The Mad Wild West Podcast

Mike Runion has a great hook for his frontier history podcast: he doesn't just tell you what happened, he tells you what people at the time said about what happened. Each episode weaves in period advertisements, newspaper headlines, and firsthand accounts from the mid-to-late 1800s, creating a texture that makes the Old West feel less like a distant historical period and more like a place that actually existed with real people trying to sell things and read the morning paper. The 28-episode catalog covers gunfights, gold rushes, rough frontier towns, murders, corruption, and hangings -- all presented through the lens of contemporary sources. A recent episode on deadly times in the Arizona Territory is a good example of the format: rather than giving you a Wikipedia-style overview, Runion reconstructs events using the language and perspective of people who were actually there. Episodes run 20 to 36 minutes, which is a comfortable length for this kind of material. At 4.9 stars with 27 ratings, the audience is small but clearly loves what Runion is doing. The explicit content rating is appropriate -- he doesn't sanitize the violence, and the period sources he quotes were often blunt about bloodshed in ways that modern historians tend to soften. The show has been running since 2020 and releases new episodes regularly. It's an excellent choice for listeners who've grown tired of the standard narrator-explains-history format and want something that feels more like time travel.