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PODCAST

The American West

In this new podcast, writer Dan Flores presents a big picture history of an American West you"ve never encountered. With the West"s deep time, its grand natural world, and its wild animals as their focus, these episodes tella fresh story of America"s most fascinating region.

history

All Episodes

53:47

Ep. 16: A Dream of Bison

The American West ·

2025/12/02

Present on the continent for nearly half-a-million years, the American bison’s numbers and near perfect adaptation to the Great Plains made it one of the evolutionary marvels of Earth. For more than 10,000 years, Native people in the West had intertwined their lives with bison herds to create the longest sustained economies and religious traditions in American history. Then over two centuries of whirlwind change in Native America, the bison was suddenly and mysteriously gone from the wild

en-US

48:46

Ep. 15: The Most Dangerous Beast? Or the God of the...

The American West ·

2025/11/18

Grizzly bears emerged in North America nearly two-hundred thousand years ago and became the Lord Beast of the American West. Native people regarded them as formidable animal gods. Europeans and Americans thought of them as wildlands monsters that needed to be eliminated. Saved before they disappeared, today grizzly bears are surviving, spreading, and distinguish the Mountain West from all other regions in the Lower 48. Thank you to our sponsorVelvet Buck. Subscribe now wherever you listen to

en-US

56:20

Ep. 14: Wolf West

The American West ·

2025/11/04

As a native family of American animals, for more than five million years wolves of various kinds have been keystone predators of western ecologies. Before humans arrived they shaped the West more than any other mammal species. Numerous, nearly tame, and admired by Native people, wolves continued this role until the arrival of people from the Old World initiated a continent-wide war against wolves. While wolf pelts became a target of the western market hunt, into the early 20th century most wolves

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1:38

Introducing: Blood Trails

The American West ·

2025/10/23

Blood Trails is a new investigative podcast from MeatEater, hosted by writer and journalist Jordan Sillars. Each episode digs into true crime stories from the world of hunting and fishing—cases where the woods and the water became the backdrop for violence and mystery. From missing hunters deep in public land to poachers turned killers and fishing trips gone fatally wrong, Blood Trails uncovers the moments when outdoor life collides with the darkness of the human heart. But this isn't

en-US

51:12

Ep. 13: A Western Geography of Hope

The American West ·

2025/10/21

Dramatic and inspirational western landscapes have been a powerful feature of western history throughout time. During and after the Civil War, a group of adventuring artists and photographers helped divert America’s gaze from the horrors of war by seeking out the most dramatic western landscapes and painting or photographing their scenery. By the 1870s most Americans and many people around the world knew about the Wind River Range, Yosemite, the Colorado Rockies, the Tetons, the Grand Canyon,

en-US

53:31

Ep. 12: John James Audubon and Vanishing America

The American West ·

2025/10/07

Before 1850 the artist and naturalist John James Audubon was America’s most famous celebrity. His Birds of America was widely regarded as “the greatest monument ever erected by art to nature.” But like Thoreau, Audubon was also a witness to the growing destruction of wild America. That was particularly evident when he and his sons journeyed up the Missouri River in the early 1840s to finish Audubon’s book on the mammals of America. Stunned at the staggering diversity and

en-US

62:11

Ep. 11: Bringing Home All the Pretty Horses

The American West ·

2025/09/23

When the western artist George Catlin journeyed to the Southern Plains in 1834 the animal that caught his attention there was the wild horse, which covered the country in immense herds. Little known to Catlin, or to Thomas Jefferson, who longed to know about horses in their natural state, horses were so successful in the western wilds because they were original natives of North America. Eventually a trade in wild horses dominated the southern West the way the fur trade did in the North. Native

en-US

63:42

Ep. 10: Start of the Endgame for the Ancient West

The American West ·

2025/09/09

When Lewis & Clark saw the West in the first years of the 1800s it still preserved the healthy biodiversity of Native-managed ecologies in place for 10,000 years. Within thirty years, everything had changed. Americans arrived in the West with religious traditions that taught animals were created solely for human use. And they introduced an economic system that made western animals commodities in a global market, an economy that snagged Native people in the trade and created the first American

en-US

51:46

Ep. 09: Catlin’s and Bodmer’s "Time Machine Visuals"

