The American West
Episodes
Ep. 17: What Really Happened to America’s National Mammal?
16 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
America’s national mammal possesses a troubling story in western history. For a century writers have presented the fate of the buffalo as brough...
Ep. 16: A Dream of Bison
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 o...
Ep. 15: The Most Dangerous Beast? Or the God of the West?
18 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Grizzly bears emerged in North America nearly two-hundred thousand years ago and became the Lord Beast of the American West. Native people regarded th...
Ep. 14: Wolf West
04 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As a native family of American animals, for more than five million years wolves of various kinds have been keystone predators of western ecologies. Be...
Introducing: Blood Trails
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Blood Trails is a new investigative podcast from MeatEater, hosted by writer and journalist Jordan Sillars. Each episode digs into true crime stories ...
Ep. 13: A Western Geography of Hope
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dramatic and inspirational western landscapes have been a powerful feature of western history throughout time. During and after the Civil War, a group...
Ep. 12: John James Audubon and Vanishing America
07 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Before 1850 the artist and naturalist John James Audubon was America’s most famous celebrity. His Birds of America was widely regarded as &ldquo...
Ep. 11: Bringing Home All the Pretty Horses
23 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 co...
Ep. 10: Start of the Endgame for the Ancient West
09 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 f...
Ep. 09: Catlin’s and Bodmer’s "Time Machine Visuals"
26 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Landscapes, wildlife, and Native people dominated the fascination with the early American West, but imagining that world is not easy. Fortunately, two...
Ep. 08: Beyond the Earth’s Curve, Mysteries
12 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Despite an ancient Native inhabitation and recent European settlements and forays around the perimeter of the West, in the early 19th century much of ...
Ep. 07: Jefferson’s "Other" Lewis & Clark
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Despite Lewis and Clark’s singular fame, Thomas Jefferson never intended their expedition to be the sole U.S. scientific exploration into the co...
Introducing: Back 40
23 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Back 40 dives deep into the world of whitetails, one burning question at a time. In each episode, host Jake Hofer sits down with multiple seasoned whi...
Ep. 06: Survivors From A Lost World
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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? ...
Ep. 05: The Wild New World of the American Serengeti
01 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 1800s, when American and European scientific explorers first began to probe the unfamiliar West with its landscapes and animals so remark...
Ep. 04: Old Man America
17 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Ep. 03: Raven’s and Coyote’s America
03 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 Ameri...
Introducing: Backwoods University with Lake Pickle
02 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Backwoods University explores wildlife biology and the people who dedicate their lives to studying animals and their habitats. Guided by host Lake Pic...
Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful
20 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 cul...
Ep. 01: West of Everything
06 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Introducing: The American West with Dan Flores
29 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
New from the MeatEater Podcast Network: Long-time western author Dan Flores presents a big picture history of an American West you've never encountere...