i thought that is what was happening. we see the cruelty of the beasleyr here, daniel who had been a sheriff in the natchez area, whipping the slaves who were talking about the approaches of the red stick creeks. all the human stories that go on and the most fascinating to me and trying to delve into the genealogy of these individuals showed they were closely related . these people were fighting on opposite sides but they all knew each other. they would yell insults back and forth and it was a very personal war played out here on a small scale. it is like the american civil war crunched down into a little tiny event in many ways create you see the same kinds of stories as you would see in a bigger picture like the american civil war. >> c-span's american history to her takes you to pictograph

cave, state park. they were left to hide bite native americans who lived in the area 9000 years ago. >> this is located five miles south of the links, montana. this is the home of some of the first people ever in the northern plains. the people that lived here really were dependent completely on the natural environment, the place around them. they traveled small distances just following the game. this place offered them shelter, food, water, medicine, and a sense of security. pictograph cave itself. it is important in a place like this to let your eyes adjust to this because you're looking at charcoal drawings that are over

1000 years old from 20 feet back. if you sit here and watch, eventually some of these images will kind of emerge. at one point, the ceiling was painted. there were boulders in front of the cave that were painted. this place really was like the sistine chapel. there was images all over it. the first thing that most people see when they come here are the red pigments because they tend to be the more recent. and they are more vibrant. if you look up here, this first thing we're looking at is what

we call a biographic scene which means it tells a story. if you miss a part of the image you will miss a piece of the story. in this instance we have seven flintlock rifles all being fired. then there is a number of dash this is the same pigment, the same diameter. part of the same image. this is a beaver, a dead beaver. it is -- you can see it's pigtail and there is two webbed it because it on has been killed. there is a lightning bolt coming out of its mouth. that is it so leaving its body. its energy. this is a group of for trappers that were ambushed right near here and this was in 1823.

killed inhem were that ambush. 23 of them got away. summit -- seven of these for trappers were killed and they took all their pelts. we do not know for sure if that is what this illustrates but it is interesting to note that when they built main street in billingsley blow up this big rock and this rock was called indian rock because it had some of the same petroglyphs or carvings of the images that you see here. when they blow up this rock emma behind it, they found seven skulls which may be the seven people that were killed in that ambush in 1823.

that image fell and is now in the visitor center. it was painted up there before,ately 2145 years you have a 2000-year-old hurtle. you have a millennium of time. of digit -- value pictograph cave state park. the name is for the pictograph and that is a significant part but forccupation story archaeologists and anthropologists there is more cultural value in the artifacts that were excavated. in 1937 buttarted people we here well before that digging in the cave. this road here was called the

reservation road for a lot of years because it was the most direct route to prior. during the stagecoach times people would stay here, they would water their horses and go up and look at the pictographs and smoke them would dig for artifacts. -- some of them would dig for artifacts. that continued when that became a wpa excavation and that when up until 1941. excavation that happened was a group of local people from billings, they saw the value in the number of artifacts that seemed to be there in the deposition that was present. and thought that this would be an excellent research tragic rather than just having people go out there from town and dig around in take things. that there was some historical value. through the efforts of some local people, the property was obtained by the state. it became the first

archaeological project in montana and one of the first in a pretty major region. there is 30,000 artifacts that were recovered here. baskets from the southwest. werearibou horns that carved into harpoon points and those came from the northwest area there was a paint applicator. everything from game pieces to turtle effigies and there is even a soapstone, piece of soapstone carved in the shape of a human head. he on what we would call occupational debris or things you would need behind when you stayed someplace for an extended time, there were these valuable, unique one-of-a-kind artifacts that were here, too. over the last few years, the collection has been curated. it has been sorted and has been .eviewed and taking care of there has been a resurgence in

looking at the documents that we have from pictograph cave. the original supervisor of the project and to me this became arsonally interesting was drafter for the highway department who went to work there. being a drafter and myself aiding and drafting and design, i took some particular interest in his civil drawings. his plan and profile drawings that he did because that is the key to the collection. that is the key to the excavation. how far down were they, where is the strata, what were they fighting? with the plan and the profile of individual drives would begin a project where we scanned all of those documents, bring them in cad environment and see if we could reengage or reconstruct

a digital reconstruction of the cave so that we could re-create where they were working. see if we could take these artifacts and place them back in context in three-dimensional space. so we can see what the surface of the cave look like. the cave floor before they started the excavation. we can see the contour lines that we traced over the top and then using the software we can turn that into a surface and so this is the east end of the cave and the west is near us here. it shows the contour of the cave before any excavation took place. his documents we can trace those contours and we can get a material wasmuch removed from this site when they did it.

we can see these excavation depth. this began -- gives us a three-dimensional environment that we can reference within. since we have this reconstructed, we can take the labels from the artifact where they said they found them, whether they were to the east or west and we can take those coordinates and place them into this three-dimensional space. basically we can take the artifacts that we have and we can put them back into their original context and try to this cave wasw put together. applications is that the data we have we can take further. the panel on the

back of the cave so that people cannot make the hike we can re-create it to some scale at the visitor center. we can do this digitally. so that the work that the archaeologists are doing referencing artifacts back into this, at some point in time, we envision a digital model so that cavee can err act with the from a distance, perhaps even at a research level. if a researcher wants to know what particular point was they could figure set. go,he tourist wanted to they can manipulate the model to see what to expect when they get there. anyone can get more information about the story of what happened here. not only from the archaeological sense but the historical sense

of the people who did this excavation and what they did and the late 1930's. billings inf montana see the value in a site like this where you have 2000 year-old images where you had 30,000 artifacts. and very unique items that were left here by people. where less than five miles from the reservation. communityount of the in billings or native people. we bring a lot of school groups here and a large amount of educational programs that we offer to teachers to tell the story so that montanans can get a sense of what what people were like thousands of years ago before there was a montana. lex we continue our look at native american history here on c-span. next month the cola set indians of florida.

a look at the spanish mission to convert native americans to christianity. and another tells about the little shell tribe of chippewa indians of montana and their struggle to become a federally recognized tribe. c-span's american history to her continues. hearing about the colusa indians who lived along southwest florida's coast for 1500 years. tame're here at the site of pa. we are standing 150 miles south of modern day tampa. there is a well known map that shows the native placee.