The American West

With its many diverse, stupendous landscapes and public lands, the West has long been a region of bucket list adventures. A descent down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon has always been near the top of the list for almost everybody. Here’s what it’s like. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube , Spotify , Apple , iHeart , Pandora , Amazon . MeatEater on Insta...

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is one of America’s most famous laws and contributions to world culture, yet half-a-century after its passage it has become yet another political lightning rod. But if you value having Thoreau’s “entire Earth,” the ESA is one of America’s best ideas. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts.  YouTube , Spotify , Apple , iHe...

In the eyes of the world, the West’s several deserts have become defining landscapes for the modern region. But one of them, the Chihuahuan Desert, has produced the only large public lands found anywhere in Texas. Therein lies a story that shapes a state. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube , Spotify , Apple , iHeart , Pandora , Amazon . MeatEater on Instagram , Facebook ,...

Calling on the photographic record made of the American West from 150 to 100 years ago, modern photographers have repeated many of the same scenes and found remarkable differences in the ecology and look of western landscapes. The question is, why such change? Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts.  YouTube , Spotify , Apple , iHeart , Pandora , Amazon . MeatEater on Instagram , Faceb...

While conservation focused national parks creation on the vertical mountains and canyons of the West, the Great Plains ended up de-buffaloed and mostly ignored. But with new, 21st century approaches to reversing that historical slight, the Plains Serengeti is on its way back. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube , Spotify , Apple , iHeart , Pandora , Amazon . MeatEater on Instagr...

Almost exactly 500 years ago, a shipwrecked Spaniard named Cabeza de Vaca and three companions made the first trans-continental journey in the history of the American West. Then he wrote down his account of eight years in Native America, one of the great First Contact stories of all time. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts.  YouTube , Spotify , Apple , iHeart , Pandora , Amazon . M...

Religion is often at the center of historical events in the West. The founding of modern Montana, in fact, happened when Native people famously pleaded for Christian missionaries. The question was whether the Christians actually understood what the Indians were asking for. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube , Spotify , Apple , iHeart , Pandora , Amazon . MeatEater on Instagram...

Charlie Russell and L.A. Huffman became famous for their nostalgic art about the Frontier world they experienced in the West. But with a fascination with what Russell called “Dreamtime Montana,” exactly what were they trying to tell us about the West’s future? Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts.  YouTube , Spotify , Apple , iHeart , Pandora , Amazon . MeatEater on...

Not only do most Americans misunderstand the great variety in western places, but many westerners are similarly clueless. This episode makes a stab at explaining nature in a part of the West unfamiliar to many, the southwestern state of New Mexico. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube , Spotify , Apple , iHeart , Pandora , Amazon . MeatEater on Instagram , Facebook , Twitter , Yo...

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, images incised and painted on rock faces, still reach out of the past to connect us with the thoughts, dreams, gods, and myths of ancient America. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts.  YouTube , Spotify , Apple , iHeart , Pandora , Amazon...

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 Wildlife Refuge, experiencing a preserved slice of primeval western America that seems in perpetual danger of being destroyed by humanity’s relentless addiction to oil. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube , Spotify , Apple , iHeart...

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 of 13,000 years of change in one western environment, where people have practiced every kind of life way from hunting elephants to turning the plains into cotton fields and oil country. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts.  YouTube ,...

In the 20th century peculiar landforms dismissed earlier in western history with the denigrating term “badlands” became compelling locations for scientists and artists in the West. First passed over as economically worthless, these barren, colorful landscapes were translated by painters like Georgia O’Keeffe into iconic imagery. Now many are national parks and wilderness areas. T...

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 saved the wolf was its own intelligence in the face of eradication, and the emergence of the new science of ecology, whose practitioners revealed the real animal within the legend. Thank you to our sponsor  Velvet Buck . Subscribe now wherever you...

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 as powerfully by the presence of a public lands system American visionaries established a century ago. This is why they did it. Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck . Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube , Spotify , Apple , iHeart...

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 country centered on conservation. In the process his obsession with nature finally took the U.S. in a different policy direction than the countries of western Europe we had tried for three centuries to emulate. Thank you to our sponsor  Velvet Buck ....

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 stories of the Modern West is how coyotes are transferring their own brand of western survivalism to the entire country. Despite a $500 million-dollar war to exterminate them, the coyote is in fact The Dude, and The Dude absolutely abides. Thank you to ou...

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 photographs of Edward Sheriff Curtis, western nostalgia became a dominant theme of art, film, and pop culture. Another artist of the age, though, showed that the West endures into the modern age. Thank you to our sponsor  Velvet Buck . Subscribe now...

When the long-term market exploitation of wildlife was joined by a form of elite safari hunting known as “field sports,” a massive destruction of western animals threatened to destroy millions of years of North American evolution. Teddy Roosevelt’s and George Grinnell’s Boone & Crockett Club wasn’t perfect, but it helped government usher in a new stage before Wild...

America’s national mammal possesses a troubling story in western history. For a century writers have presented the fate of the buffalo as brought down by a federal conspiracy that plotted the animal’s demise to undermine Native cultures. With an animal this important to American and western history, understanding the more realistic and accurate version of its 19th and 20th century stor...

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 centurie...

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 re...

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....

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 t...

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 1840...