

They sped things up by blowing up mountains with explosives.

Bam!

- Man, listen.

It wasn't cool.

They made Chinese immigrants do all the dangerous work.

No protective gear, no nothing.

People lost their lives.

- You right.

But, on the flip side, the railroad led to new land, new discoveries and more dinosaur bones.

Bone Wars, baby!

- I'm telling you, Core, it wasn't good.

Cope died in a tiny apartment surrounded by dinosaur bones.

OC also died penniless and alone.

- It's not about how you died, it's about how you lived.

Think about all they added to what we know about what happened hundreds of millions of years ago.

- For those bones, living people paid a huge price.

Native Americans were driven off their lands onto tiny reservations.

Some nearly starved when settlers practically wiped out bison.

- The country got richer because of all the gold in California.

- Gold mining hurt the environment, filling rivers with rocks and poisonous minerals that still affect us to this day.

- Check out these jeans, man.

Levi Strauss was a boss, you heard?

He designed these special work pants for miners, and voila, blue jeans!

Competition leads to discoveries and inventions.

You all see how fly I look?

(upbeat disco music) - Listen to me, Core.

Didn't you learn anything from the Bone Wars?

Competition destroyed their lives.

- Competition made the United States grow from the Atlantic to Pacific.

Competition moved things forward.

- Why won't you listen to me?

- Because I'm better than you.

- Whoa.

Okay, we're tearing up the history verse.

- Okay, what, what do I do?

- We have to agree on something.

All right, quick before it's too late.

- Now, forget that.

- Come on.

Just trust me.

Okay, do as I do.

Follow me.

All right.

Step left, then right.

Yeah, left, then right.

Okay, now shimmy, uh, shimmy.

And (indistinct).

(Core breathing heavily) Okay, I think we're good for now.

Look, OC and Cope may have made some great discoveries, but they didn't do it alone.

They had teams of people working together, not against each other, to make those expeditions happen.

- I could dig that.

But you're still ugly though.

(laughing) Whoa!

- (whispering) We have the same face.

Geez.

What are you all thinkin?

We know the westward expansion led to some cool discoveries, but does competition lead to progress or ultimately hurt us?

Think about it.

(screen zooming) And remember, history surrounds you and includes you.

So go ahead, make history.

Maybe someday I'll be telling your story right here on Compact History.

(upbeat music)