Butcher’s Crossing

By: John Williams

Narrated by: Anthony Heald

Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek ''an original relation to nature,'' drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher's Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down.

The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisiacal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher's Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

©1988 John Williams (P)2010 Blackstone Audio

Critic reviews

“Harsh and relentless yet muted in tone, Butcher’s Crossing paved the way for Cormac McCarthy. It was perhaps the first and best revisionist western.” ( The New York Times Book Review)

“[This story] becomes a young man's search for the integrity of his own being....The characters are defined, the events lively, the place, the smells, the sounds right. And the prose is superb." ( Chicago Tribune)

A Tiring Listen

I say this was a tiring read (not a tiresome one) for the sheer scale of the endeavour that the little group of four huntsmen endure. There is great thirst, distance, freezing snows, exhausting work in deplorable conditions to be read. It made me tired listening and at times I felt myself involuntarily dozing off from exhaustion, felt vicariously for these pioneers. I guess that endeavour is what built the countries that we now enjoy and there is some reason to take pride in it. There is also reason to reflect upon the waste (all those buffalo slaughtered) and the misfortune that courted every step. Williams captures all of that and, for that reason alone, his account is a worthy read. I can't say that I enjoyed the listen, but that was no fault of the writing, the reading or the underlying importance of the pioneer spirit. Heald captures the latter well, for example. For me, it was too real (if that is possible) and I am tiring just thing about it.

Coming of age in the Wild West

Innocent from Boston goes on a buffalo hunt. (Mostly) imperturbable mentor leads the hunt, along with half-wit dipsomaniac/Jesus freak and nihilistic buffalo skinner - who does not survive the adventure. At the end, the Bostonian has grown up, the mentor has learned a hard lesson and the simple man of faith still has his faith. Everyone says "My God!" at least once. A reader is laboriously schooled in the ways of the cowboy. I liked "Stoner" much better. Perhaps I haven't been out west enough to appreciate it.

A baptism of fire, and a bucket of blood

A wonderful surprise - I thought I was just going in for a well-received Western yarn, and came out a John Williams fan-boy. What writing, what characterisations, what wilderness! I won't lie to you: Buffalo die. Lots. But context is everything - the harsh scenes of slaughter and survival are counterbalanced by moments of emotional beauty and searing vistas. Butcher's Crossing is often mentioned in the same sentence as Cormac McCarthy, and with good reason.

The Horror

Excellent novel. Extremely well read.
It and Stoner are an immense monument to futility and nothingness, finely written.

Boring

I wanted to like it but it just couldn't capture my interest or attention. My mind constantly wandered.

Exceptional

I listened this book all the way back from Florida to NY when I rented a car to drive back home after 6 of my flights were cancelled in two days during a weather storm over the Atlantic last June. I enjoyed the read and the narration. And recently, I read the print book. I listened to the audio version again while reading the book. Williams’s take on the grand theme of American West could not be better illustrated than this through a set of unforgettable characters. The frontiersmen’s endurance in the face of myriad odds, the search for self, Buffalo, one of the most captivating stories of 19th American West when it almost came to become extinct due to overhunting, individualism, hunt for fortune in the West, and disappointment are among the appealing themes that decorate this epic nature tale. Whatever defines the myths and grand themes of American West exist in this narrative, in this book. Blood, lust, human conflict, an abandoned love story, and many sub-themes empower Williams’s book. And what a read and narration! One of the best in Audible’s library of audiobooks.

An American West classic

Truly an American classic. Few things set the US apart as the gritty and expansive Western drive. Williams truly captures the naive dreams, the insatiable greed and the all consuming wild in all its gripping detail. Beneath the mosaic of scenes are elemental forces and the very recognizable characters that reflect parts of us all. The narration was one of the best I’ve heard. Anthony Heald’s voice matched the emotion of the description so perfectly. He truly enhanced the story.

Terrific book

This is a great novel, beautifully written and the plot picks up and gets quite suspenseful. Highly recommended.

A literary work of art

John Williams has become one of my favorite writers. Stoner is amazing as well. His books are not amazing stories or filled with larger than life characters. His prose is not flamboyant nor overly simplistic.

His books simply “are.” They are subtle and unforgiving. They are exact. They are quite near perfect, in my opinion, precisely for the fact that I believe every word of them and forget I’m reading at the same time.

“You’re no better than the things you kill.”