The American West ·

2025/08/26

Landscapes, wildlife, and Native people dominated the fascination with the early American West, but imagining that world is not easy. Fortunately, two talented and committed painters, one American and one European, left the future a rich and varied body of “Time Machine Visuals” of the Missouri River West in the 1830s. George Catlin was a Pennsylvanian whose life’s work was to be the historian of Native people. Catlin was a Romantic who believed preserving the West’s

en-US

59:50

Ep. 08: Beyond the Earth’s Curve, Mysteries

The American West ·

2025/08/12

Despite an ancient Native inhabitation and recent European settlements and forays around the perimeter of the West, in the early 19th century much of the interior West was still a place of conjecture, rumor, and mystery. What was out there? What kind of never-known phenomena did the West hold? For the brand-new United States and its Indian Agents, winning the western tribes with trade was essential geopolitics. But as happened with John Colter’s “Hell,” the future Yellowstone Park,

en-US

53:12

Ep. 07: Jefferson’s "Other" Lewis & Clark

The American West ·

2025/07/29

Despite Lewis and Clark’s singular fame, Thomas Jefferson never intended their expedition to be the sole U.S. scientific exploration into the country’s new Louisiana Purchase. Just as compelling to him was a second major expedition into the southern reaches of Louisiana, for which he chose two leaders – Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis – who had a similar opportunity to become famous early American explorers into the West. Dispatched up the Red River of the South in 1806 with

en-US

53:39

Ep. 06: Survivors From A Lost World

The American West ·

2025/07/15

America’s pronghorn antelope has long struck observers as a beautiful feature of western landscapes, but as an enigma. Why does it run so fast? Why can’t it jump obstacles? And for those who really know its biography, why did its population fall from 15 million to a mere 5,000 over the course of a single century? This episode answers all those questions by arguing that the pronghorn is an American original who, like us, is the sole remaining member of a large, ancient family of animals

en-US

55:22

Ep. 05: The Wild New World of the American Serengeti

The American West ·

2025/07/01

In the early 1800s, when American and European scientific explorers first began to probe the unfamiliar West with its landscapes and animals so remarkably different from those of the East, the Great Plains and its wildlife seemed the most fascinating part of the West, an “American Serengeti.” Commencing with Lewis and Clark’s adventures and their attempts to catalog western wildlife, it took the entire 19th century for American explorers to introduce to science the staggering

en-US

54:31

Ep. 04: Old Man America

The American West ·

2025/06/17

Thousands of years ago Native people in the West chose, among all the possibilities, the coyote as the deity animal in their various stories of North America’s creation. Then they proceeded to fashion thousands of stories around “Old Man America,” the oldest literary figure in America. Long described as a Trickster, the deity Coyote actually was a human avatar whose stories richly conveyed human nature in both its admirable and not-so-admirable forms. As part coyote and part human,

en-US

55:37

Ep. 03: Raven’s and Coyote’s America

The American West ·

2025/06/03

For 10,000 years, from the end of the Pleistocene to the coming of Old Worlders to America, a diverse population of Native people lived in North America while somehow managing to preserve almost all its biological riches. In contrast to the period when the prior Paleolithic hunters dominated America and the West, this 10,000 year phase of American history featured only one human-caused extinction that science has so far discovered. Was this some strange accident of continental history? Or were their

en-US

1:50

Introducing: Backwoods University with Lake Pickle

The American West ·

2025/06/02

Backwoods University explores wildlife biology and the people who dedicate their lives to studying animals and their habitats. Guided by host Lake Pickle’s curiosity, you’ll hear insights from wildlife biologists and outdoorsmen, while gaining an intimate perspective on North American wildlife, habitat, and the impact humans have had on them. You’ll learn from the experts how to understand the wild. After all, you can’t love what you don’t understand. Subscribe now

en-US

65:45

Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful

The American West ·

2025/05/20

Thirteen-thousand years ago the first human culture to colonize all of North America, in this case from Pacific to Atlantic shores, was the Clovis culture of highly-proficient Siberian hunters. While they may not have been the first humans in America, the 1930s discovery of this “Clovisia the Beautiful” launched a century-long debate about their role in a remarkable series of extinctions – the loss of most of America’s African-like megafauna – coinciding with their

en-US

57:49

Ep. 01: West of Everything

The American West ·

2025/05/06

The American West fascinates people from around the world, but there are many different kinds of iconic western stories. Author Dan Flores has spent a career writing about what he calls the Natural West, stories about nature, animals, and people that span thousands of years of time in the western half of America. Although we reflexively think of history in America as new, this first episode emphasizes the West's true age by focusing on the great Chacoan Empire of a thousand years ago and what

en-US

2:02

Introducing: The American West with Dan Flores

The American West ·

2025/04/29

New from the MeatEater Podcast Network: Long-time western author Dan Flores presents a big picture history of an American West you've never encountered. Covering a vast time span in a western America whose landscapes and wild animals drew people from around the world, this podcast tells a new story of our most fascinating region. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. Don't miss episode one coming out May 6th

en-US

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