The American West – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

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The American West

MeatEater

History

Sports

Frequency: 1 episode/11d. Total Eps: 43

In this new podcast, writer Dan Flores presents a big picture history of an American West you've never encountered. With the West's deep time, its grand natural world, and its wild animals as their focus, these episodes tell a fresh story of America's most fascinating region.

Recent rankings

Latest chart positions across Apple Podcasts and Spotify rankings.

Apple Podcasts

🇺🇸 USA - history
20/08/2026
#90
🇺🇸 USA - history
19/08/2026
#89
🇺🇸 USA - history
13/08/2026
#89
🇺🇸 USA - history
12/08/2026
#75
🇺🇸 USA - history
07/08/2026
#96
🇺🇸 USA - history
06/08/2026
#91
🇺🇸 USA - history
05/08/2026
#97
🇺🇸 USA - history
30/07/2026
#88
🇺🇸 USA - history
29/07/2026
#81
🇺🇸 USA - history
24/07/2026
#91

Spotify

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Score global : 68%

Publication history

Monthly episode publishing history over the past years.

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Latest published episodes

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Introducing: The American West with Dan Flores

Tuesday, April 29, 2025 • Duration 02:02

New from the MeatEater Podcast Network: Long-time western author Dan Flores presents a big picture history of an American West you've never encountered. Covering a vast time span in a western America whose landscapes and wild animals drew people from around the world, this podcast tells a new story of our most fascinating region.

Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. Don't miss episode one coming out May 6th!

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050
iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/
Pandora: https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west

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Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters" and "Mountain Men"

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Ep. 01: West of Everything

Season 1

Tuesday, May 6, 2025 • Duration 57:49

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 ""

Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful

Season 1

Tuesday, May 20, 2025 • Duration 01:05:45

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 culture of highly-proficient Siberian hunters. While they may not have been the first humans in America, the 1930s discovery of this “Clovisia the Beautiful” launched a century-long debate about their role in a remarkable series of extinctions – the loss of most of America’s African-like megafauna – coinciding with their arrival. Are Clovis and later Folsom cultures the American architects of the early stages of today’s Sixth Extinction?

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 ""

Ep. 03: Raven’s and Coyote’s America

Season 1

Tuesday, June 3, 2025 • Duration 55:37

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 America while somehow managing to preserve almost all its biological riches. In contrast to the period when the prior Paleolithic hunters dominated America and the West, this 10,000 year phase of American history featured only one human-caused extinction that science has so far discovered. Was this some strange accident of continental history? Or were their concrete reasons for why, and how, Native America achieved this kind of environmental success?

Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck.

Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon.

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Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters" and ""

Ep. 04: Old Man America

Season 1

Tuesday, June 17, 2025 • Duration 54:31

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 America’s creation. Then they proceeded to fashion thousands of stories around “Old Man America,” the oldest literary figure in America. Long described as a Trickster, the deity Coyote actually was a human avatar whose stories richly conveyed human nature in both its admirable and not-so-admirable forms. As part coyote and part human, deity Coyote stands in a progression of human gods, one whose insights into human nature have allowed him to survive into the modern age.

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 ""

Ep. 05: The Wild New World of the American Serengeti

Season 1

Tuesday, July 1, 2025 • Duration 55:22

In the early 1800s, when American and European scientific explorers first began to probe the unfamiliar West with its landscapes and animals so remarkably different from those of the East, the Great Plains and its wildlife seemed the most fascinating part of the West, an “American Serengeti.” Commencing with Lewis and Clark’s adventures and their attempts to catalog western wildlife, it took the entire 19th century for American explorers to introduce to science the staggering biological diversity Native America had bequeathed the United States. Accounts from Lewis and Clark to Stephen Long to C. Hart Merriam give us inspiring descriptions of what the Natural West was only two centuries ago.

Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck.

Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon.

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Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "" and ""

Ep. 06: Survivors From A Lost World

Season 1

Tuesday, July 15, 2025 • Duration 53:39

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? Why can’t it jump obstacles? And for those who really know its biography, why did its population fall from 15 million to a mere 5,000 over the course of a single century? This episode answers all those questions by arguing that the pronghorn is an American original who, like us, is the sole remaining member of a large, ancient family of animals. And that it seems enigmatic only because it is one of the few survivors of America’s Pleistocene extinctions, with behaviors strongly shaped by the vanished world to which it evolved.

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 ""

Ep. 07: Jefferson’s "Other" Lewis & Clark

Season 1

Tuesday, July 29, 2025 • Duration 53:12

Despite Lewis and Clark’s singular fame, Thomas Jefferson never intended their expedition to be the sole U.S. scientific exploration into the country’s new Louisiana Purchase. Just as compelling to him was a second major expedition into the southern reaches of Louisiana, for which he chose two leaders – Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis – who had a similar opportunity to become famous early American explorers into the West. Dispatched up the Red River of the South in 1806 with a bigger party and twice the congressional appropriation of Lewis and Clark, Freeman and Custis suffered a very different fate, one that assigned them to the dustbin of American history and made Jefferson’s “Grand Expedition” a forgotten western story.

Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck.

Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon.

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Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "" and ""

Ep. 08: Beyond the Earth’s Curve, Mysteries

Season 1

Tuesday, August 12, 2025 • Duration 59:50

Despite an ancient Native inhabitation and recent European settlements and forays around the perimeter of the West, in the early 19th century much of the interior West was still a place of conjecture, rumor, and mystery. What was out there? What kind of never-known phenomena did the West hold? For the brand-new United States and its Indian Agents, winning the western tribes with trade was essential geopolitics. But as happened with John Colter’s “Hell,” the future Yellowstone Park, those traders often returned with accounts that were hard to believe. Like Colter and in the same years, a trader named Anthony Glass in the southern West convinced the Comanche and Wichita Indians to reveal to him an astounding western mystery that excited the Southwestern frontier for three decades. Hauled to civilization, it would stand as one of America’s most intriguing contributions to global science from the early West.

Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck.

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Ep. 09: Catlin’s and Bodmer’s "Time Machine Visuals"

Season 1

Tuesday, August 26, 2025 • Duration 51:46

Landscapes, wildlife, and Native people dominated the fascination with the early American West, but imagining that world is not easy. Fortunately, two talented and committed painters, one American and one European, left the future a rich and varied body of “Time Machine Visuals” of the Missouri River West in the 1830s. George Catlin was a Pennsylvanian whose life’s work was to be the historian of Native people. Catlin was a Romantic who believed preserving the West’s landscapes, animals, and Indian peoples was essential to the future. Karl Bodmer was the supremely talented painter on a Prussian prince’s 1833-4 journey up the Missouri, whose marvelous paintings have enabled modern Native people and Hollywood to re-discover the early West. Both men are celebrated now for their visual portrayals of a lost world.

Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck.

Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon.

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The American West – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

The American West – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other14

Youtube7

Instagram4

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Other14

Youtube7

Instagram4