America’s Great Plains once possessed one of the grandest wildlife spectacles of the world, equaled only by such places as the Serengeti, the Masai Mara, or the veld of South Africa. Pronghorn antelope, gray wolves, bison, coyotes, wild horses, and grizzly bears: less than two hundred years ago these creatures existed in such abundance that John James Audubon was moved to write, “it is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals.” In a work that is at once a lyrical evocation of that lost splendor and a detailed natural history of these charismatic species of the historic Great Plains, veteran naturalist and outdoorsman Dan Flores draws a vivid portrait of each of these animals in their glory—and tells the harrowing story of what happened to them at the hands of market hunters and ranchers, and ultimately, a federal killing program in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Download and start listening now!
"A big and haunting history stuffed with big animals and big ideas that reveals the fragility and resilience of the Great Plains ecosystem over the past 10,000 years."
— Karl Jacoby, author of Crimes against Nature
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Dan Flores is an American writer and historian who specializes in cultural and environmental studies of the American West. He is the author of numerous books on aspects of western United States history and was the A. B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of Western History at the University of Montana until he retired in 2014. Flores lives just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Michael Kramer is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner, a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration, and recipient of a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award. He is also an actor and director in the Washington, DC, area, where he is active in the area’s theater scene and has appeared in productions at the Shakespeare Theatre, the Kennedy Center, and Theater J.