Butcher's Crossing
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.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
3people
2023–2024years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If you enjoyed Williams's Augustus, do give Stoner and Butcher's Crossing a read. I "enjoyed" them even more than Augustus. Enjoyed is in quotes because they are both emotionally devastating -- Stoner more so than Butcher's Crossing. I didn't feel like myself for a week after reading Stoner and a decade later I still often think about it.
- Love the username.
I don't remember AtD as being particularly filthy, but it has been a long time. It remains one of my all-time favorites. If nothing else, I'm indebted to the book for encouraging me to seek out literary westerns such as Warlock by Oakley Hall and Butcher's Crossing by John Williams.
- John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing is an incredible story about buffalo hunters. If half of it is true it’s tragic. The sheer numbers; the depth of destruction for the profit of a hide. It boggles the mind that we did this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butcher's_Crossing
(Off-topic, but Williams is best known for Stoner, a truly beautiful work that you should read immediately if you haven’t already.)
- Some years ago, I gave a family member the NYRB printing of Butcher's Crossing by John Williams. The thank you note said that he had loved the book, but hated the introduction. I told him that I had been vaguely aware that book had an introduction, but hadn't read it and still might not. Generally, I don't read introductions, unless they are by the author.
