Butcher's Crossing

By John Williams

1960

Literary fiction / Western

John Williams's first mature novel, a brooding anti-Western set in 1870s Kansas and Colorado. William Andrews, a young Harvard student steeped in Emerson, abandons Boston for the frontier town of Butcher's Crossing in search of an authentic encounter with nature. He funds and joins a buffalo-hunting expedition led by the enigmatic, obsessive Miller, who claims to know the location of one of the last great untouched herds, hidden deep in the Rockies. What begins as a transcendentalist pilgrimage curdles into a grueling, often catastrophic ordeal — a confrontation with the limits of human endurance, the violence of extractive industry, and the emptiness that lies on the other side of self-discovery.