Imagine a compact, undigressive Moby-Dick about buffalo hunters instead of whalers. Both Melville’s epic and John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing (1960) depict an obsessive leader who takes men with him away from civilization to kill impressive wild creatures. A big difference between veteran buffalo hunter Miller and Captain Ahab is that the former hasn’t been mutilated by a bull buffalo, and his holocaust of a hunt has nothing to do with revenge. In that way, Williams’ novel is more terrible than Melville’s, because Miller is not existentially struggling against “whiteness” etc. but is merely a man with enough powder, lead, and endurance to kill thousands of buffalo.

After twenty years in Boston and three years at Harvard, William “Will” Andrews, whose Unitarian lay minister who encouraged him to read Emerson more than the Bible, arrives at the aptly named Butcher’s Crossing on the Kansas prairie. The “town” is an inchoate collection of six shabby structures and a few tents, reeking of manure, dust, heat, and buffalo hide brine pits. What on earth is Will doing there?! He wants to leave cities to experience wilderness and nature and become a transparent Emersonian eyeball, a free and clean part of God. Will his expectations be fulfilled when he goes on a buffalo hunt with the experienced, laconic hunter Miller, his Bible reading, whisky drinking, one-handed right hand man Charlie, and the unpleasant, pessimistic, skilled buffalo skinner Schneider? Miller claims to know a pristine hidden valley in the Colorado mountains where they will find thousands of prime wild buffalo, the hides of which ought to be bring thousands of dollars. All they need is a little capital with which to outfit their team, which Andrews, having received a bequest from an uncle, is eager to provide.

The novel, then, has some usual western genre features. A young, innocent, sensitive guy from the east goes west to experience nature and hooks up with a seasoned, capable, practical hunter and his grizzled one-handed sidekick. A shrewd businessman and a good prostitute appear. A handful of Indians make a miserable cameo. A quest ensues for an elusive mountain valley sheltering a vast herd of buffalo. But in its philosophical underpinnings and questionings, the novel is not a usual western.

The story is introduced by a pair of epigraphs, one by Emerson from “Nature” (a positive view of nature as blessing people with the sanctity of religion) and one by Melville from The Confidence-Man (a negative view of nature as freezing us to death or making us idiots). The dueling epigraphs and novel remind me of Melville’s annotated copy of Emerson’s essays on microfilm I read in graduate school, where he wrote in the margin at one point something like, “I pity the fool who follows this!” Williams (I believe) is more in Melville’s camp regarding nature.

And at times the book doesn’t feel like a usual western:

“In his mind were fragments of Miller’s talk about the mountain country to which they were going, and those fragments glittered and turned and fell softly in accidental and strange patterns. Like the loose stained bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, they augmented themselves with their turning and found light from irrelevant and accidental sources.”

The novel is sensual. Williams writes vivid details involving the five senses of activities like smelling a rotting buffalo carcass, being thirsty, climbing a steep mountain too quickly, being lost in a blizzard, submersing oneself in a fast cold river, shaving after eight months in the wilderness, looking at a woman’s nude body, and so on. Concise, poetic writing: “A patch of turning aspen flamed a deep cold in the green of the pine,” and “The sip of whisky seared his throat as if a torch had been thrust into it.”

Many vivid details, too, about the “craft” of buffalo hunting: making bullets, sharpening knives, shooting buffalo, skinning buffalo, dressing buffalo, stacking hides, thawing frozen thongs in a bucket of pee, and, of course, plenty of details of the buffalo’s body, like “His head lowered, his upturned curving horns, shiny in the sunlight, bright against the dark mop of hair that hung over his head.”

It is at times an awful novel. Miller’s knowledge that Indians use every part of the buffalo, even down to making beautiful and clever and fine bone toys and implements from them, does not prevent him from becoming “an automaton” in a non-stop orgy of killing them for nothing more than their hides. Far from using every part of the buffalo in the service of life, they sprinkle strychnine on the myriad carcasses to kill wolves. Although Charlie hates wolves as the devil’s creatures, Miller’s destruction of the buffalo is a cold, mindless response to the life in which he has immersed himself.

I regret that the point of view character and moral center of the novel Will doesn’t evince a little more discomfort with the holocaust of over 4,000 buffalo, but I suppose that just makes him a 19th-century rather than a 21st-century man.

Butcher’s Crossing shares with Williams’ historical academia novel Stoner (1965) his careful writing and psychological insights. Butcher’s Crossing is a literate western, and it must be quite disturbing to anyone who loves animals alive more than dead.