Play Book Tag discussion

Butcher's Crossing 3 1/2 stars rounding up


Written in 1960, the story of a young man, Will Andrews. It is the 1870's Will has dropped out not only of Harvard but also of life as he knows it. He travels from Boston to a small town, Butcher's Crossing, in Kansas. Carrying an introduction letter from his father, he searches and finds a man his father remembers as an acquaintance. Will then meets Miller, a buffalo hunter. Hunting the open range for the hides of the animal and craving the gold that they bring. Will agrees to join and financially back Miller's planned trip to find a herd of buffalo in the Colorado mountains that no one else knows about

Andrews seeks the wilderness so that he can be "a part and parcel of God, free and uncontained; what he will later encounter in nature is more akin to the malice of an Old Testament God

Reading Williams' description of the "raw country" and especially of "the hunt", I felt every emotion of the hunter and the animal. So descriptive, so beautiful. Still, I did not feel right about giving it a straight-up 4 stars. I honestly have to admit to skimming over paragraphs when I got bored with it.

The novel critiques the romanticized view of the American frontier and the pursuit of wealth at the expense of nature and human values.

More Literary than it was Western, it took me out of my box, a personal challenge of mine this year.