The American West
Episodes
Ep. 28: Understanding Nature in a Southwestern State
12 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Not only do most Americans misunderstand the great variety in western places, but many westerners are similarly clueless. This episode makes a stab at...
Ep. 27: Messages From the Past - The Rock Art of the American West
05 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A tangible and fascinating landscape record of the human past in the West exists in a form barely found elsewhere in America. So-called rock art, imag...
Ep. 26: Where the Primeval West Abides
21 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the summer of 2019 a small group of us does a 12-day river descent from Alaska’s Brooks Range through the heart of the Arctic National Wildli...
Announcing: Blood Trails, Season Two
12 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors--and in Season 2, we're going even deeper. From the grisly killing of a mountain man in Mont...
Ep. 25: Thinking About Big History in One Western Place
07 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A road trip with Steven Rinella across the High Plains to the Blackwater Draw Unesco Site on the border of Texas and New Mexico leads to an assessment...
Ep. 24: Getting Over the Color Green and Learning to Love Badlands
24 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the 20th century peculiar landforms dismissed earlier in western history with the denigrating term “badlands” became compelling locatio...
Ep. 23: Golden-Eyed Lightning Rod
10 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
For the first 50 years of the 20th century a new federal agency did everything in its power to disappear all wolves from the West and America. What sa...
Ep. 22: New West, Modern West, Public Lands West
24 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Frontier and the freedom it afforded was the shaping influence of the 19th century American West, but life in the Modern West has been formed just...
Ep. 21: How You Create a New West, and a New America
10 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Teddy Roosevelt enjoyed a lifestyle and political career that made him the most important president in history for the creation of a West and a countr...
Ep. 20: Coyote: America’s Jackal and Its Roller-Coaster Ride Through History
27 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Like no other western animal the coyote has been a central character in the Pleistocene West, the Native West, and the Frontier. One of the epic stori...
Ep. 19: Shadows of the Frontier
13 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
When the U.S. Census announced in 1890 that the Frontier was over, America was plunged into a period of anxiety. As evidenced by the grand Indian phot...
Ep. 18: From Safari American-Style to the Boone & Crockett Club
30 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When the long-term market exploitation of wildlife was joined by a form of elite safari hunting known as “field sports,” a massive destruc...
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...