Butcher’s Crossing
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Narrated by:
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Anthony Heald
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By:
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John Williams
About this listen
It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek ''an original relation to nature,'' drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher's Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down.
The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisiacal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon 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.
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In 1836, when she was nine years old, Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanche Indians. This is the story of how she grew up with them, mastered their ways, married one of their leaders, and became, in every way, a Comanche woman. It is also the story of a proud and innocent people whose lives pulsed with the very heartbeat of the land. It is the story of a way of life that is gone forever.
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nice book but the narrator could be better.
- By mamaD on 07-31-10
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The Bounty Hunters
- By: Elmore Leonard
- Narrated by: Josh Clark
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The old Apache renegade Soldado Viejo is hiding out in Mexico, and the Arizona Department Adjutant has selected two men to hunt him down. One -- Dave Flynn -- knows war, the land, and the nature of his prey. The other is a kid lieutenant named Bowers. But there's a different kind of war happening in Soyopa. And if Flynn and his young associate choose the wrong allies -- and the wrong enemy -- they won't be getting out alive.
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The Bounty Hunters
- By Jean on 12-27-10
By: Elmore Leonard
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Walk on Earth a Stranger
- By: Rae Carson
- Narrated by: Erin Mallon
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Lee Westfall has a strong, loving family. She has a home she loves and a loyal steed. She has a best friend - who might want to be something more. She also has a secret.
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Better than expected
- By elenne on 10-11-15
By: Rae Carson
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The Long Valley
- By: John Steinbeck, John H. Timmerman - introduction
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A Penguin Classic. First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for themselves in the world, these stories reflect Steinbeck’s characteristic interests: The tensions between town and country, laborers and owners, past and present.
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Generally Good Stories, Some are Great
- By Michael on 06-18-13
By: John Steinbeck, and others
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The Last Crossing
- A Novel
- By: Guy Vanderhaeghe
- Narrated by: John Henry Cox, John Keating, Colin Lane, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Abridged
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This epic tale sweeps across continents and time, hovers over a key era in American history, and deftly realizes the humanity of a whole cast of characters. Told through flashbacks and alternating points of view, The Last Crossing is about redemption, about seeking and finding, about human feelings and strengths, about personal honor, and about that moment in life when we must decide to cross over and surrender to love.
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A Very Dark Story
- By Virginia on 04-05-04
By: Guy Vanderhaeghe
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Comanche Moon
- By: Anita Mills
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Can a rough Texas Ranger overcome a woman’s hardened heart? Amanda Ross returns from her Boston finishing school to claim the Texas ranch her parents died fighting to protect. Determined to protect the sprawling ranch that has been in her family for generations, Amanda hates the Comanche people for taking away her only family. Clay McAlester may be a Texas Ranger, but he identifies most strongly with the Comanche people that raised him.
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They Don't Write them Like this Anymore...
- By D. Fields on 10-31-18
By: Anita Mills
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The Wettest County in the World, or Lawless
- A Novel Based on a True Story
- By: Matt Bondurant
- Narrated by: Erik Steele
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The Bondurant Boys were a notorious gang of roughnecks and moonshiners who ran liquor through Franklin County during Prohibition and after. The brothers played a central role in a major conspiracy trial and its violent end. In 1935, Sherwood Anderson, working on a magazine story, finds himself driving along the dusty red roads trying to find the brothers and break the silence that shrouds Franklin County.
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Just outstanding!
- By Rich on 08-18-12
By: Matt Bondurant
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The Iron Tiger
- By: Jack Higgins
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Before the sun can set on Jack Drummond’s career as a pilot in the British Navy, he must complete one final flight - a weapons drop over Tibet to aid guerilla fighters in their border dispute with the Red Chinese. But before he can complete the job, his plane and supplies are burned, stranding him in the Himalayas. Now, with his plane grounded, he must deliver a Tibetan leader’s son to safety over land. With the advancing Chinese enemy hot on his heels, Drummond’s final mission becomes a suspense-filled struggle for survival across the world’s most rugged terrain.
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absolutely fabulous
- By Tom on 06-17-21
By: Jack Higgins
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Året er 1873, og Will Andrews opgiver sine universitetsstudier ved Harvard og drager vestpå. Han ender i Butcher's Crossing, en lille, gudsforladt flaekke i Kansas. Butcher's Crossing er fuld af rastløse maend, der kun taenker på at tjene hurtige penge og bruge dem lige så hurtigt, blandt dem Miller. Han og Andrews bliver venner, og Andrews fascineres af Millers historie om en enorm bisonflok, der kun venter på at blive nedslagtet, godt gemt af vejen i en smuk dal i Rocky Mountains i Colorado.
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Brutal, epic, and darkly humorous
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Journey down main street in the old west.
