John Williams
Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams is not so much a novel about the wild west as it is a novel set in the west—in Kansas and Colorado of the 1870s, to be precise. It is a bildungsroman and so much more.
A young Will Andrews leaves Harvard in search of adventure and in search of himself. He heads to Butcher’s Crossing in Kansas lured by the wildness of the wide, open spaces of the west. After a meeting with Miller, an experienced buffalo hunter, Will agrees to finance an expedition to Colorado to hunt for buffalo. Accompanying them on the hunt are Charley Hoge and Fred Schneider. The tasks are assigned: Miller kills the buffalo; Charley cooks; Schneider skins the buffalo with Will as his apprentice. After a long, arduous journey across Kansas and the mountains of Colorado, the hunting party encounters a herd of nearly 5,000 buffalo. A veritable frenzy of killing and skinning ensues.
The narrative unfolds in third person limited omniscient point of view with a focus on Will. He is a novice at the beginning of the killing spree, overcome with the stench, the blood, and the sheer numbers of dead buffalo piling up. Under Schneider’s tutelage, he learns to skin buffalo and soon grows accustomed to the stench of buffalo hide and rotting buffalo meat. The buffalo hides pile up until Miller has wiped out nearly the whole herd. Even though winter is looming on the horizon, Miller refuses to head home until he has killed every last buffalo. He becomes a man obsessed. And then it is too late. The snows set in and the hunting party is forced to spend several months sheltering until Spring. The survivors make it back to Butcher’s Crossing only to discover the town and so much more has changed.
In diction that is unsentimental and attentive to detail, Williams has produced a timeless masterpiece. The pace is slow and steady. The characters are vividly portrayed, from the whiskey-drinking, bible-thumping Charley; to the cantankerous Schneider; to the inexperienced Will. Miller, the skilled buffalo hunter, looms larger than life with his knowledge of the terrain and impressive survival skills. But he assumes the guise of an Ahab in his obsession to kill more and more buffalo.
Williams sets his characters in a landscape rich in immersive detail. The stench, the heat, the snow, the dust, the blood, the aching bodies, the mosquitoes, the beans, the coffee, and above all, the buffalo all mingle together in a vivid backdrop. Against this backdrop, the men are exposed to extreme situations and reduced to their most fundamental elements.
The novel is about the human need to find purpose. It is about man pitted against nature. It is about resilience and survival against overwhelming odds. It is about a man’s coming of age. It is about man’s insatiable appetite for more and the greed that reduces men to butchers ravaging pillaging the environment in the name of profit and littering the land with evidence of their carnage.
The novel is set in the west. But it is not just about the west. It is about more than that. It is so much more than the sum of its parts.