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.

Who am I?

This is the first novel I have listened to by John Williams. It definitely puts early 21st century “coming of age” novels in their place. Will Andrews comes out West to find himself and over one year he does. Fantastic novel set at the end of the Buffalo hinting days in America.