- By Mountain Guide on 04-24-20
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First published in 1948, Nothing but the Night marked the auspicious beginning of John Williams' career as a novelist. In the person of Arthur Maxley, Williams investigates the terror and the waywardness of a man who has suffered an early traumatic experience. As a child, Maxley witnessed a scene of such violence and of such a nature that the evocation of Greek tragedy is inescapable. Now, years later, we move through a single significant day in the grown Arthur Maxley's life, the day when he is to meet his father, who has been absent for many years.
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John Williams is a certified wizard
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The son of Caesar calls to you.
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Sono gli anni Settanta dell'Ottocento. Will Andrews, dopo tre anni a Harvard, lascia il Massachusetts e, pieno di vaghi sogni e aspirazioni emersoniane verso la Natura Selvaggia, va all'Ovest. Si trova così a Butcher's Crossing, poco più che un rozzo accampamento ai margini del nulla abitato da uomini duri, sempre in cerca di un modo per fare soldi, o per scialacquarli. È proprio uno di questi individui che racconta all'ex studente di una meravigliosa valle nascosta tra le Rocky Mountains, popolata di immense mandrie di bisonti che non hanno mai conosciuto l'odore, o il fucile, dell'uomo.
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Året er 1873, og Will Andrews opgiver sine universitetsstudier ved Harvard og drager vestpå. Han ender i Butcher's Crossing, en lille, gudsforladt flaekke i Kansas. Butcher's Crossing er fuld af rastløse maend, der kun taenker på at tjene hurtige penge og bruge dem lige så hurtigt, blandt dem Miller. Han og Andrews bliver venner, og Andrews fascineres af Millers historie om en enorm bisonflok, der kun venter på at blive nedslagtet, godt gemt af vejen i en smuk dal i Rocky Mountains i Colorado.
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Brutal, epic, and darkly humorous
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A story of sadness and serenity
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The Sisters Brothers
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Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living - and whom he does it for. With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western....
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The Cruelty To Animals is Hard to Take
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Suttree
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No discussion of great modern authors is complete without mention of Cormac McCarthy, whose rare and blazing talent makes his every work a true literary event. A grand addition to the American literary canon, Suttree introduces readers to Cornelius Suttree, a man who abandons his affluent family to live among a dissolute array of vagabonds along the Tennessee river.
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The River of Sewers, Stars, Life, and Death
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By: Cormac McCarthy
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The Hot Rock
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John Dortmunder and company are hired by an U.N. African Ambassador to steal the famed Balabomo Emerald from the hands of a rival African country. But their daring and clever burglarly goes awry, and the emerald slips through their fingers. Undaunted, Dortmunder chases the gem by plane, train and automobile in hot pursuit of the hot rock.
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Dortmunder is on his game in this fun introduction
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The Log of a Cowboy
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At the young age of 16, Andy Adams left his San Antonio home to follow his dream of becoming a cowboy. Going on long drives with some of the 19th century's hardiest cowboys, he learned his trade through many adventurous years of trial and error. This account of his true experiences includes dusty cattle drives, brandings, stampedes, dangerous river crossings, and remarkable encounters with the Blackfoot, Oglala, and Platte Indian tribes.
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The Real West Portrayed By One Who Was There
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All the Pretty Horses
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Sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole's grandfather has just died, his parents have permanently separated, and the family ranch, upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes, has been sold. Rootless and increasingly restive, Cole leaves Texas, accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico.
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Beautiful writing
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By: Cormac McCarthy
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The Thicket
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Jack Parker knows all too well how treacherous turn-of-the-century East Texas can be. His parents did not survive a smallpox epidemic. His grandfather was murdered. Now his sister Lula has been kidnapped by a criminal who may believe wearing a dead man's clothes protects them both from death. With bounty hunter Shorty, a charismatic and cunning dwarf, and Eustace, a gravedigging son of an ex-slave, the heartbroken young Jack sets off on an epic quest to rescue his sister from the corrupt men who control much of the new territory.
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JESUE FORGIVES, SO WHY NOT ENJOY YOURSELF
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By: Joe R. Lansdale
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Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching examination of the bloody price of power, The Son is a gripping and utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American west with rare emotional acuity, even as it presents an intimate portrait of one family across two centuries. Eli McCullough is just twelve-years-old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his Texas homestead and brutally murder his mother and sister, taking him as a captive.
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Five Stars for the Lone Star, The Son, & Meyer
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By: Philipp Meyer
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Blood Meridian
- Or the Evening Redness in the West
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Author of the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier.
