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.

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