Butcher's Crossing

Why everyone goes nuts for "Stoner". This is his best work.

It’s the 70s - the 1870s - and Harvard graduate Will Andrews is burned out with life. Hoping to find himself in the vastness of nature, he leaves Boston for the small frontier town of Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas, where he falls in with some buffalo hunters: the veteran hunter Miller, his partner-in-crime Charley Hoge, and a local skinner Fred Schneider. The four travel into the Rocky Mountains for the greatest buffalo hunt ever. But it goes awry; they become stuck in the wilderness and are forced to confront the stark realities of nature and the limits of their humanity.

It’s difficult to evaluate Butcher’s Crossing. Everyone in the story is a blatant cowboy stereotype. The dialogue and characterisation are sparse and predictable. It’s nothing if not atmospheric though, owing to the way in which Williams zooms in on the routines and activities of the men on their expedition, or on the mountain and forests in which they are travelling. This gives the book a gritty, tactile feel. In an almost-meditative passage, the boys watch Miller mold some bullets:

Again Miller reached into his bag and took out a large ladle. He inserted it in the now-bubbling kettle of lead, and delicately spooned the molten lead into the mouth of the bullet mold. The hot lead crackled on the cool mold; a drop spattered on Miller’s hand, which held the mold, but he did not flinch. (139).

This very direct style draws us into the life of the hunters, and it also mimics Will Andrews as he becomes one of them. It often falls flat though. Much of the book is more boring than gritty, with long periods in which the boys wake up, go about the same tasks, then sit around the fire at night, eating beans and drinking coffee in silence. Some passages are far too drawn out and caught up in themselves that their immediacy is lost. Just before Schneider drowns in a river, we are put to sleep by a laborious description of a horse zig-zagging across a river. And when the men first arrive in the valley, their campsite is described like so:

They set up camp near a small spring .The spring water flashed in the last light as it poured thinly over smooth rock into a pool at the base of the mountains, and thence over-flowed into a narrow stream half hidden by the thick grass of the valley. (136).

This passage veers between flowery (“flashed in the last light”, “poured thinly”) and mundane (“thence over-flowed”). As in Nothing But the Night, Williams is prone to overwriting many inconsequential passages. Some of them just don’t make sense, such as when Andrews cups his hands in a river and drinks "noisily from the streaming bowl of his hands." (257). While the water may be streaming into his hands, and while his hands may be forming a bowl, the bowl itself could not be described as streaming - indeed, the static shape of the bowl is contrary to the dynamic movement of the water.

It’s not all bad though. In one startling passage, Andrews, tucked inside a buffalo shelter for winter, has an out-of-body experience:

Sometimes at night, crowded with the others in the close warm shelter of buffalo hide, he heard the wind, that often suddenly sprang up, whistle and moan around the corners of the shelter… At such times he felt a part of himself go outward into the dark, among the wind and the snow and the featureless sky where he was whirled blindly through the world. (236).

It's a scene so good it appears again in Stoner, as the titular character is sitting in the cold attic of his parents’ house. But unlike Stoner, Butcher’s Crossing just lacks something. The characters lack multitudes and the writing is a bit undisciplined, so their crucial moments - Schneider’s death, Miller’s insanity, Hoge’s delusions - never quite move us.

After Schneider’s drowning - and the wagon and all the buffalo hides with him - the men trudge back into Butcher’s Crossing, which is now almost abandoned. In the season they’ve been gone, it’s been bypassed by the railway, and the price of buffalo hides has collapsed anyway. Their expedition meant nothing. One of the former traders tells Andrews:

“Young people… you always think there’s something to find out... You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you - that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done.” (295-6).

Andrews attempts to overcome his despair by trying to love a prostitute that he met on the way into Butcher’s Crossing. It doesn’t work. He's drawn further into his despair until at last, with no alternative, he sets out alone into the plains of Kansas to make whatever way in the world he can. Finally, he is like the buffalo hunters - his life is filled with the occupation of what he does, the living he has to make, and the intermittent sensual pleasures he may enjoy, but ultimately it is empty and lacking in purpose. Yet by a comparison with the beginning, we see some small glimmer of hope: whereas Miller entered the town somewhat sheepishly, following others in the hopes of finding himself, he now leaves alone, determined that whoever he is and whatever path he takes will be determined by him alone.

Read this review on Substack.

John Williams superb prose re-examines the Westerner genre in this tale about a young man heading west to find himself. The action centers around a buffalo hunt instead of a big showdown at the corral. Will, the young man searchers to find meaning in the nothingness, the waste.

The river crossing scene gave me flashbacks to As I Lay Dying.

The slaughter of the buffaloes takes on more of a destruction of our earth and global warming and its blood lust reminded me of Mel Gibson's the Passion of the Christ.

I was impressed by the detail of life on the hunt and out west and this quite a different book from William's Stoner, but both are amazing reads.

quite good. reviews I have found do not compare it to heart of darkness.