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.

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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 Wild West anarchy could run its course.

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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 story seems a critical step as we figure out how to go forward in returning America’s most iconic mammal to the modern West.

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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 centuries of whirlwind change in Native America, the bison was suddenly and mysteriously gone from the wild.

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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 regions in the Lower 48.

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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.

Follow now for Episode 1, dropping on Thursday, October 30th.  

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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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