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A beautiful nightmare
- By Ryan on 07-11-11
By: Cormac McCarthy
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Boone's Lick
- By: Larry McMurtry
- Narrated by: Will Patton
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- Unabridged
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Boone's Lick is high adventure, a perfect Western tale and a moving love story - it is vintage Larry McMurtry, combining his brilliant character portraits, his unerring sense of the West and his unrivalled eye for the telling detail.
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No Lonesome Dove
- By James on 04-03-03
By: Larry McMurtry
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Close Range
- Wyoming Stories (Selected Unabridged Stories)
- By: Annie Proulx
- Narrated by: Frances Fisher, Bruce Greenwood, Campbell Scott
- Length: 5 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In "The Mud Below", a rodeo rider's obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In "The Half-Skinned Steer", an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brother's funeral, and dies a mile from home.
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A Wonderfully Ironic and Surprising Read
- By Susan L. Stewart on 04-21-12
By: Annie Proulx
What listeners say about Butcher’s Crossing
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ian C Robertson
- 02-22-16
A Tiring Listen
I say this was a tiring read (not a tiresome one) for the sheer scale of the endeavour that the little group of four huntsmen endure. There is great thirst, distance, freezing snows, exhausting work in deplorable conditions to be read. It made me tired listening and at times I felt myself involuntarily dozing off from exhaustion, felt vicariously for these pioneers. I guess that endeavour is what built the countries that we now enjoy and there is some reason to take pride in it. There is also reason to reflect upon the waste (all those buffalo slaughtered) and the misfortune that courted every step. Williams captures all of that and, for that reason alone, his account is a worthy read. I can't say that I enjoyed the listen, but that was no fault of the writing, the reading or the underlying importance of the pioneer spirit. Heald captures the latter well, for example. For me, it was too real (if that is possible) and I am tiring just thing about it.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Joseph Keiffer
- 05-12-17
Coming of age in the Wild West
Innocent from Boston goes on a buffalo hunt. (Mostly) imperturbable mentor leads the hunt, along with half-wit dipsomaniac/Jesus freak and nihilistic buffalo skinner - who does not survive the adventure. At the end, the Bostonian has grown up, the mentor has learned a hard lesson and the simple man of faith still has his faith. Everyone says "My God!" at least once. A reader is laboriously schooled in the ways of the cowboy. I liked "Stoner" much better. Perhaps I haven't been out west enough to appreciate it.
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- Tim Martin
- 05-03-20
A baptism of fire, and a bucket of blood
A wonderful surprise - I thought I was just going in for a well-received Western yarn, and came out a John Williams fan-boy. What writing, what characterisations, what wilderness! I won't lie to you: Buffalo die. Lots. But context is everything - the harsh scenes of slaughter and survival are counterbalanced by moments of emotional beauty and searing vistas. Butcher's Crossing is often mentioned in the same sentence as Cormac McCarthy, and with good reason.
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- Unknown
- 05-28-21
The Horror
Excellent novel. Extremely well read.
It and Stoner are an immense monument to futility and nothingness, finely written.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Sharlotte
- 11-14-16
Boring
I wanted to like it but it just couldn't capture my interest or attention. My mind constantly wandered.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Abyasun
- 05-08-24
Exceptional
I listened this book all the way back from Florida to NY when I rented a car to drive back home after 6 of my flights were cancelled in two days during a weather storm over the Atlantic last June. I enjoyed the read and the narration. And recently, I read the print book. I listened to the audio version again while reading the book. Williams’s take on the grand theme of American West could not be better illustrated than this through a set of unforgettable characters. The frontiersmen’s endurance in the face of myriad odds, the search for self, Buffalo, one of the most captivating stories of 19th American West when it almost came to become extinct due to overhunting, individualism, hunt for fortune in the West, and disappointment are among the appealing themes that decorate this epic nature tale. Whatever defines the myths and grand themes of American West exist in this narrative, in this book. Blood, lust, human conflict, an abandoned love story, and many sub-themes empower Williams’s book. And what a read and narration! One of the best in Audible’s library of audiobooks.
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- Tyler Quinn
- 01-28-19
An American West classic
Truly an American classic. Few things set the US apart as the gritty and expansive Western drive. Williams truly captures the naive dreams, the insatiable greed and the all consuming wild in all its gripping detail. Beneath the mosaic of scenes are elemental forces and the very recognizable characters that reflect parts of us all. The narration was one of the best I’ve heard. Anthony Heald’s voice matched the emotion of the description so perfectly. He truly enhanced the story.
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- John
- 02-24-15
Terrific book
This is a great novel, beautifully written and the plot picks up and gets quite suspenseful. Highly recommended.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Kevin
- 01-02-24
A literary work of art
John Williams has become one of my favorite writers. Stoner is amazing as well. His books are not amazing stories or filled with larger than life characters. His prose is not flamboyant nor overly simplistic.
