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These are the words of the legendary mountain man Jedediah Smith in Part 1 of the TNT six-part limited series "Into the West," premiering tonight at 7 on the cable network. Do his words resonate with profound insight or a simple man's naivete? Turns out, it's a lot of both.

Turns out, too, that the "spot on the map" was no spot at all -- it was everything west of the Mississippi River, where settlers put their faith in God and each other and headed into a land unknown.

TELEVISION REVIEW

And in a sense, "Into the West" is a similarly unknown commodity -- a land rush of vague characters (who remain so even after the credits roll) sprinting through 65 years of American history, specifically the story of the opening of the American West, from 1825 to 1890.

The breathtaking -- and sometimes breathless -- series is divided into six two-hour films, each with two intersecting stories at work: one about the Wheeler family from Virginia; the other about the Lakota Sioux tribe of the Great Plains. Their stories are told primarily through the eyes of the young Jacob Wheeler (Matthew Settle) who heads west in search of a better life and adventure, and the young Indian boy, Loved by the Buffalo (played as a young boy by Simon R. Barker and later by George Leach), a holy man-in-training who searches for answers in the spiritual world and rituals of the Lakota. It's through his spiritual journey that we "see" the fate of his people -- a devastating prophecy that becomes reality as the frontier is settled.

Over the course of the series, their lives and the lives of their descendants play out against historical events, including the Mexican-American War, the California gold rush, the Civil War, the building of the cross-continental railroad, the Battle of Little Big Horn and ultimately the Indian massacre at Wounded Knee.

At the helm of this epic is executive producer Steven Spielberg, who assembled what seems like a cast of thousands -- and six directors -- to craft the six-part series set to air in two-hour segments over the next three weekends. At a cost of $50 million, with more than 250 speaking roles and a nine-month shooting schedule, Spielberg and company have completed a Herculean task seldom seen nowadays in television. Filmed entirely in the Canadian Rockies, the cinematography by Alan Caso and William Wages is beautiful. The colors, the textures and the landscape are wondrous.

Part 1: 'Wheel to the Stars'

In "Wheel to the Stars" (the concept of the wheel takes on both literal and spiritual context in the story line), we're introduced to the Wheeler clan, a family of wheelwrights, men who build and fix wagon wheels (an excellent choice of occupation in a country on the move). Jacob Wheeler, disillusioned with the family business, heads west in search of his folk-tale hero, Smith (Josh Brolin). He eventually joins Smith and his band of mountain men, experiencing frontier life via their solitary existence. After escaping death at the hands of warring Indians, Jacob heads out on his own again and winds up living with the peaceful Lakota Sioux and marrying the beautiful Thunder Heart Woman (in a powerful, yet smartly understated performance by Tonantzin Carmelo).

Spielberg has assembled a young, somewhat less than A-tier group of actors for many of the principal roles, which is both a good and bad thing. Settle ("Band of Brothers") has a nice screen presence, but at times he can't quite take command of a scene, and the glorious scenery almost swallows him whole. More successful are Zhan McClarnon and Michael Spears as the Sioux brothers Running Fox and Dog Star. They create striking personas as men with conflicting views about their people's fate.

For the many peripheral roles, Spielberg turns to a more mature, still somewhat less than A-list group of actors. Blink, and you will probably miss cameos by Sean Astin, Gary Busey, Beau Bridges, Skeet Ulrich and Will Patton, among others. And that seems to be the one disconnect in the series (at least the first three episodes made available for review): Many of these secondary characters have little more than five minutes of total screen time before they are killed off or die from myriad diseases. (Survival in the old West was, indeed, very hard.) As such, their characters are never fully developed.

Parts 2&3: 'Destiny' to 'Dreams'

The second episode, "Manifest Destiny" (directed by Simon Wincer), does a better job of crafting its characters, thanks in part to the emergence of Keri Russell, Jessica Capshaw and Emily Holmes as Jacob Wheeler's cousins, who join him in a wagon train headed west. Their stories dig a little deeper into the everyday reality of life on the prairie with all its beauty and danger. (And if you ever wondered how pioneers got those wagons over the Rocky Mountains, you'll finally get the answer in an incredible scene involving a wagon train's system of pulleys and rope.)

Part 3, "Dreams and Schemes," is so far the most brutal in terms of action and violence. It contains several memorable scenes, including a powerful glimpse into the California Gold Rush, an era in which men were driven to madness and worse by their insatiable greed, and a horrible passage recreating the 1863 massacre of 183 people when Lawrence, Kan., was burned to the ground by the infamous pro-slavery Quantrell's Raiders led by "Bloody" Bill Anderson (Christian Bocher.)

Yet after three episodes, the saga is not deeply affecting. This may be because we've seen it all before in previous landmark miniseries such as "Lonesome Dove" (1989) or "Roots" (1977) or even the 1990 feature film "Dances With Wolves" -- stories that created unforgettable characters who immediately drew us in and held on to us for the duration. "Into the West" at times creates mere sketches of characters, and of history, along the road to the conclusion. How many more brave faces will come and go before this series ends?

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