Butcher's Crossing
1960
- american bison hunting
- western stories
- fiction
- american western fiction
- literature - classics / criticism
- westerns
- classics
- literary
- fiction / literary
- fiction - general
The story
In the 1870s, 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 full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. One of these men regales Will with tales of the immense buffalo herds hidden away in the Colorado Rockies and convinces him to join an expedition to track them down. At the end of a grueling journey, the men reach a place of paradisal richness, where they abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter. So caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time, the men are overtaken by winter and snowed in. In the 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.
What it’s like
Spare, unhurried prose that reads like weathered leather and wide prairie air: long passages of exact description of grass, snow, hide and sky, with a plain, muscular voice that rarely reaches for ornament. The sensory world is cold and physical, sunlight glaring off open plains, the damp rot of a hide camp, the blue-white silence of a mountain winter. Its vibe is bleak, meditative and heavy with dread, the kind of book to read in a quiet room on a grey afternoon or during a long stretch of solitude when you want something that sits with you rather than moves you along. The pacing is deliberate, building through patient accumulation toward a slow, brutal descent, and the register is tragic and unsparing. Its people are men who arrive hungry for meaning and are gradually hollowed out by what they take from the land, so the arc is one of innocence curdling into moral ruin. Violence is frequent and graphic: animals are slaughtered in large numbers, described in close, unflinching detail, with some human brutality and a pervasive sense of cruelty and decay, though it is not gratuitous. Recommended for readers who want serious, literary Westerns that confront American expansion honestly and who can tolerate a sustained, bleak weight.
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