In 1968, prospectors working for Atlantic Richfield struck oil at Prudhoe Bay, the largest field ever found in North America, and the discovery set off a construction project that would eventually run 800 miles of steel pipe across the state. This American Experience film, produced by Mark Davis, follows Alyeska, the consortium of oil companies formed to build and run the pipeline, through nine years of work, 78,000 workers, and more than $8 billion in costs. Before a single section of pipe could be laid, Native Alaskan groups who had waited over a century for Congress to settle their land claims objected to a route cutting through territory they considered their own, and environmentalists raised alarms about damage to some of the last untouched wilderness in the country. In April 1970 both groups took the fight to federal court, delaying government approval and forcing a reckoning between industrial ambition, indigenous land rights, and conservation that shaped how the pipeline was ultimately built.