TELEVISION / Cut Short: Thomas Sutcliffe on Ric Burns' Death of a Wagon Train

WHEN JAMES REED ROLLED OUT OF SPRINGFIELD, Illinois on 3 March 1846 he was travelling in the 19th-century equivalent of a luxury RV - a double-decked Conestoga with a built-in stove. It was a mark of his prosperity (he had no financial need to leave Springfield, where he had done well) and of a certain heedless confidence. Not everyone setting out west, across difficult terrain, would choose to lumber themselves with a vehicle that required no less than eight oxen to pull it. As Ric Burns' striking documentary for True Stories (C4), 'Death of a Wagon Train', went on to show, Reed's independence of mind was to prove fatal to many of those who travelled with him.

If that sounds a touch Lustgarten in tone, then it only reflects the fact that Burns' film had story-telling at its heart, the sort of grim, dark tale best told round a guttering fire. His previous films, a marvellous series on the Civil War and a documentary about the origins of Coney Island, demonstrated his ability to make gripping television out of history's fragmentary leavings - old photographs, letters and diaries - and contemporary footage of austere simplicity. Here he applied them to a narrative that has acquired an almost mythic status in the United States - the story of what happened when the Donner party, a group of settlers heading for California, were trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of '46 and were forced to turn to cannibalism to survive.

The travellers' first mistake was to listen to Lansford Hastings, a daydreaming lawyer who published an emigrant's guide to California advertising a short-cut he hadn't taken the trouble to verify. Despite advice to the contrary, Reed, Donner and several other families left the established route west, believing they would cut 400 miles from their long journey. In fact, they added 125 and lost many of their oxen crossing the Great Salt Lake. By the time they reached the Sierra Nevada they were racing against the oncoming winter. The first snow fell as they camped for the night 1,000 feet below the pass which led to California and relative safety. In Burns' restrained collage the first flakes, swirling out of blackness, chilled like the shadow of the villain in a Hollywood thriller.

Most directors would have leapt at the opportunity for reconstruction, replacing the stiff sepia images of the real people with more vital substitutes, but Burns' method, honouring the experience of those who were there by adding nothing to their account, has a calculated poverty, forcing the viewer into an imaginative reflection. His images of the mountainous winter landscape were all the more powerful for being depopulated - empty of succour or assistance, occupied only by your thoughts of what it must have been like. The film ended in a similarly provoking moment of bathos. Writing to her cousin in the East one of the Reed daughters passed on what her terrible experience had taught her: 'Never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can'.