In the 1870s Will Andrews a young man from a proper eastern family drops out of Harvard to go
west. Intoxicated by the heady fumes of Emersonian transcendentalism he seeks that original
relation to Nature celebrated by the sage of Concord. He knows he is not going to find it in
college. Andrews washes up in Butcher's Crossing a small Kansas town that is as its name
suggests nothing more than somewhere between here and there. In other words nowhere.
Butcher's Crossing is full of restless men looking for a way to make money or a way to waste it
and before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them. He regales Andrews with tales
of immense herds of buffalo ready for the taking hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in
the Colorado Rockies and he convinces him to join in an expedition to track the animals down.
The journey out is grueling but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there
however the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter so caught up in killing the
buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Then winter overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next
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. John Williams's fiercely intelligent
beautifully written Western is a harrowing confrontation with the American dream.
