Book review: “Butcher’s Crossing” by John Williams

Twenty-three-year-old Will Andrews looks around him and sees the rich, vibrant, beautiful abundance of the natural world.  This happens at many, many points in John Williams’s 1960 novel Butcher’s Crossing.

In this particular case, he and the three other men who have gathered a huge amount of buffalo skins for sale in the town of Butcher’s Crossing are just coming out of the mountains, exhausted after months of work and tedium.

The mountainside was a riot of varied shade and hue. The dark green of the pine boughs was lightened to a greenish yellow at the tips, where new growth was starting; scarlet and white buds were beginning to open on the wild-berry bushes; and the pale green of new growth on slender aspens shimmered above the silver-white bark of their trunks.

All about the ground the pale new grass reflected the light of the sun into the shadowed recesses beneath great pines, and the dark trunks glowed in that light, faintly, as if the light came from the hidden centers of the trees themselves.

He thought that if he listened he could hear the sound of growth.

 

Sickened by the stench

Andrews and the other men — Miller, the experienced hunter; Fred Schneider, the expert hide-skinner; and Charley Hoge, the one-armed cook and wagon driver — have been together for months on end, many more months than they had expected. And Andrews realizes that he is sickened by the stench of his body and of the bodies of the other men.

He realized suddenly that he had not bathed since that first afternoon, months before, when he had been soaked by the blood of the buffalo; nor had his clothing been washed, or even removed.  All at once his shirt and his trousers were still and heavy on his body, and the thought of them unpleasant in his mind.

But, within a few hours, the four men have the roaring cold river and have slaked their thirst and the thirst of their horses and oxen, and Andrews lets his body slide into the strong current, and he finds a way to keep his body fully in the water while holding tightly to the rocky bank to avoid being swept downstream.

 

“Playing children”

He hears a noise.  Above him is Schneider who has spent their months together complaining and keeping himself apart from the others, but, at this moment, he is grinning widely, splashing water into the young man’s already wet face.  Andrews gasps and then splashes water at Schneider.

For several moments, the two men, laughing and sputtering, dashed water toward each other as if they were playing children.

This is the high point of Butcher’s Crossing, a moment when two men who have been distanced from each other from the time of their first meeting — in a novel in which all men and the few women keep a distance from each other — engage in that most human of activities, play.

 

A moment of connections

They are joined in their enjoyment of the water and are joined in their enjoyment of each other.

And, in the midst of the immensity of Nature, in the stolid, disinterested, vast natural world, they find connection.  And are happy.

And, then, a short time later, in a moment of sudden natural violence that takes no more than two minutes, their winter of work and privation and pain and hardship, of hopes, dreams and expectations, is swept away, leaving one of them dead and the other three bereft.

And their situation grows even worse when, finally, they get back to Butcher’s Crossing and find out exactly how great their losses are.

 

Butcher’s Crossing and Stoner

There is an emotional intensity in Butcher’s Crossing that is echoed in Stoner, the novel John Williams published five years later.

Willian Stoner spends his entire adult life as an English teacher at the University of Missouri, and it’s a life that’s noteworthy for his stolid endurance of his emotional isolation and pent-up, never-released yearning.  It is as if he doesn’t know the language of human interaction. He is a stranger in a world he doesn’t understand.

Similarly, in the eleven months of 1873-1874 covered by Butcher’s Crossing, Will Andrews, a third-year student at Harvard Collage who came West seeking an unknown something, bankrolls and joins Miller’s buffalo-hunting crew.

He’s not the stereotypical Easterner who wants to test himself against the rough world of the West, so different from the civilized cities of the Post-Civil War.  Rather, he’s seeking, in a way he doesn’t quite understand, to come face to face with Nature, maybe as a way of understanding the natural world, certainly as a way of experiencing it.

 

Experiencing the natural world

And, throughout Butcher’s Crossing, he does experience it. In a very physical way, he experiences heat and thirst, stench and exhaustion, a blizzard and a blinding sun.

But, on a deeper level, he experiences the enormity of the natural world and its seemingly infinite variety and beauty and complexity.  The description above of the mountainside as a “riot of varied shade and hue” is an example. Here’s another:

For perhaps three hundred yards, the trail cut down between the pines, but at that point, abruptly, the land leveled. A long narrow valley, flat at the top of a table, wound among the mountains. Lush grass grew on the bed of the valley, and waved gently in the breeze as far as the eye could see. A quietness seemed to rise from the valley; it was the quietness, the stillness, the absolute calm of a land where no human foot had touched. 

Andrews found that despite his exhaustion he was holding his breath; he expelled the air from his lungs as gently as he could, so as not to disturb the silence.

And another:

Against the pale yellow-green of the grass, the dark umber of the buffalo stood out sharply, but merged into the deeper color of the pine forest on the steep mountainside behind them. Many of the buffalo were lying at ease upon the soft valley grass; those were mere lumps, like dark rocks, without identity or shape.  But a few stood at the edges of the herd, like sentinels; some were grazing lightly, and others stood unmoving, their huge furry heads slumped between their forelegs, which were so matted with long dark fur that their shapes could not be seen.

 

Indifference and isolation

Nature, Will Andrews finds, is something else as well. All the beauty that he sees, all the rich animal and plant life that he sees, all the great heights and depths and distances that he sees — all of that was there before he arrived and will be there when he is gone.

Nature, he finds, is nothing if not indifferent to humans.

Andrews experiences himself as a speck in the natural world.

All the work and sweat and pain that he and the others endured in the mountains comes to nothing. But even if they had made the money they’d hoped to make, it would have made no difference. They would only have made small scratches on the natural world.  They were only the tiniest of presences in the face of Nature.

In Butcher’s Crossing, Will Andrews never connects in any real way with the other three men or with anyone back in town. He is isolated from people, just as William Stoner was isolated in Stoner.

 

Stolidness and stoicism

But Andrews’s endurance of this lack of connection is a minor matter when compared to his lack of connection to Nature.  He can see the beauty and wonder and hugeness of the natural world, but he cannot connect to it, so small is he and so gargantuan is Nature.

It is as if he doesn’t know the language of Nature.  He, like Stoner, is a stranger in a world he doesn’t understand.

And he knows this.  So, at the end of Butcher’s Crossing, when he is riding out into the wilderness, there is a stolidness and stoicism to Andrews.

He has accepted his isolation and his tiny place in the natural world.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.6.25