
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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Passin' Through: A Novel
- Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures
- By: Louis L'Amour
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman, Jason Culp, Dan John Miller
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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It seemed the perfect place to lie low. The owner of the ranch was an attractive, gray-haired lady who had once been an actress. The other woman was a beautiful, fragile-seeming blonde. They needed repairs done, and he needed to disappear for a while. The first sign that things were not as they should be was when a Pinkerton man questioned him about a missing woman. Then he accidentally found a will belonging to the previous owner of the ranch. After that, a young lady showed up in town making claims that the place belonged to her.
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Not a Sackett, or is it?
- By Raymond L. Johnson on 07-08-20
By: Louis L'Amour
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Shane
- By: Jack Schaefer
- Narrated by: Eric G. Dove
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The Starrett family's life forever changes when a man named Shane rides out of the great glowing West and up to their farm in 1889. Young Bob Starrett is entranced by this stoic stranger who brings a new energy to his family. Shane stays on as a farmhand, but his past remains a mystery. Many folks in their small Wyoming valley are suspicious of Shane. But dangerous as Shane may seem, he is a friend to the Starretts - and when a powerful neighboring rancher tries to drive them out of their homestead, Shane becomes entangled in the deadly feud.
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As Good as the Great Classic Movie
- By Russ Towne on 07-20-19
By: Jack Schaefer
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The Shootists
- By: Glendon Swarthout
- Narrated by: J. P. O'Shaughnessy
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The Shootist is John Bernard Books, a man of principle and the only surviving gunfighter in a vanishing American West. He rides into El Paso in the year 1901, on the day of Queen Victoria's demise, there to be told by a doctor that he must soon confront the greatest Shootist of all: Death himself. In such a showdown against such an antagonist, J. B. Books cannot win. Most men may end their days in bed or take their own lives, but a mankiller has a third option, one which Books decides to exercise. He may choose his own executioner.
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Loved the story, disliked the narration
- By ReadsALot on 03-28-14
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The Searchers
- By: Alan Le May
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Alan Le May’s Western novels are widely considered classics in the genre, and the movie adaptation of The Searchers was named AFI’s Greatest Western Movie of All Time. When Martin Pauley and Amos Edwards return to their Texas homestead to find a burning ruin, they set out to find Amos’ missing daughter - and exact revenge on the Comanche responsible for the attack.
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A Mortal (Me) Writes of a Classic
- By Craig on 05-21-14
By: Alan Le May
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My Confession
- Recollections of a Rogue
- By: Samuel Chamberlain
- Narrated by: Nick Gallagher
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession is a quintessential American tale of a young man's unbridled escapades across the vastness of the Western Frontier. From humble beginnings in Boston, Chamberlain journeyed to Texas to fight in the Mexican-American War and eventually fell in with the notorious Glanton Gang, a brutal group of scalp-hunters immortalized in Cormac McCarthy's Western masterpiece Blood Meridian.
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An Abrupt Ending
- By Vladimir Taylor on 05-08-25
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Hunger
- By: Knut Hamsun
- Narrated by: Gunnar Cauthery
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Verging on death, a starving, destitute writer navigates the cold and indifferent city of Kristiania in search of his next meal. Frenzied and fevered, he chews on stale bread, devours scraps of wood, and bites his own finger, sleeping under the stars in old, pungent blankets, until one day he is able to sell an article and buy some food - only for the cycle then to repeat itself....
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Great book great narrator
- By Gunnar on 08-27-20
By: Knut Hamsun
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El Paso
- By: Winston Groom
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 16 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Long fascinated with the Mexican Revolution and the vicious border wars of the early 20th century, Winston Groom brings to life a much-forgotten period of history in this sprawling saga of heroism, injustice, and love. An episodic novel set in six parts, El Paso pits the legendary Pancho Villa, a much-feared outlaw and revolutionary, against a thrill-seeking railroad tycoon known as the Colonel, whose fading fortune is tied up in a colossal ranch in Chihuahua, Mexico.
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Good premise, but scatterbrained in narration
- By Courtney Harbin on 09-15-21
By: Winston Groom
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True Grit
- By: Charles Portis
- Narrated by: Donna Tartt
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old girl from Dardanelle, Arkansas, sets out to avenge her Daddy who was shot to death by a no-good outlaw. Mattie convinces one-eyed "Rooster" Cogburn, the meanest U.S. marshal in the land, to ride along with her. In True Grit, we have a true American classic, as young Mattie, as vital as she is innocent, outdickers and outmaneuvers the hard-bitten men of the trail in a legend that will last through the ages.
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So worth it!
- By Tommygaus on 12-29-10
By: Charles Portis
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The Passenger
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews, Julia Whelan
- Length: 12 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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It is three in the morning when Bobby Western plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the site are the pilot’s bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.
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It’s a new Cormac McCarthy
- By Amazon Customer on 10-25-22
By: Cormac McCarthy
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The Son
- By: Philipp Meyer
- Narrated by: Will Patton, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Shepherd, and others
- Length: 17 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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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
- By Mel on 06-04-13
By: Philipp Meyer
Exceptional
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An American West classic
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It and Stoner are an immense monument to futility and nothingness, finely written.
The Horror
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Boring
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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.
“You’re no better than the things you kill.”
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Great story, bad narration.
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Terrific book
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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.
A literary work of art
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Fabulous in every way
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- John Williams, Butcher's Crossing
Stop what you are doing. Nursing a baby? Put it down. Dousing out a wildfire? Walk away. Those things can wait. This book is here. You need to listen to it NOW. Serious. Focus. Life is short and dreams die. You need to freaking prioritize and this should be at the top of your list.
This book might have just pushed right into my top ten books of all time. I'm not sure what book got pushed out, but perhaps the Old Testament just had to go. Seriously, this book is that good. Well, perhaps, not Old Testament good, but there were times when reading this I felt GOD's finger might have just been scratch this prose on a rock or bleached bone in a mountain somewhere.
”You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies at school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you’re the only one that knows the secret; only then it’s too late. You’re old.”
It reminded me a bit of Cormac McCarthy that your mom can even read, or think of Moby-Dick, but instead of a white whale, Andrews, Miller, Schneider, and Charley Hoge are seeking an enormous herd of buffalo hidden in valley in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It is a story of death, obsession, nature, destruction, dreams, and the myth of the American West and the Wilderness Myth.
At times 'Butcher's Crossing' also reminded me of the beautiful, dreamy, obsessiveness of Werner Herzog's movies. Nature, in the end, doesn't whimper when you die. Nature often doesn't whimper when it dies. Hell, now I really want Herzog to make this book into a film.
A Holocaust of Hides
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