Welcome to OnQ magazine.

I'm Stacy Smith here at WQED multimedia.

Production crews have long been working behind the scenes on a major PBS documentary.

The War That Made America is a four part series that will premiere later this month.

While the shooting took place in the Pittsburgh area, and many important scenes were shot in Ligonier Valley in 2004, the documentary as you may know, tells the story of the French and Indian War, which started here in this region.

The series will be narrated and hosted by actor Graham Greene and Oneida Mohawk, whose ancestors fought in the war.

It took 29 days to shoot the documentary.

Our OnQ.

Cameras were there on the 10th day.

And so tonight, we're going to take you behind the scenes of the War That Made America.

Fire!

Standing by.

Ready and action.

Cut!

I'm looking at today's call sheet, which shows us all of the scenes we're trying to accomplish.

We are shooting a number of scenes where a woman who lives on the frontier has been taken captive to replace a relative of an Indian who has died in battle.

Excuse me, number one.

It's an actual sort of ritual called a mourning war, where they would replace members of their famil by taking a captive and adopting that captive into society.

And today, we're seeing her in a number of different settings with the community that's adopted from.

We're gonna have the warrior up on the path.

He's going to walk in hand off Mary Jemison to the two women that are standing right here.

The Jemison story is a great, a wonderful example of a phenomenon in colonial America that many people are not aware of.

And that is the the very different treatment of prisoners or captives.

And native communities than than French or British societies, where you sort of take captives and then you repatriate them at the end.

I wouldn't think she'd be hide at this point.

Okay.

Sounds like conversation needs to take place.

Yeah, I think that would be hard.

My name is Scott Stevenson.

I have somebody carrying one of those hides, and it's a little early in the season for serious ideas.

How about the dog being?

The historical and visual consultant.

I'd say probably one of the big ideas of The War That Made America is is trying to, bring Native Americans into the story as, as as very influential, powerful actors who were not just allies of one European power or the other, but had a sort of third path, that helps to explain switching of alliances and a lot of actions which were have traditionally been considered very arbitrary or an unfathomable failure.

The thing about this project is that it's a war between people, not just between individuals, and everyone is trying to get the land.

The Native Americans were here.

They had a different relationship to the land than the Europeans.

The Europeans got the land from them by by a variety of means.

Some of it was simply strength and weaponry, and some of it was wiliness.

It's a very interesting story about.

But there is different cultures coming, and clashing is why, for my people in particular, this war wa the darkest time of our history.

Because it was Mohawk against Mohawk.

Any sign of friendship that we make to the English will not escape the French.

My name is Darren Bonaparte.

Take the knife off me.

You help him with the ears.

I'm a historical cultural consultant, and I am responsible for the Native American content that's portrayed in this film.

Maybe once you have the bundle all wrapped up and ready to go.

I like giving advice to the actors.

For instance, today we had, a woman who was wearing a cradle board, and it has a strap and a baby in the back, and she's wearing it.

And she was it was so cumbersome, and she just didn't know how to do it.

And so what you do is when you wear that strap and it's on there, that's the only thing holding it up.

So you become very rigid.

You keep your your neck and your head straight.

You don' turn your head around like that.

When you turn, you like, move your hips.

You know what I mean?

And so I taught her that, and I, we I kind of rehearsed the scene with her, and she did it, and she got it, and it looked great.

She looked like she'd been wearing it for years.

Well, the first thing I was asked was, would you mind if an Indian picked you up in three on a horse?

And I thought, how could I pass up a chance, you know, to be abducted, so.

I'm Mary Jemison.

And it's one of the famous captive stories, Mary Jemison is about 15 years old at the time.

Not me, but, she's abducted.

Her family's abducted, by the Indians for, the whites actually attacking them.

Her family's been killed for bruising her up and scraping her up.

She's been kind of dragged through the woods.

What happens is her family is killed, but she's the only one left, and she actually gets traded to another Indian tribe.

They adopt her, and she ends up marrying an Indian chief.

She has lots of children.

And, if you find a captive, you actually get money, you get a reward.

Well, she decides that she wants to stay with the Indians, so she runs away when someone tries to capture her and spends the rest of her days living with the Indians.

Come here.

One and two and three.

I ran from the with all the speed I was missing and got home.

The chiefs gave orders that I should not be taken without my consent, and that as it was my choice to stay, I should live amongst them quietly and undisturbed.

But when you're trying to, produce for television, it's a sort of a creative struggle between the history sid and the sort of television side.

And we sort of meet in the middle and hopefully it all, it all works.

It gets the message across, in a dramatic way that hopefully people will be moved to pick up a book or, you know, pursue, visit historic sites and learn a little bit more that you couldn't conve in a couple hours on television.

So we want to kind of plant the seed, to spark people's interest.

Now we are told that the shooting on location proved difficult at times for The War That Made America.

The crew, the fact is that it was a period piece with a large cast created its own set of challenges.

The crew also had to contend with some very wet weather.

In May of 2004.

It rained almost every day.

In fact, it was the wettest May on record in 50 years.

Now there were also a few encounters with snakes, some of them poisonous.

No one was bitten, though, but they did make it, and they made it in just a few weeks.

The War That Made America will premiere on PBS, and you can look forwar on January the 18th and the 25th at 9:00, right here on WQED TV 13.

And for more information, log on to this website.

thewarthatmadeamerica.org.