Dan Flores – A Deep Dive into the History of the Natural West

Dan Flores (0:00)

The Public Lands is a more important aspect of the West than the frontier. We use the term, it's just like the Wild West. And of course, what that conveys to us is of a time when, I mean, there were no rules, everything was wide open, human nature was at its full expression. You could do anything you wanted, the strong survive. And that's a kind of a association we have with what the Western Frontier was.

But the truth is, living in the West today or visiting the West, the public lands is more important than the frontier.

Ed Roberson (0:44)

This is the Mountain & Prairie Podcast. I'm Ed Roberson. My guest today is Dan Flores. Dan is back for another visit on the podcast. If you're a fan of History of the American West, then Dan is no stranger. He's the author of many of my favorite books, including American Serengeti, Coyote America and Wild New World. Most recently, he wrapped up a 42-episode series with the MeatEater Network called The American West with Dan Flores, covering everything from bison and wolves to the origin of our public lands and what it means to belong to a place. It's the closest most of us will get to sitting in one of Dan's university classes, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Dan spent much of his academic career at the University of Montana, but he's always been less interested in the Old West of cattle drives and gunfights than in what he calls the Natural West, the landscapes, animals, native people, and ideas that make the region unlike anywhere else. He grew up in Louisiana, a place with almost no public land, and spent the 1970s looking for a foothold in the real West. He found three, the Canyon Country outside of Lubbock, Texas, Montana's Bitterroot Valley, and the Galisteo Valley south of Santa Fe, where he and his wife Sara live today.

In each place, he dug in, learned the country, and went to work restoring it. As is always the case when you talk with Dan, we covered a ton. We started out with the story behind the American West series, and how a decades long friendship with Steve Rinella finally turned into 42 episodes. We talk about the biggest epiphany Dan had while making the podcast, that for those of us living here now, the public lands matter far more than the frontier ever did. Dan traces the origins of public lands back to George Perkins Marsh, a wildly influential public intellectual most of us have never heard of. Then we go forward through John Wesley Powell, the first forest reserves, and the end of homesteading in the 1930s. We dug into Theodore Roosevelt's transformation from a young man who rushed to the Dakota territory to kill a buffalo before they were all gone, into a president willing to break with his own Gilded Age class to protect landscapes and wildlife he loved. We also talked about repeat photography and the staggering disappearance of the glaciers in Glacier National Park, the willful destruction of Western wildlife, bioregionalism and rewilding on a scale that any of us can manage, and of course a few book recommendations to round it all out. Be sure to check out the episode notes for links to everything we discussed, including the full American West series and the new 2026 edition of Coyote America. Dan is as generous with his time and wisdom as anyone I know, and I always come away from these conversations with a longer reading list and a much better understanding of this place we call the American West. But before we get started, I want to thank the people and organizations that make Mountain Prairie possible. Mountain Prairie is listener supported via Patreon, which means that listeners like you can support the podcast and all my various projects for as little as $2 per month.

The podcast is also supported by a small number of values-aligned organizations on either an annual or quarterly basis. A huge thank you to the Colorado Cattlemen's Agricultural Land Trust, the documentary Mirasole Looking at the Sun, Patagonia Books, and the Rye Resurgence Project for their generous support. And today I want to tell you a little bit more about the Rye Resurgence Project. And I'll start with one single number-12.

12 inches of water is all it takes to grow a mature crop of rye in Colorado's San Luis Valley. Potatoes, barley, and alfalfa need somewhere between 18 and 30 inches.

In a valley where the aquifers have fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded, that gap is significant. The San Luis Valley is one of the most extraordinary places in the American West, a high alpine desert ringed by the Sangre de Cristos and the San Juans, home to the Great Sand Dunes, Sand Hill Cranes, and Colorado's oldest farming communities. I've spent a lot of time down there running my strenuous life retreats, and every trip convinces me further that it's one of the most special corners of the West.