Dan Flores

speaker

4,468 appearances 23 recordings 4 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 18 Aug

Dan Flores’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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Gunfighters · Ep. 41: Favorite Books About the West | The American West · 11 Aug 2026 podcast

gave us a remarkably vivid description of what the West was like at a time when none of us now can really go back. matched

This is our time machine for seeing what it was like in the 1870s through uh the early 20th century. matched

And finally, this is a biography of Powell and all the things that Powell attempted to do in the West. matched

I mean, uh matched

Stegner sort of posits William Gilpin, who was the first territorial governor of Colorado, as the foil of the book. matched

Gilpin saw the West as no different from the East. matched

We can apply all the standard settlement techniques that we used in the East to the West, and rain is going to follow the plow, and it's actually going to eventually be green in the West. matched

And John Wesley Powell, of course. matched

understood what the West really was. matched

And so he attempted to come up with settlement plans and ultimately, I think, to uh probably to Stegner's horror, uh a certain amount of horror, matched

Powell came up with uh a mapping strategy for almost all the dams and reservoirs that we have today because he realized you had to manipulate water in order for people to settle the West. matched

But it did produce a kind of what we've come to believe uh was an overreach on the part of a hydraulic empire in the West. matched

So that's one of my books, and we've talked about Stegner already. matched

Um matched

The second book is a novel, and I will start this one out by telling you that matched

It took me three attempts to read this book. matched

Um, I would get to page sixty or page ninety on the first two attempts and put it down, telling myself I simply can't read about this much violence and bloodshed. matched

The book is Cormac McCarthy's blood meridian. matched

It is widely regarded as probably the best American novel. matched

Since Moby Dick, since Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick, it's in that category of of novels about America. matched

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