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. While wolf pelts became a target of the western market hunt, into the early 20th century most wolves were destroyed by bounty hunters and “wolfers,” who trapped and poisoned hundreds of thousands of wolves at the behest of livestock associations and state governments.

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Blood Trails is a new investigative podcast from MeatEater, hosted by writer and journalist Jordan Sillars. Each episode digs into true crime stories from the world of hunting and fishing—cases where the woods and the water became the backdrop for violence and mystery. From missing hunters deep in public land to poachers turned killers and fishing trips gone fatally wrong, Blood Trails uncovers the moments when outdoor life collides with the darkness of the human heart. But this isn't repackaged Wikipedia. Each story features original reporting you won't hear anywhere else, expert insight from detectives and hunters, and first-hand accounts from the people who were actually there. For true crime listeners looking for something new—and outdoorsmen who know the thrill and risk of time afield—Blood Trails exposes the stories left behind in the tracks. If you’re a fan of Dateline, Criminal, or Bear Grease but want your true crime set in the wild places you know, this podcast is for you.

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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 the world knew about the Wind River Range, Yosemite, the Colorado Rockies, the Tetons, the Grand Canyon, and other iconic features of western topography. As Dan relates, since Albert Bierstadt and other adventurers first portrayed them, all those places and many more in the West have never lost their magic and now make up some of the most famous scenery in the world.

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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 1840s to finish Audubon’s book on the mammals of America. Stunned at the staggering diversity and abundance of wild creatures visible in the West, Audubon soon despaired at the wholesale (and to him) senseless destruction he saw, a disturbing insight into human nature on a continent Audubon loved and tried to preserve in paint and words.

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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 covered the country in immense herds. Little known to Catlin, or to Thomas Jefferson, who longed to know about horses in their natural state, horses were so successful in the western wilds because they were original natives of North America. Eventually a trade in wild horses dominated the southern West the way the fur trade did in the North. Native people initiated the trade, Hispanics in Texas perfected the art of capture, and from 1790 into the 1850s independent American traders captured, traded for, and drove wild horses east to supply the advancing American frontier. Little known in western history because until the 1920s it lacked a corporate player, the wild horse trade was an unexpected success and mustangers a working-class phenomenon of the West.

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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 for 10,000 years. Within thirty years, everything had changed. Americans arrived in the West with religious traditions that taught animals were created solely for human use. And they introduced an economic system that made western animals commodities in a global market, an economy that snagged Native people in the trade and created the first American millionaires. By 1840 ancient western ecologies evolved around sea otters, fur seals, beavers and many other species were collapsing in both the interior and on the coasts. For some the period produced romantic figures like the mountain men. Witnessing such destruction, however, even some of their peers saw the casual loss of the ancient West very differently.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 whitetail experts to tackle a whitetail conundrum facing hunters today. From controversial tactics to evolving strategies and mindset-shifting opinions, this is where perspectives collide. Whether you're managing your first forty acres or hunting whitetails in the big woods, the Back 40 podcast delivers real-world insight, straight from the minds of those who live it. One question. Eight answers. Endless insights. Tune in starting July 30th to Back 40 on the Wired to Hunt podcast.

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