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 happened among its refugees in the Southwest in the wake of Chaco’s collapse from environmental causes. Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon. MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters" and "Mountain Men" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Full Episode
Following the collapse of the Grand Chacoan Empire, refugees founded eight thriving new towns along the Galisteo River of New Mexico, but ultimately found it difficult to sustain an arid climate civilization across the next 500 years. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West.
Brought to you by Velvet Buck, crafted for those who live off the beaten path where the hunt meets the harvest, and every glass tells a story. Enjoy responsibly. West of everything. Thinking of a podcast about the American West and my own take on its history has had me trying to understand recently why the West resonates with us the way it does.
Apologies to New England, New York, the South, the Midwest, but the West seems to fascinate the world in a way no other American region can. Why are their television channels devoted 24-7 to playing 75-year-old Western movies so a John Wayne fix is available at just about any sleepless 3 a.m.? Why does a contemporary soap opera Western like Yellowstone succeed with so many people?
Why do Germans dress up and play act being residents of the West on their vacation weekends in European forests? How does Back at the Ranch Boot Store in Santa Fe sell $5,000 cowboy boots that will never see a stirrup? Why is there a Cowboy Poets Gathering in Nevada every winter? Why a Gene Autry Museum in LA? A Buffalo Bill Historical Museum in Cody?
A National Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City? And why, maybe this is the most serious question here, does the phrase, just like the Wild West, cause all of us to imagine entire freedom of action, a whole lack of restraint, a free-for-all nobody is regulating? All that reverence and fascination for the West happens for good reason.
Because of its sunshine and the public lands that provide remarkable access to the surrounding landscape, the West is a great place to live in the present. But as we all know, it's the past of the West that's the key to its magic. Those of us who live in the West may love various aspects of the modern world out the door, but we all absolutely adore the Old West, the frontier.
We've absorbed it by watching films by John Ford and Quentin Tarantino, reading novels by Louis L'Amour and Cormac McCarthy, and histories by Stephen Ambrose and Hamptonsides. Of course, there are many versions of the West, and all of us have a personal preference for our favorite version. Clearly, for John Ford or Quentin Tarantino, it's the cowboy West of so many hundreds of Western movies.
For others, it's the West of town building and Wyatt Earp's or Marshall Dillon's imposition of law and order, or of settlers versus railroads or the gunfighter stories that Tarantino obviously also loves and loves to invert. And of course, there's the Indian Wars West of a few hundred movies and a few thousand paintings.
But as a modern Westerner, a writer and historian who is interested most in the West's remarkable landscapes and animals, the West that does it for me is one most people may not think of as iconic. I'm most drawn to what Western artist Charlie Russell in one of his magnificent paintings called When the Land Belonged to God.
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