His books simply “are.” They are subtle and unforgiving. They are exact. They are quite near perfect, in my opinion, precisely for the fact that I believe every word of them and forget I’m reading at the same time.
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- Jefferson
- 01-01-24
“You’re no better than the things you kill.”
Imagine a compact, undigressive Moby-Dick about buffalo hunters instead of whalers. Both Melville’s epic and John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing (1960) depict an obsessive leader who takes men with him away from civilization to kill impressive wild creatures. A big difference between veteran buffalo hunter Miller and Captain Ahab is that the former hasn’t been mutilated by a bull buffalo, and his holocaust of a hunt has nothing to do with revenge. In that way, Williams’ novel is more terrible than Melville’s, because Miller is not existentially struggling against “whiteness” etc. but is merely a man with enough powder, lead, and endurance to kill thousands of buffalo.
After twenty years in Boston and three years at Harvard, William “Will” Andrews, whose Unitarian lay minister who encouraged him to read Emerson more than the Bible, arrives at the aptly named Butcher’s Crossing on the Kansas prairie. The “town” is an inchoate collection of six shabby structures and a few tents, reeking of manure, dust, heat, and buffalo hide brine pits. What on earth is Will doing there?! He wants to leave cities to experience wilderness and nature and become a transparent Emersonian eyeball, a free and clean part of God. Will his expectations be fulfilled when he goes on a buffalo hunt with the experienced, laconic hunter Miller, his Bible reading, whisky drinking, one-handed right hand man Charlie, and the unpleasant, pessimistic, skilled buffalo skinner Schneider? Miller claims to know a pristine hidden valley in the Colorado mountains where they will find thousands of prime wild buffalo, the hides of which ought to be bring thousands of dollars. All they need is a little capital with which to outfit their team, which Andrews, having received a bequest from an uncle, is eager to provide.
The novel, then, has some usual western genre features. A young, innocent, sensitive guy from the east goes west to experience nature and hooks up with a seasoned, capable, practical hunter and his grizzled one-handed sidekick. A shrewd businessman and a good prostitute appear. A handful of Indians make a miserable cameo. A quest ensues for an elusive mountain valley sheltering a vast herd of buffalo. But in its philosophical underpinnings and questionings, the novel is not a usual western.
The story is introduced by a pair of epigraphs, one by Emerson from “Nature” (a positive view of nature as blessing people with the sanctity of religion) and one by Melville from The Confidence-Man (a negative view of nature as freezing us to death or making us idiots). The dueling epigraphs and novel remind me of Melville’s annotated copy of Emerson’s essays on microfilm I read in graduate school, where he wrote in the margin at one point something like, “I pity the fool who follows this!” Williams (I believe) is more in Melville’s camp regarding nature.
And at times the book doesn’t feel like a usual western:
“In his mind were fragments of Miller’s talk about the mountain country to which they were going, and those fragments glittered and turned and fell softly in accidental and strange patterns. Like the loose stained bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, they augmented themselves with their turning and found light from irrelevant and accidental sources.”
The novel is sensual. Williams writes vivid details involving the five senses of activities like smelling a rotting buffalo carcass, being thirsty, climbing a steep mountain too quickly, being lost in a blizzard, submersing oneself in a fast cold river, shaving after eight months in the wilderness, looking at a woman’s nude body, and so on. Concise, poetic writing: “A patch of turning aspen flamed a deep cold in the green of the pine,” and “The sip of whisky seared his throat as if a torch had been thrust into it.”
Many vivid details, too, about the “craft” of buffalo hunting: making bullets, sharpening knives, shooting buffalo, skinning buffalo, dressing buffalo, stacking hides, thawing frozen thongs in a bucket of pee, and, of course, plenty of details of the buffalo’s body, like “His head lowered, his upturned curving horns, shiny in the sunlight, bright against the dark mop of hair that hung over his head.”
It is at times an awful novel. Miller’s knowledge that Indians use every part of the buffalo, even down to making beautiful and clever and fine bone toys and implements from them, does not prevent him from becoming “an automaton” in a non-stop orgy of killing them for nothing more than their hides. Far from using every part of the buffalo in the service of life, they sprinkle strychnine on the myriad carcasses to kill wolves. Although Charlie hates wolves as the devil’s creatures, Miller’s destruction of the buffalo is a cold, mindless response to the life in which he has immersed himself.
I regret that the point of view character and moral center of the novel Will doesn’t evince a little more discomfort with the holocaust of over 4,000 buffalo, but I suppose that just makes him a 19th-century rather than a 21st-century man.
Butcher’s Crossing shares with Williams’ historical academia novel Stoner (1965) his careful writing and psychological insights. Butcher’s Crossing is a literate western, and it must be quite disturbing to anyone who loves animals alive more than dead.
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